Frida Kahlo lived in a society where the woman’s ambition was to be a devoted wife and mother. The events that she encountered along her life prevented the artist from achieving such goals. Physical suffering, caused by an accident in her youth, which led to many spinal operations, was reflected in her paintings. Her weakened column detained her from becoming a mother, and in 1939 her husband Diego Rivera decided not to stand next to his “dove”. This was a turning point in Frida’s life, a moment when the suffering caught an even greater proportion, becoming a crucial theme in her paintings. It is also the time when she started making the monumental paintings, which will define her as an artist. The strong Kahlo in the “The Two Fridas” portrait is the woman she became when she realized that her society’s traditions and cultural expectations were unrealistic for her.

In mid-October 1939, the emblematic couple of Mexico, applied for divorce by mutual consent to the Court of Coyoacan. However, the decision to divorce was taken by Diego. He confesses in his autobiography that he couldn’t sit next to Frida in order not to harm her anymore. “I guard her from future trouble. I’ve decided to break up with her. I just wanted to be free, so I could go to the women to whom my desire pushed me.” However, he admits in his autobiography that his love for Frida did not diminish. He hoped to cut off the umbilical cord, rather than break the deep feelings he had for her.

The effect of this decision was the deep loneness that Frida felt, the loss of reference, the breaking ties with her friends and the isolation. All this suffering is shown in a series of images, in which the artist sees herself as a martyr. Her only comfort is the mirror image perceived by the artist as a long known friend that stands beside her in good but mostly in bad moments.

Her own shadow joined her in the painting “The Two Fridas.” The characters are placed on a bench with a straight torso, fixed eyes, as if after the suffering she endured, nothing can knock her down as long as she has herself beside.

In this painting, she tries to return to her origins. “The two Fridas” appear to hold hands, one in a European-clothed, the other as a Mexican. The Tehuana dress refers to her relationship with Diego, that was cut by divorce, represented in the painting by the scissors. A bloody vein connects the suffering heart to the intact one.

The courageous Frida joins hands with the suffering Frida, as if hoping to relieve her pain. Both have a vision that gives the viewer the impression of an agreement with herself, having triumphed over pain by closing Diego in a small medallion that she holds between her fingers.

The painting’s origin is explained by the artist herself in her memoirs. Frida tells how as a child she lived with intensity an imaginary friendship with a girl. She used to make steam on the window glass in her room. With her finger, she drew a door. Through this door, she entered in a dream: “I speedily descend inside the Earth, where my imaginary friend expected me. I didn’t keep in mind any face, any color to remind me of her. But I know she was happy – she laughed a lot.”

Maybe that’s why the face of her imaginary friend turned into the artist’s face, in order to help her pass easily over the sufferings of life. “I used to follow her movements while she was dancing and told her all my secret problems.” Isolating herself from friends, after the divorce, Frida felt the need for a reliable person whom she could tell her drama. After all, what other person may be more reliable than yourself? Who else can keep your secrets so well? Who knows better the depths of your soul in order to give you the best advice, than yourself? “How much time have I spent with her? I do not know. A second or thousands of years… I was happy. I wiped the window with my hand, and she disappeared”, said Frida. The story ends when the young girl ran to the back courtyard with the secret of her imaginary friend. She hid herself at the root of a large cedar and started shouting and laughing. After 34 years of this memory, Frida paints the story of her magical friendship while being in a time of suffering, in order to bring happiness back.

“The Two Fridas” was exhibited in 1940 at the grand “International Exhibition of Surrealism” in Mexican Art Gallery of Ines Amor. Later, the painting appeared in the “Twenty centuries of Mexican art” retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico.

Salvador Dali is a preeminent figure on the wall of most well-known art museums in the world. His personality and his great ideas pulled up from his never-ending dreams made him stand out from the crowd. He always came with themes that were never used before, and if they were, the atmosphere created with the brush was definitely unique.

