Van Gogh's night sky is a field of roiling energy. Below the exploding stars, the village is a place of quiet order. Connecting earth and sky is the flamelike cypress, a tree traditionally associated with graveyards and mourning. But death was not ominous for van Gogh. "Looking at the stars always makes me dream," he said, "Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star."
The energetic and imposing picture The Great Wave (Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura) is the best-known work by Japanese artist Hokusai Katsushika (1760-1849), one of the greatest Japanese woodblock printmakers, painters and book illustrators. The Great Wave was created around 1831 as part of a series of woodblock prints called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku Sanju-roku Kei). Hokusai (2004), a book written by the Italian professor of East Asian Art, Gian Carlo Calza, offers a general introduction to Hokusai’s works, looking at a chronologically arranged overview of his life and career. The collection of monographs by distinguished Western and Japanese scholars display’s wide research and keen discernment of present studies on Hokusai, while the abundant illustrations, amounting to over 700 in total, allow the readers to explore the fascinating world of Hokusai.
Guernica is a mural-sized oil painting on canvas by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso completed in June 1937,[2] at his home on Rue des Grands Augustins, in Paris. The painting, which uses a palette of gray, black, and white, is regarded by many art critics as one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history.[3] Standing at 3.49 meters (11 ft 5 in) tall and 7.76 meters (25 ft 6 in) wide, the large mural shows the suffering of people wrenched by violence and chaos. Prominent in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, and flames.The painting was created in response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country village in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italian warplanes at the request of the Spanish Nationalists.
Made by Jake Phillips