KEY ARTISTS:
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KEY MEANINGS:
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KEY CONTEXTS:
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Social |
Philosophical |
The impact of modernisation continued.
Sharing the Impressionist context of the Industrial Revolution shaping the modern lifestyle and travel, Post-Impressionists responded to the middle-class oriented world in their own individual ways. Many developed a sense of nostalgia for nature, wanting a break from the effects of urbanisation and modernisation. Photography and the invention of new pigments continued to play an important role for the artists. |
While the bourgeoisies thrived in the newly refreshed city of Paris, Post-Impressionist artists started to see the dehumanising effects of modernisation. Many of them would move out of the city to pursue their own artistic interests, wanting to be near nature. The context of industrialisation drove Van Gogh and Gauguin to focus on human emotions and spirituality.
The French colonisation was established in parts of Polynesia which allowed Gauguin, who was in search of a primitive paradise, to eventually settle in Tahiti. Japonism also continued to influence the Post-Impressionists. |
Post-Impressionists developed their own individual philosophies on art and modern life.
Cezanne and Seurat believed that art should demonstrate its own progress inspired by the modern developments - their systematic and scientific approach to art-making is reflective of this philosophy. Gauguin and Van Gogh developed a deeply personal philosophy towards the effects of modern civilisation - they focused on emotions and aspects of primitivism to take us back to nature to examine the problem of human spirituality in the modern age. |
Post-Impressionism In Short |
Dying Years of Impressionism |
Tour of Impressionism and Post Impressionism at the Scottish National Gallery |
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What did Van Gogh learn from Japanese prints?
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The Two Branches of Post-Impressionism
Art of Order (the Classicists)The artists who rejected the lack of form and structure in Impressionism and took on a more ordered and systematic approach to rendering their subjects: Cezanne & Seurat
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Art of Feeling (the Romantics)The artists who rejected the mere capturing of optical effects in Impressionism and wanted to focus on expressing their subjective feelings about a subject: Gauguin & Van Gogh
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THE FATHER OF MODERN ARTPaul Cezanne (1839-1906)
Cezanne began working with the Impressionist Pissarro in 1872 and exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition. Previously, he had been working in very dark colours, but his palette brightened considerably under Pissarro’s influence. He began to paint his landscapes en plein air under the Impressionist influence and produced highly textured surfaces with broken brushstrokes.
However, he was already showing more interest in expressing the structure and solidity of objects than fleeting effects of light. He described Impressionist paintings like cotton wool and moved away from Impressionism in 1877. He began to flatten his surface, using his brush to create a kind of hatching, often called ‘constructive’. Strokes were separate, parallel and diagonal, creating a sense of solidity. Instead of producing quick sketches of fleeting light, he took a long time to paint his subjects. He wanted to recreate an ordered nature like Poussin in the 17th century.
“I wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums.” – Paul Cezanne www.theartstory.org/artist-cezanne-paul.htm |
Seeing Nature through Multiple Viewpoints
Paul Cézanne, Mt Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, 1887
Georges Braque, Houses at L'Estaque, 1908
Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Basket of Apples, 1890-94
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None other than Pablo Picasso called Paul Cézanne “the father of us all.” Why? In many respects, Cézanne was the first Western artist to explore the reduction of Western painting and in doing so led the way towards what we know today as abstract painting.