Dali couldn’t stay connected to only one art domain. He wanted to try them all: beginning with painting, continuing with writing in newspapers, making impossible photographs and ending in creating movies side by side with the great directors of the times. The surrealist manner he developed in his paintings, spread to the movies he created. By doing so he had not only begun a new era in the field of painting, but also in cinematography.

He first flirted with movies when the cinema industry began in 1929. For his first cinema experience, he participated in making the Un Chien Andalou (“An Andalusian Dog”) movie, with Luis Bunuel. The silent movie had a surrealist inspiration, and it presented the principles of psychic and irrational automatism. The scenes are the result of two authors who’s imagination does not leave room for any interpretation and rational logic.

The unique narrative flow that doesn’t use the initial “once upon a time” can be described in terms of then-popular “Freudian free association.” Bunuel was the one that came with the idea of making such a movie. He told Dali at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half “like a razor blade slicing through an eye.” Dali was already fascinated with the world of dreams, by including them in his paintings, so he developed the idea by adding descriptions of his own dreams, such as a hand crawling with ants.

The collaboration between the two was a success from the start. They both were fascinated by what the psyche could create, and decided to write a script based on the concept of suppressed human emotions. Dali perceived this film as a figurative and intellectual revolution, as he wrote in his memoires: “The film has the success I had expected. In one evening, this film had destroyed a decade of pseudo-intellectual postwar avant-garde.” The “Honey is sweeter than blood” and “The Great Masturbator” paintings have details and symbolic elements that inspire some of the movie scenes.

The film was initially released to a limited showing in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months. After making this movie, Dali leaves France and returns to Catalonia in order to find himself. He starts painting clear and surrealist images such as photographs. These creations become typical for his style. One of these works is called “Das Ratsel der Begierde,” now housed by the Monaco Pinakothek der Moderne.

The Surrealists become even more fascinated by the Catalonian painter’s talent after he begins working for the second time with Luis Bunuel for the film “L’Âge d’or” (“Golden Age”). If during their firt movie, Bunuel and Dali had a great connection, now they come with different ideas in how to make the movie. Fascinated by the solemnity of Catholicism, Dali wants to introduce “many archbishops and relics” in the film. Bunuel perceives these ideas as a movement against the clergy.

Therefor, because of the different interpretation of the script and the violent episodes during the first screenings of the film at Studio 28, the two artists stop collaborating. By the time the film went into production, Bunuel and Dali had a falling out, and so the painter had nothing to do with the actual making of “The Golden Age.”

However, the film scandalized the public and was withdrawn from the market. A group of young right-wing extremists destroyed the hall in which the movie was projected. Dali exhibits his own works in the cinema foyer, along with other surrealist artists. The only painting saved from the fury of the demonstrators was “Invisible Woman sleeping, horse and lion.” Dali offers an explanation for this film:

“Writing together with Bunuel for the topics in ‘The Golden Age,’ I wanted to present the ‘conduct’ of a man hunting for love through degrading and patriotic human ideals, and other miserable mechanisms of reality “.

However, Dali doesn’t give up on his cinematic passion, and he continues to collaborate with great directors until the late 70s. In 1945, the artist creates the scenography for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, “Spellbound,” which is based by Francis Beeding’s novel, “The House of Dr. Edwards.”

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.

Amedeo Modiglaini was born to paint in a very unique space and time. The time he lived in was like one of those famous and incredible tales about painters: The usual struggle to live, the usual violent parties ending in drunkenness, surrounded by women, and the usual end at an early age.

Amedeo Modigliani struggled with poverty all his life. He had a short and rebellious existence, difficult and restless. Amedeo Modigliani lived his life in freedom, the freedom of the mind and soul, despite the fact that his body imprisoned him most of his life. He was desired by women and some great artists and collectors of those times. The irony is the freedom he so ardently wanted, but which his body didn’t let him live. Nevertheless, he knew how to live his freedom through art.

