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"Truly profound and highly creative artists are always out of step with their time and their society"
Many masterpieces of the greatest painters of the 19 century were renowned as such only after the death of their creators. Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Edgar Degas are three outstanding artists who failed to win recognition from their contemporaries. Unfortunately, fame came to them with their deaths. They were among the pioneers who experimented with colors and brushes, and that resulted in new movements in art such as post-impressionism, impressionism and expressionism.
Dutch post-impressionist Van Gogh, Vincent (1853-1890) spent a miserable and tragic life; he ended his artistic career with consciousness of his failure and committed suicide at the age of 37 years old. Surprisingly, for his entire life he sold only one painting for only 400 francs, or about $100 dollars. Nowadays his paintings are topping the list of world's most precious masterpieces and priced in the millions of dollars. Indeed, according to the "knowledge database" on Internet Van Gogh's painting "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" was sold at the incredible price of $85.2 million dollars and became one of the most expensive paintings ever sold.
Unlike Van Gogh, another painter and sculptor Degas, (Hilaire Germain) Edgar (1834-1917) was born in wealthy family in France, and lived in abundance. Drawing paintings of motion was something that distinguished him from other artists. There is an interesting fact from the article on the internet theartgallery web site , saying that it's estimated, that there are approximately 1500 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings of dancers were drawn by him during his artistic life. However, as many other impressionists, his artistic lot had been a hard one. His bright talent and creative work were not well known to the public until after his death.
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) was also a French painter, nowadays he is treated as the father of modern art, but throughout his entire career he was always an object of unworthy criticism and taunts from public and journalists. According to Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia, Paul Cezanne strove to develop an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression, and abstract pictorial order. His goal was, in his own mind, never fully attained and he left most of his works unfinished and destroyed many others. Despite Paul Cezanne's talent and creative work, the popularity of his paintings began to rise the year after his death at the retrospective exhibition in 1907.
All three painters mentioned above lived at same period of time and had a close relationship with each other. They devoted their lives to art, innovating new movements in painting. And they were also judged by the same public. Being poor or rich did not play any role in their artistic destiny. They were far ahead of their time, and society was not ready for realistic appreciation of their great contribution to art and humanity.
By Alisher Muhammadiev
(April 15th, 2005)
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