Jemima Keren R. FlaminianoNS1-03

BFA Adv.

Post-Impressionism

The English critic Roger Fry (Roger Fry 1866-1934, English art critic and painter)coined the term “Post-Impressionism” in 1910 to identify a broad reaction againstImpressionism in avant-grade painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Art historians recognize Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Georges Seurat (1859-1891),Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), and Paul Gaugin (1848-1903) as the principal Post-Impressionist artists.

Each of these painters moved through an impressionist phase, and each continuedto use in his mature work the bright Impressionist palette.

But each came also to reject Impressionism’s emphasis on the spontaneousrecording of light and color.

Some sought to create art with a greater degree of formal order and structure;others moved further from Impressionism and developed more abstract styles thatwould prove highly influential for the development of Modern painting in the early20th century.

Paul Cezanne

No artist had a greater impact on the next generation of Modern painters thanCezanne, who enjoyed little professional success until the last few years of his life,when younger artist and critics began to recognize the innovative qualities of hisart.

The son of a prosperous banker in the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence,Cezanne studied art first in Aix and then in Paris, where he participated in thecircle of Realist artist around Manet.

Cezanne now dedicated himself to the objective transcription of what he called his“sensations” of nature.

All of these physical improbabilities are designed, however, to serve the largervisual logic of the painting as a work of art, characterized by Cezanne as“something other than reality”-not a direct representation of nature but “aconstruction after nature.”

His conception of the canvas as a separate realm from reality, requiring its ownrules of composition, is his chief legacy to Modern art.

Mont Sainte-Victoire (1885-1887)

Still Life With Basket of Apples (1890-1894)

The Large Bathers (1906)

Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat was another artist who, like Cezanne, adapted Impressionistdiscoveries to the creation of an art of greater structure and monumentality.

Born in Paris and trained at the E’cole des Beaux-Arts, Seurat became devoted toclassical aesthetics, which he combined with a rigorous study of optics and colortheory, especially the “law of the simultaneous contrast of colors,” first formulatedby Michel-Eug’ene Chevreul in the 1820s.

The Impressionists knew of Chevreul’s law but had not applied it systematically.

Chevreul’s law holds that adjacent objects not only cast reflections of their owncolor onto their neighbors but also create in them the effect of theircomplementary color.

By painting it the way he did, Seurat may have intended to show how tranquil itshould be.

It is more likely that he was satirizing the Parisian middle class, since like Pisarrohe was a devotee of anarchist beliefs and made cartoons for anarchist magazines atthat time.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886)

Vincent Van Gogh

Among the many artist to experiment with divisionism was the Dutch painterVincent Van Gogh, who took divisionism and Impressionism and made of them ahighly expressive personal style.

The oldest son of a protestant minister, Van Gogh worked as an art dealer, teacher,and evangelist before deciding in 1880 to become an artist.

After brief periods of study in Brussels, The Hague and Antwerp, he moved in 1886to Paris, where he discovered the work of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist.

In a steady and prolific output over 10 years, he communicated his emotional statein paintings that contributed significantly to the emergence of the Expressionistictradition, in which the intensity of an artist’s feelings overrides fidelity to the actualappearance of things.

Vincent Van Gogh enjoyed the bold design and hand crafted quality of Japaneseprints.

The stress and burden of these attacks led him into a mental asylum and eventuallyto his suicide in July 1890.

The Starry Night (1889)

Plum Orchard, Kameido (1857)

Japonaiserie, Flowering Plum Tree (1887)

Paul Gauguin

In painting from his imagination rather than from nature in The Starry Night, VanGogh was perhaps following the advice of his friend Gauguin, who had oncecounselled another colleague, “Don’t paint from nature too much. Art isabstraction. Derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, andthink more of the creation that will result.”

Born in Paris to a Peruvian mother and a radical French journalist father, Gauguinloved in Peru from infancy until the age of seven; this experience, together with hisservice in the Merchant Marine in his youth, may have awakened in him thewanderlust that marked his artistic life.

In 1883, Gauguin lost his job during a stock market crash; three years later heabandoned his wife and 5 children to pursue a full-time painting career.

Gauguin’s mature style was inspired by such non-academic sources as medievalstained glass, folk art, and Japanese prints and it features simplified drawing,flattened space, and anti-naturalistic color.

Gauguin’s chief ground-breaking innovation was his use of color not to describe asubject, but to express hi feelings.

Mahana No Atua-Day of the God (1894)

Auguste Rodin

The French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) conceived of his sculpture largelyas volumes existing in space, as materials to be manipulated for a variety of surfaceeffects.

Thus he anticipated the aims of many 20th-century sculptors.

Auguste Rodin, the son of a police inspector, was born in Paris on Nov. 12, 1840.

In 1864 Rodin began to live with the young seamstress Rose Beuret, whom hemarried the last year of his life.

In 1875 Rodin went to Italy, where he was deeply inspired by the work ofDonatello and of Michelangelo, whose sculpture he characterized as being markedby both "violence and constraint."

Rodin's interests continued to broaden. Between 1879 and 1882 he worked atceramics, and between 1881 and 1886 he produced a number of engravings. By1880 his fame had become international, and that year the minister of fine artscommissioned him to design a doorway for the proposed Museum of DecorativeArts.

The Thinker(1888)

The Kiss

(1886)

Based from my observation only…

Post-Impressionism was the continuation of Impressionism.

To conclude this:

It is not the matter of rejection but it is the matter how will you stand up and achieve

it. It is the reality of life.