Cézanne believed the world could be treated through a more formal, abstract system of three forms: the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. One can see what are referred to as Cézanne’s proto-abstract ideas in his series of works focusing on Mont St. Victoire. One of the first things to notice, like in Manet’s work, the emphasis on flatness. The landscape, for one, has been reduced to flat planes, squares and rectangles in many areas. The ground either seems to be tan and flat or a green diagonal mound, but nothing more complicated. Also look at the buildings pictured. Cézanne has taken any particularly unique details and reduced them into flattened planes so that the houses seem like small cubes. (And here in many respects you can see the root of Cubism. Compare certain passages of this painting with Georges Braque’s Houses at L’Estaque, the first work to be called cubist.) Cézanne has also taken what is a very rocky mountain and smoothed out any irregularities. Try squinting your eyes and most of the mountain in view could almost be a uniformly flat rock face—something, again, it is not in real life. Cézanne also reduces the landscape with his brushstrokes. Only a few strokes indicate a group of trees or the side wall of a building. Also, like Manet, Cézanne seems to be reinforcing the fact that this image is on a flat plane. Look, for example, at the tree in the foreground of the image, how it is outlined in a lighter colour and higher up on the trunk the tree seems to blend in with the background sky. Also look at the lower section of leaves and how the division between them and the mountain is muddied and this particular area of the painting seems to be vibrating. It would have been easy for Cézanne to make a clear division here, to present the tree as being in front of the mountain. However he chose not to, and like Manet, chose to dispute the traditional assumptions of what a painting should do, and seek to express something that was not just dependent on realism but which sought something different through a reduction of forms and a fusion of the elements in a scene. What would also become very influential on later painters—especially the Cubists—was Cézanne’s incorporation of different points of view of objects in one painting. In many ways this was an attempt to make painting on a flat surface more true to the experience of vision, particularly the reality that vision was a series of successive images and that life and experience was about constantly shifting perspective. (One can see how Cézanne’s interest parallel contemporary experiments with stop-motion photography and early film by Muybridge.) Look, for example, at his Still Life with Basket of Apples (1890-94). The longer you look at this work, the more it becomes subtly perplexing because it is a compilation of different views of objects in one work. Like the pastiche of genre scenes in Manet, your mind tries to put the scene together but the way Cézanne has painted it, forces work against you. The table top on which everything rests is seen from two different angles, so the edge on the left hand side doesn’t meet up with the right side edge after the tablecloth. Also, if you look at each apple, they each seem to be painted individually (some in very odd shapes and angles) to the extent that it is difficult to integrate them all into one point of view. As well, the basket seems to be painted from two different angles and the wine jug looks as if it is tipping over in the background. Cézanne was, in many respects, more interested in relating objects to each other than making sure the painting made perspectival sense. www.artsy.net/article/matthew-the-father-of-us-all |
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THE COLOUR SCIENTISTGeorges Seurat (1859-1891) Georges Seurat is chiefly remembered as the pioneer of the Neo-Impressionist technique commonly known as Divisionism, or Pointillism, an approach associated with a softly flickering surface of small dots or strokes of colour.
Initially, he believed that great modern art would show contemporary life in ways similar to classical art, except that it would use technologically informed techniques. His success quickly propelled him to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde. His triumph was short-lived, as after barely a decade of mature work he died at the age of only 31. But his innovations would be highly influential, shaping the work of artists as diverse as Vincent Van Gogh and the Italian Futurists, while pictures like Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884) have since become widely popular icons. • Seurat was inspired by a desire to abandon Impressionism's preoccupation with the fleeting moment, and instead to render what he regarded as the essential and unchanging in life. Nevertheless, he borrowed many of his approaches from Impressionism, from his love of modern subject matter and scenes of urban leisure, to his desire to avoid depicting only the 'local', or apparent, colour of depicted objects, and instead to try to capture ALL the colours that interacted to produce their appearance. • Seurat was fascinated by a range of scientific ideas about colour, form and expression. He believed that lines tending in certain directions, and colours of a particular warmth or coolness, could have particular expressive effects. He also pursued the discovery that contrasting or complementary colours can optically mix to yield far more vivid tones that can be achieved by mixing paint alone. The technique he developed is better known as Divisionism (after the method of separating local colour into separate dots), or Pointillism (after the tiny strokes of paint that were crucial to achieve the flickering effects of his surfaces). • Although radical in his techniques, Seurat's initial instincts were conservative and classical when it came to style. He saw himself in the tradition of great Salon painters, and thought of the figures in his major pictures almost as if they were figures in monumental classical reliefs, though the subject matter - the different urban leisure pursuits of the bourgeois and the working class - was fully modern, and typically Impressionist. • In Seurat's later work he left behind the calm, stately classicism of early pictures like Bathers at Asnières, and pioneered a more dynamic and stylized approach that was influenced by sources such as caricatures and popular posters. These brought a powerful new expressiveness to his work, and, much later, led him to be acclaimed by the Surrealists as an eccentric and a maverick. "Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science." – Seurat www.theartstory.org/artist-seurat-georges.htm |
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THE MAN IN SEARCH OF A PARADISEPaul Gauguin (1848-1903) Gauguin was initially influenced by the Impressionists and took part in their exhibitions from 1879 to 1886. However, he was not interested in just recording appearances, particularly those of modern life and the bourgeoisie. Along with the Symbolist writers of the time, who had published their manifesto in 1886 and saw him as one of their own, he wanted to express a deeper reality. He needed to escape Paris. His colour became flatter and less textural as it became more symbolic. Gauguin was also a self-taught painter. Like Van Gogh, he had experimented with Seurat’s dotted technique in Paris in 1886 so he was already something of a connoisseur of the most advanced attitudes towards colour.
