After Impressionism
• While it was ridiculed by
the Salon and dismissed
by the art establishment,
Impressionism was to
have a profound effect on
the work of young
European avant-garde
artists, many of whom
experimented with
Impressionist technique in
the 1870s and 1880s.
Impressionism’s focus on
the fleeting moment,
objective realism, colour
and light, and its
preoccupation with
modern life excited these
painters.
• However, by the mid-1880s some artists on the
fringe of the Impressionist movement were
becoming dissatisfied by the limitations of
Impressionist painting. Impressionism’s
concentration on the fleeting and the casual
resulted in work that was seen to be trivial;
without meaning or content. The tendency of
Impressionist paintings to focus on the leisure
pursuits of the bourgeoisie (wealthy middle
classes) sat uneasily with the Socialist ideologies
of many young painters. The hurried application of
paint in an attempt to capture light through colour,
often led to paintings which appeared sketchy or
formless.
• These limitations proved too
restrictive for a number of artists
who sought new means of
representing their ideas in paint.
These artists are often called the
Post-Impressionists, although this
was not a term that any of them
identified with.
Some of theses artists had exhibited with the
Impressionists and described themselves as
Neo- Impressionists or “The New Impressionists”
• Some are quite accurately considered
Symbolists, due to the way they used
colours and imagery to describe ideas and
feelings rather than merely representing
what was visible.
• Divisionism (later
to be called
Pointillism) was
adopted by a
number of NeoImpressionists,
most notably
Georges Seurat.
This technique was
influenced both by
an Impressionist
approach to colour,
and the theories of
contemporary
scientists on how
the eye processed
colour.
• In Pointillist paintings the
canvas is saturated with
tiny dots of pure colour
which are then “mixed” in
the eye of the viewer.
This was an incredibly slow and painstaking This painting lacks
approach and Seurat’s largest and most
much of the
impressive paintings such as Sunday
spontaneity and
Afternoon on the Island of the Grande
freedom of
Jatte (1884-6) were carefully composed
Impressionist painting,
using a large number of preliminary studies.
but has a sense of
composition,
Classicism and
monumentality that is
missing in
Impressionist
paintings. Unlike
Impressionist
paintings, this work is
rich in content, and
addresses social
issues such as class
inequality.
• Other PostImpressionist
approaches include
Cloisonnism
(where images were
reduced to flat
planes of, often
bright, colour
surrounded by dark
lines);
Emile Bernard, Breton
Harvesters
• and Intimism (where everyday scenes
were painted using, often patterned areas
of muted colour).
Eduard Vuillard, Sleep, 1891
• Both of these approaches owe much to
the popularity of Japanese prints in
Europe in the second half of the 19th
century.
• In Japanese prints images lacked many of the
conventions of European painting. The large areas of
flat colour, the emphasis on line and the lack of
naturalistic perspective forced many PostImpressionist painters to reconsider the possibilities of
oil painting. Some artists also developed an interest in
non-European Art and folk Art which was to influence
their work.
• While Impressionist Art can be
seen as a break from the art that
preceded it, many PostImpressionist artists were more
prepared to allow great European
Art of the past to influence their
painting.
• There are Artists working in the Post-Impressionist
period who stand alone from any school or group. The
most famous of these is the Dutchman, Vincent Van
Gogh who from 1880 (aged 27) to his suicide a
decade later devoted his life to Art with a religious
zeal, creating over 800 paintings.
The Sewer,
1888
• Van Gogh’s mature work is typified by rich surfaces of
thickly applied paint, with the patterns of the
brushstroke clearly emphasised and a use of bold
often unnaturalistic colours. His paintings are charged
with energy and an emotional intensity that creates a
stark contrast with the work of the Impressionists.
Starry
Night, 1889
• The
Impressionists’
Positivist approach
led to painting
which aimed to
directly capture in
paint whatever the
eye could see. In
contrast, Paul
Cézanne wrote
“The eye is not
enough, reflection
is needed”. For
Cézanne, painting
required meaning.
Boy with Skull, 1898
• Cézanne is famously
quoted as wanting to
“re-do Poussin again
from nature”. In his
landscapes, Cézanne
wanted to achieve the
sense of order and
composition present in
the classical
landscapes of old
Masters such as
Poussin but combine it
with the energy, colour
and observational
rigour of Impressionism
• The monumentality of Cézanne’s greatest
landscapes is achieved through an emphasis on
form. In a letter to the painter and critic Emile
Bernard, Cézanne advised to “treat nature by
the cylinder, the sphere, the cone”. Every form,
from the foliage of a pine tree to the famous rock
of Mont-Saint-Victoire, is treated with an
underlying weight and structure.
