Gustav Klimt Fulfilment Painting

Fulfilment was painted by Gustav Klimt in 1905. Fulfilment reworks the theme from the last section of the Beethoven Frieze, The Choir of the Angels of Paradise, and predates The Kiss. The three couples are very similar, with the man's back turned towards the viewer, shielding his lover's body while exposing her rapt face.

In all three versions the man's head is bent over so that it is on a level with hers; in The Kiss this is achieved by having the woman kneel, while in the other paintings Klimt simply makes the man taller. All three works place the couple against a broadly gold background, whether flat, patterned or speckled, which has the effect of setting them from ordinary, earthly love.

On the man's robe is a square with further squares - albeit some distorted - inside it, picked out in black, white, shades of grey and gold, Klimt often seems to have contrasted square or rectangular shapes with circles and spirals to illustrate the difference between masculinity and femininity. The overlapping of the two shapes seems to suggest a sort of physical and spiritual union achieved by the couple, as in The Kiss.

Van Gogh Irise Painting

Irise was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1889. In the asylum at Saint-Remy, between attacks, Van Gogh devoted himself to his art with a desperate determination, knowing that this alone might save him. He called painting "the lightning conductor for my illness." And observing his continued ability to paint, he felt sure that he was not really a madman. The irises are perhaps the first subject he did in the asylum. 

It preceded his first attack there and at first glance shows no evident trace of the moodiness and high tension that appear in many of the later works. He paints the flowers with admiration and joy. The profusion of elements in this close-packed picture is tamed and ordered for the eye without loss of freedom by the division of the canvas into fairly distinct, large regions of color approaching symmetry: the cold leaf-green in the middle, the iris-blue above and beneath, and in two corners the red ground and the distant warm green, touched with yellow, orange, and white. Each region has its own characteristic shapes and spotting, and all are luminous.

Interesting in the high-keyed color is that the strongest ntoe, the iris-blue, is the darkest and also has the greatest range from light to dark. In mass of color, the chief contrast is of this blue with the mild, dilute blue-green of the leaves; their complementary contrasts with red and yellow are secondary and reserved for the margins of the picture. All this helps to temper the luxuriant natural bouquet and to produce a closer, muted harmony, while preserving a gay colorfulness and richness.

Van Gogh Wheat Field with Crows Painting

Wheat Field with Crows was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1890. This painting is believed to be the last work of Van Gogh. Writing of this picture shortly before his suicide, Van Gogh conveyed something of its tragic mood."Returning there, I set to work. The brush almost fell from my hands...I had no difficulty in expressing sadness and extreme solitude". The singular format of the canvas is matched by the vista itself, a field opening out from the foreground by way of three diverging paths. It creates a disquieting situation for the spectator, who is held in doubt before the great horizon and cannot, moreover, reach it on any of the roads before him; these end blindly in the field or run out of the picture.

The familiar perspective network of the open field is now inverted; the lines converge toward the foreground from the horizon, as if space had suddenly lost its focus and all things turned aggressively upon the beholder. The blue sky and the yellow fields pull away from each other with disturbing violence; across their boundry, a flock of black crows advances toward the unsteady foreground. And here in this pathetic disarray, we discover a powerful counteraction of the artist. In contrast to the turbulence of the brushwork, the whole space is of a primordial breadth and simplicity. The colors in their frequency have been matched inversely to the largeness and stability of their areas.

The artist seems to count: one is the unique blue of the sky - unity, breadth, the ultimate resolution; two is the complementary yellow of the divided, unstable masses of growing wheat; three is the red of the diverging roads that lead nowhere; four is the complementary green of the untrodden grass of these roads; and as then n of the series there is the endless progression of the zigzag crows, the figures of fated that come from the far horizon. As a man in distress counts and enumerates to hold on things securely or to fight a compulsion, Van Gogh in his extremity of anguish creates an arithmetical order to resist disintegration. He makes an intense effort to control, to organize. Elemental contrasts become the essential appearances; and in this simple order, the separated parts are united by echoes of color, without changing the larger forces of the whole. Two green clouds are reflections, however dimmed, of the green of the roads.

