The following is a list of the top posts of the week that we’ve shared with our facebook friends on the overstockArt.com facebook page. We try and make our facebook posts informative and engaging as we love to hear what our fellow art lovin’ friends have to say about particular artists and their art. So if you have a moment, check out the overstockArt.com facebook page and share your passion for art and wall decor with us!

1. Vincent Van Gogh (1853 – 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist Master whose innovative artwork powerfully influenced modern Expressionism, Fauvism, and early abstraction. Astoundingly prolific, Van Gogh produced all of his work during a 10-year period, at one point, creating 150 paintings and drawings within one year. Painting outdoors, Van Gogh uniquely captured the nighttime nuances of light and shadow, and was also renowned for his paintings of sunflowers and irises.

   Tormented by mental illness for most of his life, Van Gogh created many of his masterpieces while he was institutionalized. Although Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime, he is now regarded as one of the most profoundly influential artists of the 19th century. Van Gogh’s tumultuous friendship with Paul Gauguin literally changed art history. After living together in Arles, France, art historians believe Gauguin sliced off Vincent’s ear with a sword – an act previously believed to have been performed by van Gogh himself in a fit of rage

2. As a Jew born in 19th century Russia, Marc Chagall had two options in pursuing an artistic career: he could hide or deny his Jewish roots, or he could use art to celebrate them. He chose the latter, and today we remember him not only as a quintessential Jewish artist, but also as an adept colorist, an Expressionist genius, and a master of many artistic mediums.

   Chagall (1887 – 1985) was born near the city of Vitebsk (now Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire), about half of whose population was Jewish. Chagall’s family was part of one of the Eastern European Jewish market-villages (which were called “shtetls,” and proliferated during the late 19th and early 20th centuries), and his early life was steeped in Hasidic Judaism.

   Though Chagall would spend most of the 20th century outside Russia, in either France or the United States, his artistic inspirations were seated in his hometown and upbringing. The whimsical elements in his paintings are often tied to Hasidic lore, and much of his work is a response to the long-standing oppression of Russian Jews. As for Vitebsk, in 1944 Chagall addressed the town in the second person in an open letter, in which he pondered his motivations for leaving, and concluded that “I did not live with you, but I didn’t have one single painting that didn’t breathe with your spirit and reflection.”

3. An exhibition featuring Japanese woodlock prints (ukiyo-e) in 1890 Paris gave impetus to Mary Cassatt’s “Breakfast in Bed.” The prints she saw of Kitagawa Utamaro inspired her to create a new series of paintings depicting women in their daily activities.

   In addition to the subject matter being similar, the style of dress and juxtaposition of figures in “Breakfast in Bed” is also very clearly influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e. Cassatt produced many different versions of this same scene, which is an extension of the type of intimate and tender moments she favored portraying most in her work.

   Cassatt wasn’t the only painter to find inspiration in the “floating world” of ukiyo-e. Master artists like Edgar Degas, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt also shared an affinity for “Japonisme.”

4. Piet Mondrian is best known for his contributions to the De Stijl art movement, and paintings that simplified visual compositions of vertical and horizontal movement. Given that the bulk of his oeuvre is characterized by rectangles and primary colors, there’s a lot to be said of the fact that Mondrian famously said, “curves are so emotional.”

   Born Pieter Cornelius Mondriaan (1872 – 1944), the Dutch painter was always interested in art, but his first career was as a primary school teacher.

   While teaching in Amsterdam in the 1890s, he practiced painting pastoral scenes, and often worked in the pointillist and fauvist styles. He developed an appreciation for abstraction when he moved to Paris in 1911, and it was at this time that he dropped the second “a” in his surname as a means of emphasizing his departure from the Netherlands (though he returned home during WWI).

   Mondrian moved back to Paris after the war, and over the next 20 years he began settling into the grid-based style that would become his signature. With his simplified paintings, Mondrian became an advocate for pure abstraction and universality though a reduction of form and color. His earlier paintings from this period show mostly primary-colored rectangular forms, delineated by thin, gray lines. As Mondrian’s work evolved, the colors became fewer, the lines became thicker and darker, and he sought to create movement with calculated brushstrokes.

5. Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) was renowned for her self-portraits, and developed a style that infused Mexican and Amerindian cultural elements with surrealism and symbolism. Kahlo experienced many hardships in her life: As a child she contracted polio, which left her right leg physically deformed; as a teenager, she was in a trolley accident that left her lifelong back problems. Kahlo spent significant time in the hospital, and was notoriously irritable. However, her temperamental issues made her a fierce opponent when defending her ideologies.

   The beliefs to which Kahlo held fast were the motivations of the Mexican Revolution, and Trotsky’s communist ideal—the latter had an effect on Kahlo seeing herself as an outsider, and the former had a strong influence on her aesthetic. Characterized by populist and agrarianist movements, the Mexican Revolution piqued Kahlo’s interest in the preservation of pre-Columbian and Mexican peasant traditions. For many posthumous years, she was better known as “Diego Rivera’s wife” than for her painting. But in the 1980s, Kahlo’s place in Mexican art history was recognized, and her work regained attention for its celebration of Mexican traditions.

6. “Fifty Abstract Paintings which as Seen from Two Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as seen from six yards appears as the head of a Royal Bengal Tiger”,1963 – Salvador Dali

This is it! We hope you will continue to enjoy reading our ArtCorner blog and come join us on facebook for more artistic discussions!

The paintings, “Tête de cheval” (Horse’s Head) dated 1962 and “Verre et Pichet” (Glass and Pitcher) dated 1944, were discovered during a joint action carried out by Swiss and Serb police.

“I can tell you with pride and joy that after three-and-a-half years of investigative work we have located both stolen Picasso paintings,” said Charles Faessler, a Swiss prosecutor involved in the case.

The paintings were stolen in February 2008 while they were on display in an art gallery at Pfaffikon, near Zurich. The artworks, which have a combined value of an estimated £2.6 million, were borrowed by Sprengel Museum galleries Pfaffikon in Hanover.

But who was behind the heist remains a mystery. No arrests were made. Several scenarios are now staged in order to find out what was the reason for the theft in the first place. It is said that the paintings were hard if not impossible to be sold on the open market precisely because they are so well known to the art world.
Therefore the thieves may have been working for a private collector or may have tried to cut a deal with the insurance company responsible for the paintings.

Some speculate that the thieves may have demanded a sum of money from the insurance company far less than the pictures’ insurance value, hoping the company would hand over some cash in order to save itself having to pay the full amount.

Also, disappearing borders and customs checks have made the smuggling of stolen art easier. At the same time the number of those willing to part for some illicit art increased because of the growing affluence around the world. Interpol’s database on stolen art lists some 34,000 pieces.

Picasso’s paintings are the first on the list of art theft

Earlier this year a Picasso’s drawing had been stolen from the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco. “Tete de Femme”, created in 1965, was estimated to be worth $275,000. Thief grabbed Picasso’s drawing off the wall and fled in a waiting taxicab.

Fortunately, the Union Square restaurant’s security camera captured the crook and so the police recovered the art work in the same week.

This was a fortunate situation, considering the latest news. Just this month five paintings, by Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani, that were stolen last year from a museum in Paris are now considered gone forever as they were thrown to the garbage and probably crushed by a rubbish truck. The destroyed paintings were estimated at £100 million.

Police have yet to discover many Picasso’s paintings that have been stolen in the last decade, such as “The Dance”, disappeared on February 24th, 2006, from the Museu da Chacara do Ceu in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Another painting made by Picasso that hasn’t yet to be found is “The Pigeon with Green Peas”, stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris last year, on May 20th.

Painting should be easy. Feelings on canvas. Deep struggles along a poor life. Dreams of a far away childhood. The pain of the body or of a broken heart. All of these made great themes for paintings. However, it is not enough to have a miserable life and just crave it on the canvas. You have to know techniques. Most of the great painters explored many styles.

