Post-Impressionism
1880 - 1905
• French phenomenon that included French
artists like Gauguin, Cezanne, ToulouseLautrec and the Dutchman van Gogh
• Careers spanned 1880-1905
• Their canvases shone with rainbow-bright
colour patches
• The Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied
with Impressionism
• They wanted art to be more substantial,
not completely dedicated to capturing a
passing moment
Monet (fleeting moment)
van Gogh (emotion and sensation
through colour and light)
• They were split into two groups
• Seurat and Cezanne concentrated on
formal, near scientific design- Seurat with
his dot theory and Cezanne with his colour
planes.
• Gaughin, van Gogh, and Lautrec,
emphasized expressing their emotions
and sensations through colour and light
• Twentieth-century art, with its extremes of
individual styles from Cubism to
Surrealism, grew out of these two trends
Formal Design
Seurat
Cezanne
v.s.
Expressing Emotion and Sensations
Van Gogh
Gaughin
Seurat
1859-1891
• Always wore a top hat and dark suit with
precisely pressed trousers
• He was just as meticulous in his art
• His method was known as pointillism
• He applied confetti-sized dots of pure,
unmixed colour over the whole canvas
• He theorized that complementary colours,
set side by side, would mix in the viewer’s
eye with greater luminosity than if mixed
on the painter’s palette
• His method was so intensive he only
finished seven large paintings in his
decade-long career
• Died at age 31
• His most celebrated work, A Sunday on La
Grande Jatte took him two years and forty
preliminary colour studies
Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-86
• For Seurat, warm colours (the orange-red
family) connoted action and gaiety, as did
lines of moving upward
• Dark, cool colours (blue-green) and
descending lines evoked sadness
• Middle tones or a balance of warm and
cool colours, and lateral lines conveyed
calm and stasis
• Seurat’s last painting,
“Le Cirque” (circus),
conveys a mood of
frenetic activity
• The acid yellow and
orange colours and
upward-curving lines of
the performers contrast
jarringly with the muted
spectators ranged
horizontally in static
rows
Seurat, Le Cirque, 1891
Toulouse-Lautrec
1864-1901
• He caricatured his own
deformed appearance in
bitter self-portraits
• Born to France’s most
blueblood family- the
1,000-year-old Counts of
Toulouse
• Lautrec was a selfimposed exile from high
society due to a childhood
tragedy
• As a teenager, he broke both legs, which
atrophied, giving him a five foot stature
with a child’s short legs, the powerful torso
of a man, and a grossly disproportionate
head
• He abandoned his love of riding and
shooting his interest in art
• His teacher pronounced his early drawings
“simply awful”
• He was an alcoholic and
syphilitic
• He consorted with
bohemians (a person who
has unconventional social
habits) and social outcasts
• For his series paintings of
bored prostitutes lounging
around dreary bordellos,
he lived in a brothel for a
time
• Work was similar to Degas in style and
content
• Drew his subjects from contemporary life:
Parisian theatres, dance halls, and
circuses
• Portrayed movement and private moments
through slice-of-life glimpses with abrupt,
photo graphic cropping
• Primary interests were actresses with
doubtful morality, entertainers, acrobats,
and prostitutes
• Asymmetrical
cropping derived
from their mutual
admiration of
Japanese prints
• Almost all of
Lautrec’s paintings
are of figures in
interior night
scenes lit by
glaring, artificial
light
Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge,
1892
• Beginning about
1890, he designed
posters of bold
visual simplicity
Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan Japonaise
Paul Cezanne
1839-1906
• Was a loner who felt alien in the city
• Even among the Impressionists he was
considered beyond the pale
• Manet called him a “farceur” (a joke)
• Degas thought he was a wild man
because of his provincial accent, comical
clothes, and unorthodox painting style
• The public denounced Cezanne’s
paintings with vengeance
• At the first Impressionist exhibit in 1874,
sneering crowds were loudest around
Cezanne’s paintings
• Stung by ridicule, he retreated to Aix
• He was obscure until his first one-man
show in 1895, after which he was seen as
a “Sage” by the younger generation
• Cezanne’s work was radical at the time
because of his new take on surface
appearances
• He penetrated to its underlying geometry
• “Reproduce nature in terms of the cylinder
and the sphere and the cone,” he advised
• Simplify particular objects into near
abstract forms fundamental to all reality
• He painted this
subject matter over
60 times
• To create the illusion
of depth, he placed
cool colours like blue,
which seem to
recede, at rear and
warm colours like red,
which seem to
advance, in front
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire,
1902-04, oil on canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm
(Philadelphia Museum of Art)
• He was as systematic
in his still lifes
• “Cezanne arranged the
fruit, contrasting the
tones one against
another, making
complementaries
vibrate, the greens
against the reds, the
yellows against the
blues, tilting, turning,
balancing the fruit as
he wanted it to be…”
Cezanne, Still Life with Apples and
Oranges, 1895-1900
• In his last ten years,
he was obsessed with
the theme of nude
bathers in an outdoor
setting
• Because of his
extreme slowness in
execution, his
shyness, and a fear of
his prudish neighbors’
suspicions, Cezanne
did not work from live
models
Cezanne, Large Bathers, 1905
Paul Gauguin
1848-1903
• Lived in Peru as a child
• Spent six years before the
mast as a young man
sailing to exotic ports
• For more than a decade he was
prosperous
• Parisian stock broker, a middle-class
father of five who took up Sunday painting
in 1873
• By 1883, Gauguin had
ditched his new family for his
new love- art
• He paraded the boulevards
with a monkey on his
shoulder and an outlandishly
dressed Javanese girl on his
arm
• Became a full-time painter at
35, he headed to Pont-aven
in Brittany
A Javanese Girl at Her
Toilette Painting
• He transformed colours and distored
shapes to convey his emotional response
to a scene
• Gauguin spent his last ten years in the
South Seas, where he felt free at last
• He lived in a native hut with a 13-year-old
Tahitian mistress
• Simplified figures, the firm outlines, rich
colours- especially lilac, pink and lemon
Paul Gauguin Tahitian Women (on the beach) 1891
Paul Gauguin Vision After the Sermon, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel 1888
Paul Gauguin Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892
Vincent Van Gogh
1853-1890
• Brief ten year career
• When van Gogh
discovered
Impressionism in Paris,
his work underwent a
drastic change
• He switched from dark to
bright colours and from
social realist themes to
light-drenched, outdoor
scenes
• Even though van Gogh adopted the
broken brushstroke and bright
complementary colours of the
impressionists, his art was always original
• He threw himself into paintings with a
therapeutic frenzy, producing 800
paintings and as many drawings in ten
years.
