Artnit

The Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel sought inspiration in literature and usually presented tragic situations or dark sides of the figures in the paintings. He painted The Swan Princess at the farm of his parents in Chernihiv province, in present-day Ukraine, in the summer of 1900. It is believed that the painting was inspired by the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov which was based on the fairytale of the same name by Alexander Pushkin. Vrubel designed the decor and costumes for this opera and his wife, opera singer Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel, sang in the role of The Swan Princess. However, he said that he set the character of Tatiana from the poem by Eugene Onegin by Pushkin. The painting The Swan Princess is in The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

The idea of the swan song recurs from Aesop to Ovid to Plato to Tennyson. According to folklore, while he is mute during the rest of his life, swan sings most beautifully and mournfully before he dies. Hence this phrase came to be used to describe someone who was leaving in style and for the final performance of an actor, singer, composer, poet, or the like. Now it means the last effort of any man and also someone's best work.

The virginal, enduring, beautiful today
will a drunken beat of its wing break us
this hard, forgotten lake haunted under frost
by the transparent glacier of unfled flights!

French poet and one of the foremost contributors to French symbolism in poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé spread his new poetics based on the introduction of free verse and the construction of the poem around a central symbol using the image to symbolize an abstract aspect of the human mind. His poetry is dominated by the pursuit of pure language, and the reader only senses the meaning of the poem. One of his most famous poems is the Sonnet about the Swan or The Swan as it is often called, published in 1876. It evokes Mallarmé's sense of exile in which the poet is found among men, like a bird that is prevented from flying.

Symbolist poetry of French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé anticipated and inspired artistic schools of the early 20th century like Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Dadaism. The idea of poetry as evocative, derived from the world of ideas, philosophy, and arguably, from the poets own drive to create something original from the depth of their being. Stéphane Mallarmé said: “The art of evoking an object little by little so as to reveal a mood or, conversely, the art of choosing an object and extracting from it an ‘etat d’ame’” -- a state of the soul.

Girl with a Mandolin is one of the most beautiful, lyrical, and accessible of all Cubist paintings but is also an early example of an Analytic Cubist painting. The idea for this painting originated in Cadaques where Pablo Picasso and Fernande Olivier spent a summer vacation in 1910. The same year Picasso painted in Paris Girl with a Mandolin within the Cubism. Today it is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Influenced by Camille Corot, who taught him that the addition of a musical instrument endows a character with the stillness of an object, Georges Braque returned to the depiction of the human figure after two years that was almost entirely dedicated to painting landscapes and still life pieces. He painted Woman with a Mandolin in the spring of 1910, during his first cubist phase, known as Analytical Cubism. This painting was the first oval-shaped cubist painting, painted by Georges Braque in the usual rectangular shape. After he completed this work Pablo Picasso also produced a painting featuring a figure with a mandolin, an oval Girl with a Mandolin, and a rectangular Girl with a Mandolin. Today, the painting Woman with a Mandolin is in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich.

Pablo Picasso's The Young Ladies of Avignon is usually compared to Paul Cézanne's The Large Bathers. Picasso had been very much inspired by this painting. It helped him to look at objects from varying viewpoints. Painted around the same time but with completely different feels, these paintings are influential and have given the painters their distinguished recognition, particularly those that include nude figures in their work.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or The Young Ladies of Avignon, originally titled The Brothel of Avignon is a revolutionary large oil painting created in 1907 by Pablo Picasso. Picasso prepared this painting in his Paris studio over six months by making hundreds of sketches, drawings, and paintings of revision. He named the painting The Young Ladies of Avignon after a brothel in Avignon Street in Barcelona. This painting is considered to be the first cubist, avant-garde, and municipal modern painting of the XX century and the most famous example of cubism painting. It is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The Joy of Life by Henri Matisse is perhaps the first canvas to clearly understand the great formal challenge of Paul Cézanne and to further the elder master's ideas. This painting is simultaneously seen as inspired by and breaking free of Paul Cézanne's, last great painting, The Large Bathers in its marked symmetry and the adaptation of the nude forms to the triangular pattern of the trees and river.