2 Aug’23, ON THIS DAY
Today is world friendship day. We create many days in modern times to remember forgotten days and moments. Fathers and mothers Day, and for lovers, Valentine’s Day, and many other days for many reasons, indicating we are ignoring many things without a particular day for ‘celebration’. Friendship is human nature; without friendship, life sometimes seems incomplete; we celebrate human’s most astonishing element, ‘Friendship’ today, the most beautiful thing that holds all humanity.
In Art, friendship is a topic of depicting and narrating beautiful elements of two people’s relationship, regardless the gender.
Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh
“Like everyone else, I need relationships of friendship or affection or trusting companionship, and am not like a street pump or lamp-post, whether of stone or iron…” Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo van Gogh in 1879
Van Gogh is one of the best artists’ examples of celebrating ‘friendship’ more than anything; Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, one of the great artists friendships in art history, stay together without any intention; as Aristotle mentioned, ‘What is a friend? A single soul in two bodies. Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin met in 1887; after their meeting, Van Gogh invited Gauguin to stay with him. They stayed together, taught many things, developed many techniques, experimented with untried pigments, etc.
Apart from this, they often quarrelled and fought with each other, celebrating their togetherness and splitting out. Their friendship finally peaked when Van Gogh famously sliced off his left ear following a furious argument with Gauguin.
Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat
In one way or another, the friendship between Andy Warhole and Basquiat is the most celebrated one in the history of Modern Art. The Pop Art legend and wild and young artist Jean-Michel Basquiat met and made company with each other on a historical affair of Art history; “he’s just one of those kids who drives me crazy, Warhol wrote in his diary after meeting Basquiat.
That was a time of dramatic union of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism; they met in a restaurant, and Warhol took a self-Portrait with his Polaroid camera. That meeting led to a work; Basquiat sent Warhol a double portrait of the duo made after the photograph. Warhol finished Jean-Michel Basquiat, an Artwork that combines a screen-printed picture of the named artist. They met, suddenly made a company, and became inseparable, fed each other for fame, artistic creation, inspiration, and finally, friendship.
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud
The friendship between Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud is much celebrated in western Art; they met in the 1940s and saw each other almost daily for the next 25 years, and stayed as friends until the mid-80s when they fell out bitterly. “Who can I tear to pieces if not my friends? Bacon once said that at the peak of their relationship, they didn’t spend their time in the studio criticising each others’ work; they would hang out at the Gargoyle Club in London, drinking, gambling and arguing.
Lucian Freud is famed for his gloomy interiors and cityscapes, private portraits, self-portraits and naked paintings. Alongside Bacon, he is regarded as Britain’s most important figurative post-war painter. The two extremes of artistic practices were believed to make a company for many years and broke up.
Salvador Dalī and Marcel Duchamp
Dali and Duchamp, two masters from two unlikely areas of artistic expression, Duchamp despised formal art and was keener towards readymade and conceptual art. Dalí was seen as the rebel of painting. Duchamp starts to question the traditional way of artistic life, hates fame and rejects making a living as a skilled artist. In contrast, Dalí created a spectacle of existing as an artist and enjoyed every second. But they link each other with aesthetic, philosophical, and personal, are studied in an autumn display at the Royal Academy, and deliver a refreshed view of their separate canons.
Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne
Paul Cezanne and Camille Pissarro met, suddenly becoming good friends like Van Gogh and Gauguin. They start to collaborate and discuss Art and other matters; the common element is the same rejection of tradition and academic training on which both painters established their works. They have worked together and experimented for over twenty years, forming a leading pair within the Impressionist group.
The Young Girls by Amrita Sher-Gil
In Indian Art, friendship is narrated and depicted well. The opposite of the Western art scene, a company in Indian Art is more into a subject of Art. A group of people founded the Bombay art movement, but that movement is more an ideological one, not only related to friendships.
One of the leading women artists from India, Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting titled The Young Girls (1932) narrates two women in a company in a closed space. Amrita’s sister Indira sits on the left, dressed in chic European garb, while the partly undressed figure in the foreground is a French friend, Denise Proutaux. This painting was rewarded a Gold Medal at the Grand Salon in 1933.
11 Famous Friendship Day Arts that You Need to See on International Friendship Day
Krispin Joseph PX, a poet and journalist, completed an MFA in art history and visual studies at the University of Hyderabad.