Amedeo Modigliani’s art cannot be categorized in a specific style, such as Modigliani himself who is unique. His life is characterized by one of his biographers as “a prolonged suicide and his work the victory of an immortal spirit.” Few people know the feeling of suffocation that a disease can give you, that feeling of heaviness and lack of oxygen, which ironically, makes you see life without constraints and makes you reprogram your priorities so you feel as free as you can. Just as few people know the freedom you can touch through creativity.

Amedeo Modigliani had a frail body, which made him have a life considered by some as being messy, but for him, it meant freedom, the freedom to paint what he wanted, to drink and smoke hashish when he wanted and to experience carnal love.

Modi, as he was called by his family, had always needed special attention because of his health problems: at eleven years old he made a pleuritis, two years later he had typhus with pulmonary complications, and at seventeen, he became ill with tuberculosis, a disease which will prove fatal. The more the disease seized him, the ardent was Modi’s will to live life as if he was on unimaginable heights, as if he wouldn’t reach the next day. And the freedom he felt in his soul was poured over his brush with which he painted especially portraits and very few landscapes. Amedeo manifested himself through painting as if the artistic imagination represented the getaway from the weakness of the body. His life has been strewn with many stories about the famous personalities of Paris fellowship, artists, poets and intellectuals of Montmartre and Montaparnasse. In his art, he was influenced by Cezanne, the Cubists and minimalist ideas that the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi had.

Legend has it that his mother Eugenia Garsin, with the bailiff at the door, hid valuables under the bed were in just a few minutes, she gave birth to the last of her four children, Amedeo, on 12 July 1884. Dodi’s father, Flamingo Modigliani was the owner of a bank that had just gone bankrupt. Modi had a keen interest in reading. He was in love with Baudelaire’s and D’Anunzio’s poetry and Nietzsche’s philosophy, but as a child he had shown a remarkable inclination for drawing.

His first “scratches” on two illustrated books date from 1893 and became famous through the Archives Grimani – Servolini. He acquired art studies from various Livorno masters. His first love was old Italian art, especially Renaissance creations, which he had the opportunity to see in his journey to southern Italy in the search of a warmer climate that could relieve his breathing problems.

Paris’s lights had attracted his attention in the spring of 1906, when he decided to try the French adventure. He enrolled at the Academy Colarossi from rue Grande-Chaumiere in Montparnasse, where prestigious students had passed such as Rodin, Wistler, Cezanne and Gauguin. Young Modigliani was quickly integrated into the Paris life, full of cafés, theaters and nightlife, and became a dominant member of the group Diego Rivera, Chaim Soutine, Max Jacobs and others. His first supporter was Dr. Paul Alexandre, who in addition to the materials, he assured Modi a roof over his head. Among the artists who gravitated around Alexandre was Constantin Brancusi, a sculptor much older than Modigliani and who showed him the tribal and primitive art. Another artist who attended the same circles was Pablo Picasso, but between the two had never been a friendship, but rather a rivalry.

Modigliani’s official debut among Parisian artists took place through the presence of six of his paintings at the 1908s Salon: “Idol”, two drawings, two nudes, “Bust of a young woman” and “Seated Nude” and the famous painting called “The Jew Woman” . At that time, he tries to sculpt, an art which he declares to be his life first and true passion. Since 1913, Amedeo’s life becomes much harder and fuller of insufficiencies caused by food shortages, hashish, alcohol and by the dust, he inspired while sculpting. It is said that at one time, weakened by illness, Modi fainted and was convinced by friends to return to Livorno, where he could get better.

However, already the spirit of Paris was part of himself, so shortly after he joined the French artists again. Its searches in the painting field will go towards purity, the eternal and timeless faces. Most of his close friends became subjects for his portraits such as Chaim Soutine, Diego Rivera, Max Jacobs, Jaques Lipchitz.