Cezanne’s use of very
deliberately placed,
strong, directional
brushstrokes,
underlines the sense
of structure and
timelessness his
landscapes.
•Cézanne’s interest in combining an almost sculptural modelling of
forms with creating a sense of harmonious balance in the overall
canvas is perhaps most visible in his many still-life paintings
• By
simultaneously
representing
different
viewpoints,
distorting
perspective,
flattening
images, and
prioritising the
overall design
of the picture
surface,
Cézanne
redefined the
rules of oil
painting.
Paul Gauguin
• French Artist, born
Paris, 1848 into a
wealthy family
• Spent early childhood
in Peru with mother’s
family
• While working
as a
Stockbroker,
Gauguin’s
interest in Art
developed
into a passion
which was to
see him leave
his job and his
family.
Inspired by the Impressionists, most influentially
Camille Pissaro, Gauguin’s paintings of the late 70s
and early 80s are very much Impressionist in style.
He regularly exhibited his work with the
Impressionists between 1877 and 1886.
• In 1886,
Gauguin
first started
working in
Brittany and
the style of
his painting
started to
change.
“Four Breton Women Dancing” shows an
increased flattening of forms and a lack of spatial
depth that shows the influence of Japanese prints.
The choice of peasant women as subject matter
also makes a stark contrast with the wealthy
boating parties of Monet and Renoir.
• Gauguin described his new
style as Synthetism, by
which he meant a style of art
in which the form (colour
planes and lines) is
synthesized with the major
idea or feeling of the subject.
Breaking away from the
Impressionist preoccupation
with the study of light effects
in nature, Gauguin sought to
develop a new decorative
style in art based on areas of
pure colour (e.g., without
shaded areas or modeling), a
few strong lines, and an
almost two-dimensional
arrangement of parts.
Yellow Christ 1889
• In Vision After the Sermon (1888) Gauguin attempts
to combine in one setting two levels of reality, the
everyday world and the dream world. The lower
figures are reduced to areas of flat patterns, without
modeling or
perspective.
•The large colour
areas are intense
and without
shadows. The
design is so strong
that the two
realities fuse into
one visual
experience.
• Gauguin shared
a close and
tempestuous
friendship with
Vincent Van
Gogh. They were
equally devoted
to a life absorbed
in painting, and
the time they
worked together
in Arles in the late
1880s was highly
productive for
both artists.
Portrait of Vincent
painting Sunflowers,
1888
Gauguin’s and Van
Gogh’s All-night café ,
Arles, 1888
• Gauguin boasted of the “great rustic and superstitious
simplicity” of the figures in his paintings. He said
“Civilization makes you sick”. Gauguin saw in peasant
and “primitive” people an honesty and a connection to
spirituality which lent itself perfectly to his particular
brand of Symbolist painting.
Proud of his
Peruvian heritage,
Gauguin saw
himself as a modern
day “primitive”; he
drew heavily on
non-western art for
influence; and
famously moved to
live and work in
Tahiti.
• The Tahitian society was
a strange mingling of
paganism and
Christianity and many of
Gauguin’s paintings
displayed the fusing of
cultures both in their
subject matter and in his
use of modern western
art ideas and ancient
imagery. For example,
his Ia Orana Maria
(1891) has the Madonna
and Child as Tahitians,
attended by Buddhist
angels derived from an
ancient Buddhist temple
frieze, so combining
Christian, Buddhist and
Oceanic religions
• In many ways,
Gauguin’s paintings
became less “primitive”
in the South Seas. His
colour palette remained
unnaturalistic but
became more
harmonious and
sophisticated. He
brought on his travels a
stock of photographs
and reproductions, from
ancient Egyptian and
Greek sculpture
alongside examples
from European painting,
and his later work
shows the breadth of
these references.
Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892) depicts Gauguin’s
teenage lover, struggling to sleep for fear of Tupapau (the
Spirit of the dead) lurking in the shadows. Gauguin’s version
of Manet’s Olympia, makes use of a number of symbolist
devices, from unnaturalistic colour to the presence of a
supernatural being.
•Gauguin wrote that
the purple of the
background was
used to create a
mood of “terror” and
the yellow cloth
was designed to be
“unexpected”. The
real and the
imagined coexist,
resulting in a highly
emotionally
charged image.
The End
Annah The
Javanese,
1894, oil on
canvas 116
x 81cm