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...

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter credited as being among the first to truly venture into abstract art. He persisted in expressing his internal world of abstraction despite negative criticism from his peers. He veered away from painting that could be viewed as representational in order to express his emotions, leading to his unique use of colour and form. Although his works received heavy censure at the time, in later years they...

"His paintbrush set everything in motion: the landscape of Provence, the colourful still lifes, his portraits and the picturesque coast of southern France. More than any other artist, Paul Cézanne, the "Father of Modernism", captured the light and the play of colours of the South in his pictures and lent them through his new pictorial language a liveliness and dynamism which continue to fascinate viewers to this day. Paul Cézanne (1839 - 1906) painted...