His original style, turned to the purity of art will reach maturity in around 1914. In the same year, his first serious relationship begins with the young English writer Beatrice Hastings, with whom Modi will stay two years. Until then, his relationships with women were short, tumultuous and largely fueled by physical impulses. They were one-night stands, to whom Amedeo devoted countless graceful and melancholy nudes. However, his true love, with whom he stayed until the end of his life, was the shy and reserved Jeanne Hebuterne.

To her he dedicated most of his woman portraits, but never nudes. Living together was not easy. Modigliani had no money to support his family. They often moved from one location to another, living on the edge of poverty. In addition, the artist continued his disorderly life, with parties and drunkenness. This type of life did not last for long. In January 1920, Amedeo had lost his conscious and was transported to a hospital but could not be saved.

Modi’s love story had an unexpected and tragic end. After hearing about Amedeo’s death, Jeanne, who was nine months pregnant, thrown herself from the fifth floor window of her parental home. The huge love that she felt for Modi made her choose death over life.

Unfortunately, Amedeo Modigliani’s portraits haven’t attracted a lot of attention from the critics during his lifetime. The first real contact with the public took place two years after his death in 1922, on the occasion of the Thirteenth Biennial of Art in Venice. However, his paintings haven’t received praise from Italian critics. He rather received fame and recognition abroad in France or USA. Now, “Nude Sitting on a Divan” is Amedeo’s most expensive painting. It was estimated at $ 69 million.

His drawing was a silent conversation. A line of dialogue between our faces and his lines. Modigliani’s portraits are not a reflection of its external line, but of his interior, his noble, acute, agile and dangerous grace” – Jean Conteau

How is it that some people have their own world as if that world is the true reality? Is a world of an artist a reality in-itself and normal people simply cannot understand it? We like to call it madness. Is it possible that without a little madness, a painter cannot become a great artist?

Some painters took drastic measures in times of weakness, such as Vincent Van Gogh cutting his ear off. Others kept a hidden life by staying out of the light of society. Only close people knew about Paul Cezanne’s weakness, his depression and his lack of reality. It is said that he was a difficult person to be around with.

Paul Cezanne was, for the most part, a loner and did not let many people around him. Even so, is it possible that a mad man can realize his lack of reality? Cezanne himself wondered if he was insane: “Tell me, do you think I’m going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.” The problems began with the onset of diabetes in 1890, destabilizing his personality to the point where relationships with others were strained.

However, his ability to paint hasn’t been affected. Although he had admired in his lifetime, Cezanne rarely liked his paintings and often, despite the long time spent making them, destroyed them. It is said that the artist once put someone to sit for him in order to make a portrait for three months and then destroyed the painting. For some, the endless sittings were often tortures. The artist demanded that his models remain absolutely motionless. However, he wasn’t interested in the facial mimicry or emotions, but in the composition of the moment. For this reason, he painted people he could afford to pay, such as farmers and day laborers.

It was people like “The Card Players” that Cezanne used as models to paint. The painting can now be admired at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nevertheless, Cezanne was so dissatisfied with the results of his works, and even showed sympathy with the Salons that turned down his paintings for shows.

Although towards the end of his life collectors became increasingly interested in Cezanne’s works and his paintings began to reach significant prices, the artist retreated more and more from the world. “The world doesn’t understand me, and I don’t understand the world, that’s why I’ve withdrawn from it.”

Cezanne’s health weakened him as he grew older. Apart from his diabetes, his depression worsened, and was mainly manifested in a growing distrust of his fellow human beings and eventually in paranoia. His mood swayed between euphoria and despair. However, he was delighted at the increasingly frequent visits from friends and admirers.

Despite him wanting to be alone, he also appreciated the importance the admirers gave his work. He felt that at last he was being taken seriously. In January 1905 he wrote to Roger Marx, the editor of the Gazzette des Beaux-Arts:
“My age and my health will never allow me to realize the dream of art that I have been pursuing all my life. But I shall always be grateful to the intelligent amateurs who had – despite my own hesitations – the intuition of what I wanted to attempt for the renewal of my art.”

