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Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Fuentetodos, 1746 – Bordeaux, 1828) Goya est peut-être le peintre le plus accessible entre tous. Son art, comme sa vie, est un livre ouvert. Il ne cachait rien de ses contemporains, et leur offrait son art avec la même franchise. L'entrée dans son monde n'est pas barricadée de difficultés techniques. Il prouva que si un homme a la capacité de vivre et de multiplier ses expériences, de se battre et de travailler, il peut produire un grand art sans besoin de recourir au décorum classique, ni à la décence traditionnelle. Il naquit en 1746, à Fuendetodos, un petit village de montagne d'une centaine d'habitants. Enfant, il travailla dans les hamps avec ses deux frères et sa soeur, jusqu'au moment où son talent pour le dessin mit fin à sa misère. A 14 ans, soutenu par un riche bienfaiteur, il partit pour Saragosse, afin d'étudier auprès d'un peintre de cour, et plus tard, à l'âge de dix-neuf ans, pour Madrid. Jusqu'à son trente-septième anniversaire, si l'on omet des dessins de tapisserie d'une qualité décorative méconnue et cinq petits tableaux, Goya ne peignit rien de significatif. En revanche, une fois qu'il eut dominé ses énergies récalcitrantes, il produisit des chefs – d'oeuvre avec la vélocité d'un Rubens. Sa nomination à la cour fut suivie d'une décennie d'activité incessante – des années de peinture et de scandales – entrecoupée de périodes de maladie. Les esquisses de Goya démontrent une maîtrise du dessin de premier ordre. En peinture, il est, comme Velàzquez, plus ou moins tributaire de son modèle, mais non pas à la manière détachée de l'expert en nature morte. Si une femme est laide, il fait sienne son indigne laideur ; si elle est séduisante, il met en scène son charme. Il préfère terminer ses portraits en une seule séance de pose et être un tyran pour ses modèles. Comme Velàzquez, il se concentre sur les visages, mais il dessine ses têtes avec astuce, et les construit grâce à des tons de gris transparents. Des formes monstrueuses habitent son univers en noir et blanc : ce sont ses productions les plus profondément réfléchies. Ses figures fantastiques, comme il les appelle, nous remplissent d'un sentiment de joie ignoble, exacerbent nos instincts démoniaques, et nous transportent dans des délires de destruction peu charitables. Son génie atteint des sommets dans ses dessins des horreurs de la guerre. Placée à côtés des oeuvres de Goya, n'importe quelle autre image de guerre fait figure d'étude sentimentale de la cruauté. Il évite les actions éparpillées sur le champ de bataille et se confine dans des scènes de boucherie isolées. Nulle part il n'a obtenu une telle maîtrise de la forme et du mouvement, des gestes aussi dramatiques et des effets d'ombre et de lumière aussi ahurissants. Goya a rénové et innové dans toutes les directions.

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Lacan, the last owner of Courbet’s The Origin of the World, loved the painting so much that he couldn’t even bring himself to look at it. Instead, he hid it behind a “safer” painting. The Chinese called it the “valley of the roses” (watch out for the thorns!), the Persians, the “honey-pot” (watch out for the bees!), and the Greeks, “the mound of Venus” (mind the steep climb!); to each era its fantasies and its theories about the feminine mystique. Then there are the testimonies of poets, painters, and even of some famous psychiatrists. The Origin of the World is a work of art only suitable for lovers of intrigue.

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Whistler suddenly shot to fame like a meteor at a crucial moment in the history of art, a field in which he was a pioneer. Like the impressionists, with whom he sided, he wanted to impose his own ideas. Whistler’s work can be divided into four periods. The first may be called a period of research in which he was influenced by the Realism of Gustave Courbet and by Japanese art. Whistler then discovered his own originality in the Nocturnes and the Cremorne Gardens series, thereby coming into conflict with the academics who wanted a work of art to tell a story. When he painted the portrait of his mother, Whistler entitled it Arrangement in Grey and Black and this is symbolic of his aesthetic theories. When painting the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens it was not to depict identifiable figures, as did Renoir in his work on similar themes, but to capture an atmosphere. He loved the mists that hovered over the banks of the Thames, the pale light, and the factory chimneys which at night turned into magical minarets. Night redrew landscapes, effacing the details. This was the period in which he became an adventurer in art; his work, which verged on abstraction, shocked his contemporaries. The third period is dominated by the full-length portraits that brought him his fame. He was able to imbue this traditional genre with his profound originality. He tried to capture part of the souls of his models and placed the characters in their natural habitats. This gave his models a strange presence so that they seem about to walk out of the picture to physically encounter the viewer. By extracting the poetic substance from individuals he created portraits described as “mediums” by his contemporaries, and which were the inspiration for Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Towards the end of his life, the artist began painting landscapes and portraits in the classical tradition, strongly influenced by Velázquez. Whistler proved to be extremely rigorous in ensuring his paintings coincided with his theories. He never hesitated in crossing swords with the most famous art theoreticians of his day. His personality, his outbursts, and his elegance were a perfect focus for curiosity and admiration. He was a close friend of Stéphane Mallarmé, and admired by Marcel Proust, who rendered homage to him in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. He was also a provocative dandy, a prickly socialite, a demanding artist, and a daring innovator.

