Art historians have long observed the highly characteristic brushstroke styles of Vincent van Gogh and have relied on discerning these styles for authenticating and dating his works. In our work, we ...compared van Gogh with his contemporaries by statistically analyzing a massive set of automatically extracted brushstrokes. A novel extraction method is developed by exploiting an integration of edge detection and clustering-based segmentation. Evidence substantiates that van Gogh's brushstrokes are strongly rhythmic. That is, regularly shaped brushstrokes are tightly arranged, creating a repetitive and patterned impression. We also found that the traits that distinguish van Gogh's paintings in different time periods of his development are all different from those distinguishing van Gogh from his peers. This study confirms that the combined brushwork features identified as special to van Gogh are consistently held throughout his French periods of production (1886-1890).
Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) with explicit brushstroke representation is essential for both high-grade imitating of artistic paintings and generating commands for artistically skilled robots. ...Some algorithms for this purpose have been recently developed based on simple heuristics, e.g., using an image gradient for driving brushstroke orientation. The notable drawback of such algorithms is the impossibility of automatic learning to reproduce an individual artist’s style. In contrast, popular neural style transfer (NST) algorithms are aimed at this goal by their design. The question arises: how good is the performance of neural style transfer methods in comparison with the heuristic approaches? To answer this question, we develop a novel method for experimentally quantifying brushstroke rendering algorithms. This method is based on correlation analysis applied to histograms of six brushstroke parameters: length, orientation, straightness, number of neighboring brushstrokes (NBS-NB), number of brushstrokes with similar orientations in the neighborhood (NBS-SO), and orientation standard deviation in the neighborhood (OSD-NB). This method numerically captures similarities and differences in the distributions of brushstroke parameters and allows comparison of two NPR algorithms. We perform an investigation of the brushstrokes generated by the heuristic algorithm and the NST algorithm. The results imply that while the neural style transfer and the heuristic algorithms give rather different parameter histograms, their capabilities of mimicking individual artistic manner are limited comparably. A direct comparison of NBS-NB histograms of brushstrokes generated by these algorithms and of brushstrokes extracted from a real painting confirms this finding.
Impressionism is the most popular art movement among museum-goers. But that which may now seem delightful and rather inoffensive landscape painting was in truth one of the first avant-garde ...movements, whose members decided to act as a group in order to more effectively combat traditional art values. The Impressionist's plein airpaintings shocked the public for their technique as much as for their apparent banality. But while Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and others sought to capture light's fleeting nature, the following generation would go on to reject naturalism. Post-Impressionists such as Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Seurat would favour the subjective over the objective, the timeless over the concrete. In so doing, they paved the formal grounds on which 20th century modern art would grow. This Essential volume is a visual guide through these crucial moments in art history and of the 19th century's unrelenting advance towards modernity.
Henri Matisse and Hilda Rix left Paris in early February 1912 for the Moroccan city of Tangier. They stayed in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France for most of February and March. Matisse visited again in ...October of that year while Rix returned in 1914 accompanied by her sister. Rix's painting style took a new turn, developing a post-impressionist style in oils that incorporated abstraction, a primary palette and a flattened picture plain. Both artists executed portraits, working with the same models, in an unused room provided by the owner of the hotel, that became a temporary studio space. Matisse complained that his radical compositions met with derision from the hotel's guests. Their art and letters produced in Tangier reveal the challenges they experienced in finding models and painting in public and in private. They were both representatives of European colonising cultures and committed advocates of modernism and of Morocco. Rix adopted a counter-orientalist position in lectures and articles upon her return to Australia.
This article discusses the representation of the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) in the exhibition "Manet and the Post-Impressionists" at the Grafton Galleries, London in 1910-11. It ...publishes several letters, most previously unpublished, between the dramatic critic and journalist Desmond MacCarthy, who was appointed by the art critic Roger Fry to handle the detailed arrangements over loans to the exhibition, and Jo Bonger, widow of Vincent's brother Theo, which provide insight into how the exhibition was organised and the public reaction. Van Gogh was represented by around 30 works, which tended to be singled out by hostile critics as being the most outrageous in the exhibition; it was in large part owing to his work's presence at the Grafton Galleries, however, that Van Gogh was soon to become, along with the French artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), one of the most famous of the Post-Impressionists. (Quotes from original text)
Contributing to the discourse on a "Global Cézanne Effect," this essay examines the artistic and critical reception of Paul Cézanne in Japan during the early twentieth century. The author pays ...particular attention to the complex relationship between the French artist's painting practice and Eastern aesthetic theory. Compatibilities arise, at times, as a result of accidental or even willful mistranslations of French, English and German texts, lhe author also analyzes Cézanne's reception in the context of German Expressionism's foray into East Asia, along with the contemporary resurgence of Southern school literati painting.
