Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism, in Western painting, movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style’s inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art.

Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of color and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favor of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colors of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken color. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.

Paul Cézanne

After a phase of uneasy dissension among the Impressionists, Paul Cézanne withdrew from the movement in 1878 in order “to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums.” In contrast to the transient modern world depicted by the Impressionists, his approach imbued landscape and still life with a monumental permanence and coherence. He abandoned the Impressionists’ virtuoso depiction of evanescent light effects in his preoccupation with the underlying structures of natural forms and the problem of unifying surface patterns with spatial depth. His art was the major inspiration for Cubism, which was concerned primarily with depicting the structure of objects.

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Georges Seurat

In 1884, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, Georges Seurat revealed an intention similar to Cézanne’s with paintings that showed more attention to composition than did those of the Impressionists and that delved into the science of color. Taking as a point of departure the Impressionist practice of using broken color to suggest shimmering light, he sought to achieve luminosity through optical formulas, placing side by side tiny dots of contrasting colors chosen to blend from a distance into a dominant color. This extremely theoretical technique, called pointillism, was adopted by a number of contemporary painters and formed the basis of the style of painting known as Neo-Impressionism.

Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Émile Bernard

The Post-Impressionists often exhibited together, but, unlike the Impressionists, who began as a close-knit, convivial group, they painted mainly alone. Cézanne painted in isolation at Aix-en-Provence in southern France; his solitude was matched by that of Paul Gauguin, who in 1891 took up residence in Tahiti, and of van Gogh, who painted in the countryside at Arles. Both Gauguin and van Gogh rejected the indifferent objectivity of Impressionism in favor of a more personal, spiritual expression. After exhibiting with the Impressionists in 1886, Gauguin renounced “the abominable error of naturalism.”

With the young painter Émile Bernard, Gauguin sought a simpler truth and purer aesthetic in art; turning away from the sophisticated, urban art world of Paris, he instead looked for inspiration in rural communities with more traditional values. Copying the pure, flat color, heavy outline, and decorative quality of medieval stained glass and manuscript illumination, the two artists explored the expressive potential of pure color and line, Gauguin especially using exotic and sensuous color harmonies to create poetic images of the Tahitian people among whom he would eventually live.

Arriving in Paris in 1886, the Dutch painter van Gogh quickly adapted Impressionist techniques and color to express his acutely felt emotions. He transformed the contrasting short brushstrokes of Impressionism into curving, vibrant lines of color, exaggerated even beyond Impressionist brilliance, that convey his emotionally charged and ecstatic responses to the natural landscape.

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Odilon Redon

Less closely connected with the Impressionists were Toulouse-Lautrec and Odilon Redon. Concerned with perceptive portraiture and decorative effect, Toulouse-Lautrec used the vivid contrasting colors of Impressionism in flat areas enclosed by a distinct, sinuous outline. Redon’s still-life florals were somewhat Impressionistic, but his other works, featuring evocative and often mystical subject matter, are more linear and closer to Symbolism in style. In general, Post-Impressionism led away from a naturalistic approach and toward the two major movements of early 20th-century art that superseded it: Cubism and Fauvism, which sought to evoke emotion through color and line.