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Vincent van Gogh’s life and work are so intertwined that it is hardly possible to observe one without thinking of the other. Van Gogh has indeed become the incarnation of the suffering, misunderstood martyr of modern art, the emblem of the artist as an outsider. An article, published in 1890, gave details about van Gogh’s illness. The author of the article saw the painter as “a terrible and demented genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always at the brink of the pathological.” Very little is known about Vincent’s childhood. At the age of eleven he had to leave “the human nest”, as he called it himself, for various boarding schools. The first portrait shows us van Gogh as an earnest nineteen year old. At that time he had already been at work for three years in The Hague and, later, in London in the gallery Goupil & Co. In 1874 his love for Ursula Loyer ended in disaster and a year later he was transferred to Paris, against his will. After a particularly heated argument during Christmas holidays in 1881, his father, a pastor, ordered Vincent to leave. With this final break, he abandoned his family name and signed his canvases simply “Vincent”. He left for Paris and never returned to Holland. In Paris he came to know Paul Gauguin, whose paintings he greatly admired. The self-portrait was the main subject of Vincent’s work from 1886c88. In February 1888 Vincent left Paris for Arles and tried to persuade Gauguin to join him. The months of waiting for Gauguin were the most productive time in van Gogh’s life. He wanted to show his friend as many pictures as possible and decorate the Yellow House. But Gauguin did not share his views on art and finally returned to Paris. On 7 January, 1889, fourteen days after his famous self-mutilation, Vincent left the hospital where he was convalescing. Although he hoped to recover from and to forget his madness, but he actually came back twice more in the same year. During his last stay in hospital, Vincent painted landscapes in which he recreated the world of his childhood. It is said that Vincent van Gogh shot himself in the side in a field but decided to return to the inn and went to bed. The landlord informed Dr Gachet and his brother Theo, who described the last moments of his life which ended on 29 July, 1890: “I wanted to die. While I was sitting next to him promising that we would try to heal him. […], he answered, ‘La tristesse durera toujours (The sadness will last forever).’”

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The eclectic art of which the Carracci family dreamed was realised by Rubens with the ease of genius. However, the problem was much more complicated for a man of the north, who wished to add to it a fusion of the Flemish and Latin spirits, of which the rather pedantic attempts of Romanism had illustrated the difficulties. He achieved it without losing anything of his overflowing personality, his questing imagination, and the enchanting discoveries of the greatest colourist known to painting. Rubens, the greatest master of Baroque painting’s exuberance, took from the Italian Renaissance what could be of use to him, and then built upon it a style of his own. It is distinguished by a wonderful mastery of the human form and an amazing wealth of splendidly lighted colour. He was a man of much intellectual poise and was accustomed to court life, travelling from court to court, with pomp, as a trusted envoy. Rubens was one of those rare mortals who do real honour to humanity. He was handsome, good and generous, and he loved virtue. His laborious life was well ordered. The creator of so many delightful pagan feasts went each morning to mass before proceeding to his studio. He was the most illustrious type of happy and perfectly balanced genius, and combined in his personage passion and science, ardour and reflection. Rubens expressed drama as well as joy, since nothing human was foreign to him, and he could command at will the pathos of colour and expression which he required in his religious masterpieces. It might be said that he was as prolific in the representation of the joy and exuberance of life as Michelangelo was in the representation of passionate emotions.