So what made Cezanne stand out from the artist’s crowd? Was depression, madness or paranoia that made him paint in such a unique manner? or none of these, but only his talent? I guess that only Cezanne can answer that question:

To my mind, one does not substitute oneself for the past; one merely adds a new link to its chain. With the temperament of a painter and an ideal of art – that is to say, a conception of nature – sufficient means of expression would have been necessary to be intelligible to the general public and to occupy a decent place in the history of art.” – Paul Cezanne

Paul Klee grew up in a family of musicians. His father, Hans Klee trained as a singer, and played the piano and the violin at Stuttgart conservator, where he met Ida Frick, Paul’s mother. Ida was training to be a singer as well.

They got married in 1875 and gave birth to their oldest daughter Mathilde, and on December 18th 1879 Pail was born. Paul started school in 1886. Paul began to play the violin at the age of seven.

Paul Klee was so good playing the Violin that at the age of eleven, he became an associate member of the orchestra that gave concerts at the Berne Music Society. At the same time he started drawing, being introduced to this new visual art form by his grandmother. Unlike his musical ability, his passion for drawing was not given encouragement by his parents. Klee kept so much in his parent’s mind that he did not let aside his violin lessons.

Paul Klee in his diary stated that he “would have gladly left school during the last year, but my parents’ wishes prevented me from doing so. I now felt like a martyr. After I had scraped through my school-leaving examination, I began to paint in Munich.” Klee’s decision to leave music aside was for the idea that music had passed its peak. Modern composers left him cold.

However, he had to sustain himself financially speaking, so he still played in an orchestra. He particularly liked the great composers of the 18th and 19th century.

Did you know that Rivera tried cubism?

The Cubist influence reached Diego Rivera in 1912, through his neighbors in Montparnasse the Dutch painters Piet Mondrian, Conrad Kikkert and Lodewijk Schelfhout. However, it was in the next year that his transition to Cubism took place.

In the following five years Rivera made over two hundred works. His attempts, following cubist influences, reached their apogee with the oil painting Woman at a Well. His pastel color’s palette is quite unusual through the earlier cubist artists. Rivera reached maturity in cubism with the painting Sailor at Breakfast, made in 1914. This work reflects better his friendship with Juan Gris, through the mixture of paint with sand and other substances, the thick application of paint and the use of a collage technique.

At his first one-man show in April 1914 at the Galerie Berthe Weil, Rivera included twenty-five cubist works, and some of them were even sold. After this success, his cubist paintings have been shown in exhibitions in Munich, Vienna, Prague, Amsterdam and Brussels. Rivera even took part in the Cubist painters debates, and the most heated discussion were held with Pablo Picasso.

Rivera met Pablo through the artist Ortiz de Zarate. One of Rivera’s last cubist paintings is Motherhood: Angelina and the Child Diego. The painting betrays his preoccupation with scientific and philosophical ideas that led to a so-called “classical” technique. The painting shows his first wife, Angelina holding in her hands Rivera’s son. Diego jr. fell ill weakened by cold and hunger and died at the end of 1918, at the age of two.

Rivera gave up cubist style after an incident called “the Rivera affair.” In the spring of 1917, Diego had a rough exchange with the art critique Pierre Reverdy, who became the theorist of Cubism during the war years. Reverdy wrote hurtful piece about the work of Rivera, in his book “Sur le Cubism.” That started a dispute when Rivera met the writer at a dinner arranged by Leonce Rosenberg. The result of this exchange of replicas was Rivera’s break up with Rosenberg and Picasso, and with the Cubist style. He also lost the friendship of Braque, Gris, Leger, Lipchitz and Severini. The painting Zapatista Landscape, bought by Rosenberg, had been locked away until the 1930s.