Gauguin went to Brittany in the South of France where he thought myths and legends still thrived. Here he became involved with a group of artists who called themselves Synthetists. He was particularly interested in the Symbolist movement’s search for universal signs and symbols, and was anti-progress and anti-naturalist. He visited Martinique in the Caribbean in 1887, becoming obsessed with tropical colours. He began experimenting with Cloisonnism – black outlines – from Japanese prints and medieval stained glass and cloisonné enamelling. He famously worked one summer in an intensely colourful style alongside Vincent Van Gogh in the south of France, before turning his back entirely on Western society. He had already abandoned a former life as a stockbroker by the time he began traveling regularly to the south Pacific in the early 1890s, where he developed a new style that married everyday observation with mystical symbolism, a style strongly influenced by the popular, so-called "primitive" arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia. Gauguin's rejection of his European family, society, and the Paris art world for a life apart, in the land of the "Other," has come to serve as a Romantic example of the artist-as-wandering-mystic. • After mastering Impressionist methods for depicting the optical experience of nature, Gauguin studied religious communities in rural Brittany and various landscapes in the Caribbean, while also educating himself in the latest French ideas on the subject of painting and colour theory (the latter much influenced by recent scientific study into the various, unstable processes of visual perception). This background contributed to Gauguin's gradual development of a new kind of "synthetic" painting, one that functions as a symbolic, rather than a merely documentary, or mirror-like, reflection of reality. • Seeking the kind of direct relationship to the natural world that he witnessed in various communities of French Polynesia and other non-western cultures, Gauguin treated his painting as a philosophical meditation on the ultimate meaning of human existence, as well as the possibility of religious fulfilment and answers on how to live closer to nature. • Gauguin was one of the key participants during the last decades of the 19th century in a European cultural movement that has since come to be referred to as Primitivism. The term denotes the Western fascination for less industrially-developed cultures, and the romantic notion that non-Western people might be more genuinely spiritual, or closer in touch with elemental forces of the cosmos, than their comparatively "artificial" European and American counterparts. • Once he had virtually abandoned his wife, his four children, and the entire art world of Europe, Gauguin's name and work became synonymous, as they remain to this day, with the idea of ultimate artistic freedom, or the complete liberation of the creative individual from one's original cultural moorings. "Don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction. Study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our divine master." "Civilization is what makes you sick." “I shut my eyes in order to see.” – Paul Gauguin www.theartstory.org/artist-gauguin-paul.htm |
Click on the image to watch the episode on Van Gogh.
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WHAT IT MEANS TO FEEL DEEPLYVincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) Vincent Van Gogh shared with the Impressionists an admiration for Japanese prints but it was this which led him away from Impressionism to develop a style of his own with flat colour areas and strong outline. In 1888 he wrote: “I should not be surprised if the Impressionists soon find fault with my way of working, for it has been fertilized by the ideas of Delacroix rather than by theirs. Because, instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly.”
Van Gogh was a largely self-taught artist who went on to change the face of Post-Impressionism forever. A troubled yet highly-skilled painter, Van Gogh’s work was an outlet for his emotion, particularly when battling depression. Upon moving to Paris, van Gogh was hugely inspired by the works of the Impressionists and Post-impressionists and he adopted their bright palette and developed a unique style which continues to be emulated by artists to this day. Working at an often furious pace van Gogh produced more than 2,000 works of art, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches in his 10-year career. However, he sold only one painting during his lifetime and did not become successful until after his death. His expressive and emotive use of colour and distinct brushwork became hugely popular and massively influenced Expressionism, Fauvism and early abstraction as well as various other aspects of 20th-century art. Today, van Gogh is generally regarded as the greatest Dutch painter since Rembrandt. • Van Gogh's dedication to articulating the inner spirituality of man and nature led to a fusion of style and content that resulted in dramatic, imaginative, rhythmic, and emotional canvases that convey far more than the mere appearance of the subject. • Although the source of much upset during his life, Van Gogh's mental instability provided the frenzied source for the emotional renderings of his surroundings and imbued each image with a deeper psychological reflection and resonance. • Van Gogh's unstable personal temperament became synonymous with the Romantic image of the tortured artist. His self-destructive talent was echoed in the lives of many artists in the twentieth century. • Van Gogh used an impulsive, gestural application of paint and symbolic colours to express subjective emotions. These methods and practice came to define many subsequent modern movements from Fauvism to Abstract Expressionism. "It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures." "I know for sure that I have an instinct for colour, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones." "Real painters do not paint things as they are... they paint them as they themselves feel them to be." – Vincent Van Gogh www.artble.com/artists/vincent_van_gogh http://www.theartstory.org/artist-van-gogh-vincent.htm |