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Picasso was born a Spaniard and, so they say, began to draw before he could speak. As an infant he was instinctively attracted to artist’s tools. In early childhood he could spend hours in happy concentration drawing spirals with a sense and meaning known only to himself. At other times, shunning children’s games, he traced his first pictures in the sand. This early self-expression held out promise of a rare gift. Málaga must be mentioned, for it was there, on 25 October 1881, that Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born and it was there that he spent the first ten years of his life. Picasso’s father was a painter and professor at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts. Picasso learnt from him the basics of formal academic art training. Then he studied at the Academy of Arts in Madrid but never finished his degree. Picasso, who was not yet eighteen, had reached the point of his greatest rebelliousness; he repudiated academia’s anemic aesthetics along with realism’s pedestrian prose and, quite naturally, joined those who called themselves modernists, the non-conformist artists and writers, those whom Sabartés called “the élite of Catalan thought” and who were grouped around the artists’ café Els Quatre Gats. During 1899 and 1900 the only subjects Picasso deemed worthy of painting were those which reflected the “final truth”; the transience of human life and the inevitability of death. His early works, ranged under the name of “Blue Period” (1901-1904), consist in blue-tinted paintings influenced by a trip through Spain and the death of his friend, Casagemas. Even though Picasso himself repeatedly insisted on the inner, subjective nature of the Blue Period, its genesis and, especially, the monochromatic blue were for many years explained as merely the results of various aesthetic influences. Between 1905 and 1907, Picasso entered a new phase, called “Rose Period” characterised by a more cheerful style with orange and pink colours. In Gosol, in the summer of 1906 the nude female form assumed an extraordinary importance for Picasso; he equated a depersonalised, aboriginal, simple nakedness with the concept of “woman”. The importance that female nudes were to assume as subjects for Picasso in the next few months (in the winter and spring of 1907) came when he developed the composition of the large painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Just as African art is usually considered the factor leading to the development of Picasso’s classic aesthetics in 1907, the lessons of Cézanne are perceived as the cornerstone of this new progression. This relates, first of all, to a spatial conception of the canvas as a composed entity, subjected to a certain constructive system. Georges Braque, with whom Picasso became friends in the autumn of 1908 and together with whom he led Cubism during the six years of its apogee, was amazed by the similarity of Picasso’s pictorial experiments to his own. He explained that: “Cubism’s main direction was the materialisation of space.” After his Cubist period, in the 1920s, Picasso returned to a more figurative style and got closer to the surrealist movement. He represented distorted and monstrous bodies but in a very personal style. After the bombing of Guernica during 1937, Picasso made one of his most famous works which starkly symbolises the horrors of that war and, indeed, all wars. In the 1960s, his art changed again and Picasso began looking at the art of great masters and based his paintings on ones by Velázquez, Poussin, Goya, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix. Picasso’s final works were a mixture of style, becoming more colourful, expressive and optimistic. Picasso died in 1973, in his villa in Mougins. The Russian Symbolist Georgy Chulkov wrote: “Picasso’s death is tragic. Yet how blind and naïve are those who believe in imitating Picasso and learning from him. Learning what? For these forms have no corresponding emotions outside of Hell. But to be in Hell means to anticipate death. The Cubists are hardly privy to such unlimited knowledge”.

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Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), who can be assigned to the school of classical modernism, was born in Amersfort, Netherlands. After studying in Amsterdam, he started his artist´s career in the impressionist style as a figure and landscape painter. His works from these years showed the influence of Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) and of Fauvism, a French school from the beginning of the 20th century. When he traveled to Paris in 1911, he discovered Pablo Picasso´s works (1881-1973) and, with that, Cubism. He thereafter became a pioneer of abstract painting in the Netherlands. From the 1920s on, his paintings show a vertical and horizontal composition that, combined with the oppositions of blue, yellow, red, and noncolored spaces, turned into his trademark. His art was very appreciated in New York, where he spent his last years. Mondrian was not only a painter but also an art theoretician and cofounder of the art school De Stijl.

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Just as there is a fundamental difference in the use of the words “naked” and “nude”, the unclothed body can evoke a feeling of delight or shame, serving as a symbol of contradictory concepts – beauty and indecency. This book is devoted to representations of the nude by great artists from antiquity and the Italian Renaissance to French Impressionism and contemporary art; from Botticelli and Michelangelo to Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso and Botero. This beautifully produced book provides a collection that will appeal to all art lovers.

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A timeless theme that cannot be ignored, love has always fascinated artists. Painters, sculptors and even architects have drawn inspiration from and illustrated it. Ever new, love has led artists to create the masterworks of their life. From Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love to Brancusi’s The Kiss, the treatment of love has changed along with time and style, but remains, in the end, an everlasting universal language. This book illustrates love in all its strength and variety.

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Those who have had the chance to hold a medieval manuscript in their hands cannot fail to have been impressed by the feeling of being in touch with a long-passed epoch. Back when a book was a true handicraft and every copy the result of a laborious process, the object was more a work of art than a volatile commercial product. The Mega Square Illuminated Manuscripts puts the reader in touch with amazing medieval illustrations and unique adornments, which document the imaginative power of their creators.

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