Van Gogh Almond Blossom Painting

Almond Blossom was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1890. This painting was immediately before one of his attacks; "My work was going well," he informed his brother, "the last canvas of branches in blossom - you will see that it is perhaps the best, the most patiently worked thing I had done, painted with calm and with greater firmness of touch.

And the next day, down like a brute." Poised between lucidity and desperation, this lacework of light and color is kept aloft by the confidence Van Gogh had acquired in the previous two or three years and the sheer technical finesse now at his command. At the back of his mind may well have been a blossom study from a Japanese print, such as the work by Kunisada acquired at some point by the two brothers for their collection.

In the "firmness of touch" of Almond Blossom, we see the culmination of years of intensive, questioning draftsmanship; and in the openness and buoyancy of the design, we sense the optimism that the artist - despite his insurmountable condition - could magnificently, magically translate into paint.

Gustav Klimt Birch Forest Painting

Birch Forest  was painted by Gustav Klimt in 1902. Klimt seems to have felt tranquil in the middle of forests. Although the trunks are cut off by the top of the canvas, the composition is not claustrophobic. Rather, the trees reach up to the sky like columns in a cathedral created by nature. The central European countries had a long tradition of allegorical paintings of the forest.

Albrecht Altdorfer (1480 - 1538) painted the first pure landscape, with towering pine trees reaching up out of the picture frame, dwarfing any sense of human scale. The rich heritage of folklore based around the forest, including Grimm's fairy tales, may also have struck a chord with Klimt.

Rather than dwell on the mysterious, dark nature of the forest, Klimt has chosen an apparently autumnal scene, where the colours of the leaves naturally tend towards the golden tones he favoured. The tiny dabs of paint achieve a shimmering effect of light, far from the reality of dank and gloom, while the patterning of the trunks across the width of the canvas hints at a musical rhythm.

Claude Monet Water Lilies Painting

Water Lilies was painted by Claude Monet in 1916. Dissatisfied with the limitations of traditional art, Claude Monet (1840-1925) founded Impressionism. Along with Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissaro, he was a groundbreaking forerunner of the movement. His serene, classic series of water lily paintings, with their dreamlike atmosphere and vivid colors, continues to provide strong inspiration for abstract artists worldwide.

The water-lily pond at Monet’s home in Giverny, north-west of Paris, became the principal motif of his later paintings. Filling the canvas, the surface of the pond becomes a world in itself, inspiring a sense of immersion in nature. Monet’s observations of the changing patterns of light on the surface of the water become almost abstract. The paintings were not fully appreciated in Monet’s lifetime, and when they were reassessed in 1950s, some critics viewed them as precursors of Abstract Expressionism.

In his effort to capture just the right amount of light and dark, Monet always worked on several canvases at once and furiously followed the changing daylight. He painted intently, disregarding all the topical trends, and declared to his astonished contemporaries, "The subject is not important to me; what I want to reproduce is what exists between the subject and me." Near the end of his life, as a result of his intense efforts to place what he painted in the proper light and shade.

Claude Monet Poppies Painting

Monet painted The Poppy Field near Argenteuil in 1873. Painted in the wildflower fields outside Argenteuil, this painting reveals Monet's passion for color. With dabs of red, he scatters the blooms in a natural profusion across the lush green fields.In the foreground, he sketches in the figures of Camille and Jean with simple strokes of violet, black, and white. Their figures appear again at the top of the hills in the distance, more a suggestion of color than an accurate record of their appearance.

Monet diluted the contours and constructed a colourful rhythm with blobs of paint starting from a sprinkling of poppies; the disproportionately large patches in the foreground indicate the primacy he put on visual impression. A step towards abstraction had been taken.In the landscape, a mother and child pair in the foreground and another in the background are merely a pretext for drawing the diagonal line that structures the painting. Two separate colour zones are established, one dominated by red, the other by a bluish green. The young woman with the sunshade and the child in the foreground are probably the artist's wife, Camille, and their son Jean.

When he returned from England in 1871, Monet settled in Argenteuil and lived there until 1878. These years were a time of fulfilment for him. Supported by his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, Monet found in the region around his home the bright landscapes which enabled him to explore the potential of plein-air painting.He showed Poppy Field to the public at the first Impressionist exhibition held in the photographer Nadar's disused studio in 1874.