• He painted all day-without stopping to eatat white-hot speed and then continued
painting into the night with candles stuck
to his hat brim
• Rejected by several woman, when a Dutch
spinster finally accepted him, her parents
forbade the match and she poisoned
herself
• Prototype for the suffering genius
• After a fight with Gauguin, van Gogh
threatens him with a straight razor and
then later that night, slices off his left ear
lobe, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and
presented it to a prostitute
Vincent Van Gogh Sunflowers 1888
Van Gogh Room at Arles, 1889
Vincent Van Gogh Starry Night 1889
• Produced “Starry
Night” while he was
a patient in the
Saint-Remy asylum
• The stars and moon
explode with energy
• In van Gogh’s last
seventy days, he
painted seventy
canvases
Vincent Van Gogh Self-Portrait 1889
Vincent Van Gogh Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear 1889
• Did nearly 40 selfportraits in oil
• Done two weeks after
his disastrous quarrel
with Gauguin and selfmutilation
• Used very few colours
• Concentrated on agony
in the eyes
• He died in 1890 from a
self-inflicted gunshot
wound at the age of 37.
Expressionism
1905 - 1925
• Expressionism was opposed to academic
standards that had prevailed in Europe and
emphasized the artist's subjective emotion,
which overrides fidelity to the actual
appearance of things.
• The subjects of expressionist works were
frequently distorted, or otherwise altered.
• Landmarks of this movement were violent
colours and exaggerated lines that helped
contain intense emotional expression.
Application of formal elements is vivid,
jarring, violent, or dynamic.
• Expressionists were trying to pinpoint the
expression of inner experience rather than
solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict
not objective reality but the subjective
emotions and responses that objects and
events arouse in them.
• Many artists of this period assumed that the
chief function of art was to express their
intense feelings to the world.
Edvard
Munch (Moonk) 1863 - 1944
• Pronounced Moonk
• Norwegian painter
• Inspiration from the German expressionist
movement
• Most productive period was 1892-1908 in
Berlin
• He produced paintings, etchings,
lithographs, and woodcuts
• Munch was an outsider who called his
painting his “children”
• His mother and father died of
comsumption when he was young, leaving
him raised by a fanatically religious father
• Munch realized his psychological
problems were a catalyst for his art
• He specialized in portraying extreme
emotions like jealousy, sexual desire, and
loneliness
• Although Munch often went for months
without painting, once he began to work,
he painted in a frenzy
• Munch was a forerunner for
Expressionism, a style that portrayed
emotions through distorting form and
colour
Edvard Munch Self Portrait with a Wine Bottle, 1906
Edvard Munch The Scream 1893
• Shows the fear of
losing one’s mind
• Blood red clouds
• When Munch first
exhibited the painting,
it caused such an
uproar, the exhibit
was closed
Egon Schiele
1890 -1918
Egon Schiele Sitting Woman with Legs 1917
Egon Schiele Scornful Woman 1910
Egon Schiele Self Portrait 1912
Egon Schiele Loincloth 1914
Amadeo Modigliani
1884-1920
• Known for his paintings of reclining nudes
• Figures have long, thin necks, sloping
shoulders, tilted heads with small mouths,
long noses, and blank slits for eyes
• Although poor as a pauper, he dressed to
the hilt, with flying red scarf and loud
corduroy suit
• When the mood
struck, he was
wont to strip off
his clothes,
shouting to
astounded café
patrons, “Look at
me! Don’t I look
like a god?”
Amadeo Modigliani Nu couché de dos (Reclining Nude from the Back)1917
Amadeo Modigliani Nude Sdraiato
Twentieth
Century
Henri Matisse
1869-1954
• The idea that art does not represent, but
reconstructs, reality
• A minimalist before the term existed
• Matisse sought to eliminate nonessentials
and retain only a subject’s most
fundamental qualities
• Matisse lived in trying times (countless
strikes, uprisings, assassinations, and two
world wars) and yet his paintings ignored
all social or political controversy
• Matisse perfectly evoked sensual nudes in
line drawings with barely a dozen strokes
• Matisse believed paintings should not only
be beautiful but should bring pleasure to
the viewer
• Matisse came late to painting, having
trained to be a lawyer to please his father
• In his last years, Matisse was bedridden
• He fastened a charcoal
stick to a bamboo fishing
pole and was able to
sketch huge figures on
the ceiling above his bed
• His favourite activity was
to cut fanciful shapes out
of brightly coloured
paper to be glued onto
large-scale collages
Henri Matisse The Dance 1910
Henri Matisse Large Red Interior 1848
Fin