Paul Klee is the artist who discovered colors after being trapped for many years in the black-and-white style of drawing. After becoming a painter, he put down in his memoirs the methods he adopted in order to make his paintings.

At the beginning of his artistic career, in 1903, Klee begun working on a cycle of eleven etchings, called ‘Inventionen’. These were his first experiments that lasted until 1905. The ‘Inventionen’ works were part of an international exhibit of the Munich Secession, in June 1906. The mechanism was rather simple. He drew with a needle on a blackened pane of glass. From this Klee developed his glass-pane technique that had the attention on the contrast between dark and light. This technique was applied on fifty-seven art works.

Klee and wrote about his technique in his diary:

1. Cover the pane evenly with white tempera, perhaps by spraying on a diluted mixture
2. After it has dried, scratch the drawing into it with a needle
3. Cover the back with black or colored areas.”

The spray used by Klee in his earlier ‘Inventionen’ is later applied on canvas. He covered part of the paper with a stencil and sprayed the free places with water colors.

Another experiment in Klee’s early years was with colors. The content of a picture such as a landscape was not important, but the shapes were. His first attempt in including colors in his paintings is by using dark tonalities. He also combined the graphic techniques and used both charcoal and watercolor, such as in “In the Ostermundingen Quarry, Two Cranes”, made in 1907.

Later he started applying one layer of paint on top of another in his colored works, in order to attain certain tones.

Despite his attempts to reproduce landscapes, the abstraction is the style that made him famous. Klee describes his view on abstraction in his diaries: “Abstract? Being abstract as a painter is not the same as abstracting natural objective ways of comparison but, independent of these possible forms of comparison, is based on the extraction of pictorially pure relations: light and dark, color to light and dark, color to color, long to short, broad to narrow.”

So Klee describes the abstraction as a requirement on how the artist paints a picture and not that of the picture’s message to the public. This idea Klee included in his work “In the Kairouan-style”, a painting made after his journey to Tunisia, that lasted twelve days in 1914.

The oil transfer drawing is another of Klee’s techniques developed during his lifetime. Aided by a piece of paper covered with black oil paint, he transferred a drawing onto another piece of paper or surface used for painting. The lines of the tracing appear slightly blurred. The pressure applied in tracing made smudged patches that he didn’t let out from the picture, but included them too. Afterward, the artist added watercolors. He used this technique in the painting “The Tightrope Walker,” made in 1923.
Paul Klee’s experiments included, in his maturity, psychological theories, such as the one developed by Ernst Mach and written in the book “The Analysis of the Sensations and the Relations of the Physical to the Psychic.” One of his paintings that shows Mach’s ideas is “monsieur Pearly Pig”. The theory says that, although a square and a rhombus are identical, they are not perceived as such. The rhombus appears in movement and rather larger than the square. In order to counteract this, in his painting, Klee enlarges the square so the viewer perceives them as equal.

In the end is seems that a painter’s style is not made out of one technique, but a sum. Klee made numerous experiments during his lifetime in order to be satisfied with his creations. The fact that he was his own critic made his search through different styles and techniques more ardent. Nevertheless, this quest was not in vain for he found his own style. Just as a man’s personality and character are polished according to the events he encounters in his lifetime.

Five paintings, of whitch some by Matisse, Picasso and Modigliani, stolen in May 2010 from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris have been thrown to garbage. The story was told by one of the thieves. The man confessed that he destroyed the paintings estimated at 100 million pounds, after his accomplices reached behind bars.

These five works are “Still life with candle holders” by Fernand Léger, “The Pigeon Pea” by Pablo Picasso,” La Pastorale ” by Henri Matisse, “L’Olivier near Estaque” by Georges Braque and “The Woman with a Fan” by Amedeo Modigliani.

The five paintings were stolen on the night of 19 to 20 May 2010. The architects of the theft were three men. The first, known as spider-man, is presented as the burglar of the paintings. The second, a former Parisian antique dealer, denies that he is the sponsor of the robbery. The third was entrusted with the paintings.

