More or less a self-taught artist, his work was startlingly innovative, from the very beginning. When he started to become a draughtsman aiming to working for illustrated magazines, he already broke all conventions. Later, when he re-orientated towards painting, the same happened again. Neither his early realist work, though close to the Dutch tradition, nor his later impressionist phase met the contemporary expectations. But then his even more radical, more personal depictions of everyday life showed up, using bold, usually distorted, even caricature draughtsmanship and visible dotted or dashed brush marks, sometimes in swirling or wave-like patterns, which are intensely yet subtly coloured. 1890, the year he died, marks his break-through. Since then, Vincent van Gogh became a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism and has had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists, with a lineage that follows through to the Abstract Expressionism of Willem de Kooning and the British painter Francis Bacon.
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