Post-Impressionism is a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists’ concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour. Due to its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content, Post-Impressionism encompasses Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, Pont-Aven School, and Synthetism, along with some later Impressionists’ work. The movement was led by Paul Cézanne (known as father of Post-impressionism), Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat.
The term Post-Impressionism applied to the reaction against impressionism led by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat It can be roughly dated from 1886, the year of the last Impressionist exhibition, to c 1905, when Fauvism appeared and the first moves towards Cubism were made. While it was predominantly a French movement, there were related developments in other countries, which often occurred somewhat later. Post-Impressionism can be loosely defined as a rejection of the Impressionists’ concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour in favour of an emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content It therefore includes neo-impressionism, symbolism, Cloisonnism, synthetism, and the later work of some Impressionists The term was coined in 1910 by the English critic and painter Roger Fry for an exhibition of late 19th-century French painting, drawing, and sculpture that he organized at the Grafton Galleries in London.
The term Post-Impressionism was first used by art critic Roger Fry in 1906. Critic Frank Rutter in a review of the Salon d’Automne published in Art News, 15 October 1910, described Othon Friesz as a “post-impressionist leader”; there was also an advert for the show The Post-Impressionists of France. Three weeks later, Roger Fry used the term again when he organized the 1910 exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, defining it as the development of French art since Manet.
Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism while rejecting its limitations: they continued using vivid colours, often thick application of paint, and real-life subject matter, but were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, distort form for expressive effect, and use unnatural or arbitrary colour.
Term
The term goes back to the English painter and art critic Roger Fry, who had used him in 1910 on the occasion of his organized exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists in the Grafton Galleries, London. There, among other paintings by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh were shown. The demarcation to impressionism, however, is out of focus. In particular, Cézanne is sometimes assigned to one or the other category.
Characterization
By the Impressionists in the 1870s, a significantly changed view of art was visible, a first step on the way to the art of modernity. The late Impressionists pursued this path further, but developed to the spontaneity and virtuosity of their predecessors new ideas of order. The tendency was to take the picture more and more clearly as an independent art form. It should become an object of pure performance of color and form, based on the aesthetic enjoyment and transmission of the subjectiveSensations of the artist aimed. The viewer is thus invited to rate the sensual experience of colors and lines higher than the natural appearance of things, to which less and less importance has been attached.
Overview
The Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with what they felt was the triviality of subject matter and the loss of structure in Impressionist paintings, though they did not agree on the way forward. Georges Seurat and his followers concerned themselves with Pointillism, the systematic use of tiny dots of colour. Paul Cézanne set out to restore a sense of order and structure to painting, to “make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums”. He achieved this by reducing objects to their basic shapes while retaining the saturated colours of Impressionism. The Impressionist Camille Pissarro experimented with Neo-Impressionist ideas between the mid-1880s and the early 1890s. Discontented with what he referred to as romantic Impressionism, he investigated Pointillism, which he called scientific Impressionism, before returning to a purer Impressionism in the last decade of his life. Vincent van Gogh used colour and vibrant swirling brush strokes to convey his feelings and his state of mind.
Although they often exhibited together, Post-Impressionist artists were not in agreement concerning a cohesive movement. Yet, the abstract concerns of harmony and structural arrangement, in the work of all these artists, took precedence over naturalism. Artists such as Seurat adopted a meticulously scientific approach to colour and composition.
Younger painters during the early 20th century worked in geographically disparate regions and in various stylistic categories, such as Fauvism and Cubism, breaking from Post-Impressionism.
Defining Post-Impressionism
The term was used in 1906, and again in 1910 by Roger Fry in the title of an exhibition of modern French painters: Manet and the Post-Impressionists, organized by Fry for the Grafton Galleries in London. Three weeks before Fry’s show, art critic Frank Rutter had put the term Post-Impressionist in print in Art News of 15 October 1910, during a review of the Salon d’Automne, where he described Othon Friesz as a “post-impressionist leader”; there was also an advert in the journal for the show The Post-Impressionists of France.
Most of the artists in Fry’s exhibition were younger than the Impressionists. Fry later explained: “For purposes of convenience, it was necessary to give these artists a name, and I chose, as being the vaguest and most non-committal, the name of Post-Impressionism. This merely stated their position in time relatively to the Impressionist movement.” John Rewald limited the scope to the years between 1886 and 1892 in his pioneering publication on Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin (1956). Rewald considered this a continuation of his 1946 study, History of Impressionism, and pointed out that a “subsequent volume dedicated to the second half of the post-impressionist period”: Post-Impressionism: From Gauguin to Matisse, was to follow. This volume would extend the period covered to other artistic movements derived from Impressionism, though confined to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rewald focused on such outstanding early Post-Impressionists active in France as van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Redon. He explored their relationships as well as the artistic circles they frequented (or were in opposition to), including:
Neo-Impressionism: ridiculed by contemporary art critics as well as artists as Pointillism; Seurat and Signac would have preferred other terms: Divisionism for example
Cloisonnism: a short-lived term introduced in 1888 by the art critic Édouard Dujardin, was to promote the work of Louis Anquetin, and was later also applied to contemporary works of his friend Émile Bernard
Synthetism: another short-lived term coined in 1889 to distinguish recent works of Gauguin and Bernard from that of more traditional Impressionists exhibiting with them at the Café Volpini.
Pont-Aven School: implying little more than that the artists involved had been working for a while in Pont-Aven or elsewhere in Brittany.
