art · sid gore

Wassily Kandinsky, 1866–1944

Yellow-Red-Blue, 1925

Oil on canvas, 128 × 201.5 cm

Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris

Kandinsky painted this in 1925, while he was teaching at the Bauhaus. Yellow shapes and fine lines gather on the left, a large blue circle crossed by dark curves fills the right, and red sits between them. In his 1911 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he wrote that yellow seems to come toward you and blue to sink back into depth.

Photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

Wassily Kandinsky, 1866–1944

Composition VIII, 1923

Oil on canvas, 140 × 201 cm

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.262

Circles, triangles and crossing lines float on a pale, open ground. Kandinsky painted it in Weimar in July 1923, while he taught at the Bauhaus. It is the eighth of the ten large canvases he called Compositions, and he counted it among the best of his paintings after the war.

Photograph by Xyxyzyz on Wikimedia Commons.

Claude Monet, 1840–1926

Water Lilies, 1906

Oil on canvas, 87.6 × 92.7 cm

Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1157

Monet painted the lily pond in his garden at Giverny about 250 times. Here he leaves out the bank and the horizon, so the lilies seem to float on the sky and clouds reflected in the water.

Photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

The Japanese Footbridge, by Claude Monet

Claude Monet, 1840–1926

The Japanese Footbridge, 1899

Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 101.6 cm

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Victoria Nebeker Coberly, in memory of her son John W. Mudd, and Windsor Booth Jacobs, 1992.9.1

Monet had this arched wooden footbridge built over the pond in his water garden at Giverny. In 1899 he painted it over and over from nearly the same spot, with thick green foliage behind it and water lilies spread across the pond below.

Photograph by the National Gallery of Art on Wikimedia Commons.

Vincent van Gogh, 1853–1890

The Starry Night, 1889

Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 92.1 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange), 472.1941

Van Gogh painted this in June 1889 at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had gone that May to recover. It is the view from his east-facing window before sunrise, with a dark cypress in front and a village he added from imagination. He built the sky in thick, swirling strokes of blue and yellow.

Photograph by Google Arts & Culture on Wikimedia Commons.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat, 1859–1891

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884–86

Oil on canvas, 207.5 × 308.1 cm

Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926.224

Parisians spend a Sunday afternoon on an island in the Seine. Seurat worked on it for two years from dozens of drawings and oil sketches, setting small touches of unmixed colour side by side and leaving your eye to blend them. He showed it at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, and later went back to paint the border of coloured dots around its edge.

Photograph by Google Arts & Culture on Wikimedia Commons.

Edward Hopper, 1882–1967

Nighthawks, 1942

Oil on canvas, 84.1 × 152.4 cm

Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection, 1942.51

You look through the curved glass of a New York diner late at night, at three customers at the counter and a man in white behind it. Hopper said a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue suggested it, though he simplified the scene and made the place bigger. He finished it in January 1942, weeks after the United States entered the Second World War, and the Art Institute bought it that spring.

Photograph by the Art Institute of Chicago on Wikimedia Commons.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai, 1760–1849

The Great Wave off Kanagawa, about 1830–32

Woodblock print, ink and colour on paper, 25.4 × 38.1 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Howard Mansfield Collection, Purchase, Rogers Fund, 1936, JP2569

A great wave curls over three boats of rowers, with Mount Fuji small in the distance beneath it. Hokusai made it for his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji when he was about seventy, and it was printed thousands of times from carved wooden blocks. The deep blue is Prussian blue, a pigment that had only recently reached Japan.

Photograph by The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wikimedia Commons.

Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, by Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh, 1853–1890

Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, 1888

Oil on canvas, 91 × 72 cm

Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, 8672

In August 1888 Van Gogh painted four sunflower canvases in Arles for the room Paul Gauguin would stay in at the Yellow House. This one has twelve blooms, some open and some going to seed, crowded into a yellow vase signed Vincent against a pale blue-green wall. He worked in the mornings, fast, before the flowers wilted.

Photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

Café Terrace at Night, by Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh, 1853–1890

Café Terrace at Night, 1888

Oil on canvas, 80.7 × 65.3 cm

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

A gas lamp lights the terrace of a café on the Place du Forum in Arles, under a deep blue sky full of stars. Van Gogh painted it on the spot at night in September 1888, the first time he put stars in a sky. He wrote to his sister that it was a night picture with no black in it, only blues, violets and greens.

Photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

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