Tag Archives: gauguin

Pont-Aven = Vision After The Sermon

It's a painting of Paul Gauguin which is in Na...

This is one of those paintings I needed to see – it was an important turning point in art history. The bold use of colour was deep rooted and part of the bedrock of the Synthetist style of modern art – an extension of the pioneering vision of other artist including Emile Bernard.

Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) is an oil painting by French artist Paul Gauguin in 1888. It is now in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. It depicts a scene from The Bible, where Jacob wrestles an angel. A vision or hallucination that the Breton women experience after a sermon in church. Painted in Pont-Aven, Brittany, France – the inherent spiritality of subjects in this painting, the influence of the cloisonnist style, all point towards a great painting and a break through in 19th century art.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Richter

As much as I am a massive fan of Gauguin the highlight of my visit to Tate Modern was looking at the six Richter paintings, ‘John Cage’.

The urge and joy of letting paint drag n drop is…?

The Cage Paintings were conceived as a single coherent group, and displayed for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Their titles, Cage (1)-(6), pay homage to the American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992). In his ‘Lecture on Nothing’, Cage famously declared “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.” Richter is equally suspicious of ideologies and any claim to absolute truth. He shies away from giving psychological interpretations to his paintings, preferring to allow viewers and critics to make up their own minds.