Symbolism: a term highly welcomed by vanguard critics in 1891, when Gauguin dropped Synthetism as soon as he was acclaimed to be the leader of Symbolism in painting.
Furthermore, in his introduction to Post-Impressionism, Rewald opted for a second volume featuring Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau “le Douanier”, Les Nabis and Cézanne as well as the Fauves, the young Picasso and Gauguin’s last trip to the South Seas; it was to expand the period covered at least into the first decade of the 20th century—yet this second volume remained unfinished.
Significant Representatives
The work of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh was characterized by an expressive use of color and greater formal freedom.
Picasso and Cezanne were interested in highlighting the material qualities of painting, representing living beings and landscapes, volumes and relationships between surfaces, as in Pines and Rocks (1895-1898, MoMA, New York). His interest in geometric shapes and the prismatic light inherent in the perception of nature anticipated the experiments of Cubism.
Gaughin, in an attempt to achieve the communicative capacity of popular art, focused on the representation based on flat and decorative surfaces and the use of numerous symbolic meanings, as seen in the work. Calvary Breton (1889, Palace of Fine Arts, Brussels).
Van Gogh, on the other hand, approached nature with vigorous brush strokes of color, evocative of the artist’s inner emotions. His subjective experimentation, exemplified in Starry Night (1889, MoMA of New York), preceded expressionism.
Cézanne transformed his motifs into a system of great clarity and solidity. His analytic -looking painting examines the volumes of the objects and, especially in landscape paintings, leads to virtually crystalline structures, so that it is possible to see them as a precursor to Cubism.
Gauguin developed a new, decorative style through a widespread use of colors and simplified forms, which he himself described as synthetism, as he emerged from the combination of various sources: church stained glass, the naive immediacy of folk art, and the Japanese color woodcut that has been around since In 1850 in large numbers came to Europe and had already influenced the Impressionists. In other words, the word should describe the attempt to summarize the outward appearance of things, the artist’s feelings towards them, and aesthetic considerations in a synthesis.
Also Toulouse-Lautrec was influenced by Japanese printmaking. The clearest evidence of this is his color lithographs – poster designs for the amusement parks of the Paris Montmartre, which contributed significantly to the early boom of poster art around 1890.
Van Gogh painted a series of passionately expressive pictures in a few years between 1886 and 1890. In color, he saw a special language that could directly affect the human soul. His style anticipated features of Expressionism.
Seurat also relied on the expressive power of color, but without van Gogh’s exuberance. Rather, on the basis of scientific theories, he created a painting technique in which optical mixing would result in a particularly intensive effect if the whole picture was broken down into small dots of color arranged like a mosaic (pointillism or divisionism).
Impact
From different points of view, the Post-Impressionists have prepared the art of modernity. Their commonality was that they advanced the decisive change from the imitation of nature to the autonomous existence of the image.
Reviews and adjustments
Rewald wrote that “the term ‘Post-Impressionism’ is not a very precise one, though a very convenient one.” Convenient, when the term is by definition limited to French visual arts derived from Impressionism since 1886. Rewald’s approach to historical data was narrative rather than analytic, and beyond this point he believed it would be sufficient to “let the sources speak for themselves.”
Rival terms like Modernism or Symbolism were never as easy to handle, for they covered literature, architecture and other arts as well, and they expanded to other countries.
Modernism, thus, is now considered to be the central movement within international western civilization with its original roots in France, going back beyond the French Revolution to the Age of Enlightenment.
Symbolism, however, is considered to be a concept which emerged a century later in France, and implied an individual approach. Local national traditions as well as individual settings therefore could stand side by side, and from the very beginning a broad variety of artists practicing some kind of symbolic imagery, ranged between extreme positions: The Nabis for example united to find synthesis of tradition and brand new form, while others kept to traditional, more or less academic forms, when they were looking for fresh contents: Symbolism is therefore often linked to fantastic, esoteric, erotic and other non-realist subject matter.
To meet the recent discussion, the connotations of the term ‘Post-Impressionism’ were challenged again: Alan Bowness and his collaborators expanded the period covered forward to 1914 and the beginning of World War I, but limited their approach widely on the 1890s to France. Other European countries are pushed back to standard connotations, and Eastern Europe is completely excluded.
So, while a split may be seen between classical ‘Impressionism’ and ‘Post-Impressionism’ in 1886, the end and the extent of ‘Post-Impressionism’ remains under discussion. For Bowness and his contributors as well as for Rewald, ‘Cubism’ was an absolutely fresh start, and so Cubism has been seen in France since the beginning, and later in Anglosaxonia. Meanwhile, Eastern European artists, however, did not care so much for western traditions, and proceeded to manners of painting called abstract and suprematic—terms expanding far into the 20th century.
According to the present state of discussion, Post-Impressionism is a term best used within Rewald’s definition in a strictly historical manner, concentrating on French art between 1886 and 1914, and re-considering the altered positions of impressionist painters like Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, and others—as well as all new schools and movements at the turn of the century: from Cloisonnism to Cubism. The declarations of war, in July/August 1914, indicate probably far more than the beginning of a World War—they signal a major break in European cultural history, too.
Along with general art history information given about “Post-Impressionism” works, there are many museums that offer additional history, information and gallery works, both online and in house, that can help viewers understand a deeper meaning of “Post-Impressionism” in terms of fine art and traditional art applications.
Source from Wikipedia