“Spider-man” explained to the police that once inside the museum, no alarm went off, and he continued to conduct the burglary for nearly two hours.

It took police officers more than a year before placing the three men under official investigation. The police managed to catch the culprits just this past September.

Before this, in May 2011, the three men were arrested as part of another case of stolen paintings. The first two were placed under arrest, but the third person entrusted with the paintings was not.

According to Le Journal du Dimanche, one of the alleged accomplices told detectives that when the other two men were arrested, he “panicked and destroyed the canvases before throwing them into a rubbish bin” in spring 2011.

The police are not convinced that he is telling the truth and hope to recover at least some of the stolen artworks.

The French art museums have been criticized repeatedly for not being concerned with the safety for the exhibits. Months before the burglary, a thief walked out of a gallery in Marseilles with Degas’ The Chorus under his coat. Until the theft last year, the biggest unsolved art case was one on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. The stolen works had been estimated over $500 million.

The FBI estimates the market for stolen art at £3 billion annually and Interpol has about 30,000 pieces of stolen art in its database.

When we think about Pablo Picasso, we think he was genius. But he was a child once. He was a student, too. He had his fears and doubts. What was the road that made Picasso become the contemporary art genius symbol?

His life is seemingly divided by a series of important events which lead him to become the greatest painter of the 20th Century. Picasso dedicated his body and soul to painting. His father, who was also a painter, teaches him Catalonian painting techniques which are his first steps to becoming an artist.

By the end of the First World War, Pablo does not seek any artistic recognition, he doesn’t take part in any exhibition. The amazing precocity of the young artist is developed under the careful guidance of his father. His first true painting is believed to be “Picador,” made in 1890. His brilliancy is tied to the story that tells how Pablo promoted all the entrance exams at the Fine Arts School in Barcelona in just one day.

In his first studies, young Pablo is directed by his father to the sacred art. This is when at Jose Garnelo Alda’s workshop, Picasso made the “First Communion,” in the winter of 1896. The painting was accepted at the Municipal exhibition in Barcelona, and is the first officially recognized academic work. The painting has enjoyed such success, that he receives an order from a monastery in Barcelona. Picasso claimed that these were his first sold paintings.

Later, Picasso becomes exposed to the Prado Museum painters, specifically El Greco. El Greco supposedly influenced Picasso when he was going through the so-called “blue period.” The success of the religious art makes him try and paint a larger picture, “Science and Charity.” Legend has it that the canvas was so big that it had to be inserted into the workshop, through the window. However, an X-ray examination revealed that this painting was made over another drawing, a scene of a battle. The recycled canvas was a common habit in his youth, for economic reasons. The custom was kept up until his first Parisian success. Even though these paintings haven’t got the same values as the cubist ones, they are considered to be studies that have led him to follow the path of Cubism.

In the coming years, Picasso learns techniques that distance him from the academic style. In Barcelona, around 1907, he is part of a group of artists who frequent the cabarets and have a culture that oscillates between English Pre-Rafaelism and an attitude of bohemian life. Therefore, Picasso dedicates his paintings to numerous cabarets. In 1909, Pablo has his first solo exhibition with a few charcoal drawings, portraits of his friends made in expressionist style. It is also the time when he decides to change his pattern name, Ruiz to Picasso, his mother’s surname.

In that autumn, Pablo meets the avant-garde Paris. On this occasion, he made one of the first paintings that ultimately defined his own personality, “Mill of Galette.” This was also his first sold canvas in France. Picasso began increasingly more to break from the Catalan style and is inspired by the representative painters of Post-Impressionism. He is drawn, in particular, to Toulouse Lautrec’s paintings.

The most common theme among the Catalans was the night life. Therefore, this could not be left out from Picasso’s paintings during his stay in Paris.

In the coming years, he spent time traveling between Spain and France. These years were marked by poverty, but rich in artistic experience. It is the period in which blue predominates in his paintings. The artist becomes concerned with the symbolic approach rather than painting the reality as true as possible. The Blue Period begins with works inspired by the death of his friend, Casagemas. The paintings capture characters encountered in his travels around the year 1902. Representative for this period is the “Blue Nude.”

Picasso permanently moved to Paris in 1904, when he attempts the Catalan’s colony meetings, and makes numerous visits to the Medrano Circus. This is when the harlequins came in his center of attention and become a predominant theme in his paintings. At the same time, he gets rid of the Symbolism style and takes as a reference point the French artist’s style such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. From Paul, he acquires a primitive approach. From the almost monochrome palette he used in the blue period, his paintings are now rich in color and his characters are from the circus world. In 1905 two of these works are on display for a while at the Venice Biennale.

The paintings were withdrawn by the exhibition officer after just a few days because they were considered to be scandalous for those times. This is why for many years, Picasso didn’t want to participate in any official exhibition. Instead, he starts to be passionate about the “art negre” style from which he gets inspired to make cubist paintings. This was the beginning of a new era for him as well as for the world he inspired.

The authentic painters can never lie on laurels. They know only to lead an eternal and miserable existence, that of painters.” – Pablo Picasso

“I always thought it was abnormal for painters to live alone. You waste your time if you stand alone.” These are the words of Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, on 1 June 1888. The artist fostered the development of a workshop where painters would exchange ideas and experiences and make masterpieces side by side. The workshop was to be organized so that the rules of society and art schools would not enter. This was the place where artists would come from all over the place, artists who did not want to be under pressure from critics, where artists would be free to paint whatever they felt.

The loneliness which confronted van Gogh throughout his lifetime made him think more ardent about the possibility of making such a place on his own or perhaps with the help of a few friends. The dream of a community of artists living and working together is strongly cultivated by Van Gogh during his stay in Arles. To achieve this, he appealed through letters to Theo, Gauguin and Bernard.

The model to which Van Gogh aspired was the medieval brotherhoods. He even writes to Theo about it in August 1888. “Living like monks or hermits, having work as the dominant passion and, giving up the well-being.” Van Gogh hoped that by association with other artists, the painters financial situation will not be dramatic anymore. Many had a big number of debts, while others lived in extreme poverty until the end of their lives.

This could not happen, said Van Gogh, if artists had lived together. Another model that he was inspired by was the Pont-Aven circle, the city where, in 1886, he joined with Gauguin and Bernard, a group of artists with common goals. The last model, Van Gogh was inspired by was the Japanese tradition. The artist would lead this workshop in the South and will entitle Gauguin as its “abate.”

The financial support would come from his brother, Theo, as it turns out from one of the letters Van Gogh send to him: “My idea is to create and manage to leave to posterity a workshop where my successors can live. I do not know if I make myself understood, but, in other words, we make art, we manage business deals, which will be continued by those who come after us. If others say it is too far from Paris, let them say.” This utopia has been maintained for a long time by Gauguin, who supported him for a while.

They would talk about founding together the “Atelier du Midi,” where Bernard, Seurat and Signac would also be involved. Van Gogh’s dream was shattered by the tragic event happened in Arles, when the artist cut his year after an argument with Gauguin. Before this the two started an experiment to see how this communion would work. Van Gogh instead several times for Gauguin to come to Arles to find a studio according to his ideas and be its director. Gauguin postponed his departure again and again, finding excuses in letters and financial loop-holes. In his memoirs, Gauguin explains the fact that he hesitated to honor the invitation because of a “vague instinct” that gave him the presentiment of something abnormal.

Despite this he went to Arles. The two had different personalities. One was like a volcano, and the other was boiling inwards. Thus, the friendship was rocked from the beginning. It all culminated in a tragedy. Gauguin used the whole episode as a long-awaited excuse to justify his finally leaving Arles. The two have never worked together again and thus Van Gogh’s dream of having a workshop collapsed. Van Gogh came to terms with his situation quickly, and he decided not to bother with the idea of a workshop any longer. He wrote to his brother: “I have tried to get used to the idea of starting afresh, but at this present time it is impossible for me.”

In his time spend in Arles, Van Gogh passed through the yellow period. The results were the famous Sunflower paintings.