Jemima Keren R.

Flaminiano
NS1-03
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 against
Impressionism 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 continued
to use in his mature work the bright Impressionist palette.

But each came also to reject Impressionism’s emphasis on the spontaneous

recording 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 that
would prove highly influential for the development of Modern painting in the early
20th century.
Paul Cezanne
No artist had a greater impact on the next generation of Modern painters than
Cezanne, 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 his
art.

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 the
circle 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 larger
visual logic of the painting as a work of art, characterized by Cezanne as
“something other than reality”-not a direct representation of nature but “a
construction after nature.”

His conception of the canvas as a separate realm from reality, requiring its own
rules 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 Impressionist
discoveries 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 to
classical aesthetics, which he combined with a rigorous study of optics and color
theory, especially the “law of the simultaneous contrast of colors,” first formulated
by 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 own
color onto their neighbors but also create in them the effect of their
complementary color.

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

It is more likely that he was satirizing the Parisian middle class, since like Pisarro
he was a devotee of anarchist beliefs and made cartoons for anarchist magazines at
that 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 painter
Vincent Van Gogh, who took divisionism and Impressionism and made of them a
highly 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 1886
to 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 state
in paintings that contributed significantly to the emergence of the Expressionistic
tradition, in which the intensity of an artist’s feelings overrides fidelity to the actual
appearance of things.

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

The stress and burden of these attacks led him into a mental asylum and eventually
to 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, Van
Gogh was perhaps following the advice of his friend Gauguin, who had once
counselled another colleague, “Don’t paint from nature too much. Art is
abstraction. Derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and
think more of the creation that will result.”

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

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

Gauguin’s mature style was inspired by such non-academic sources as medieval

stained 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 a
subject, 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 largely
as volumes existing in space, as materials to be manipulated for a variety of surface
effects.

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 he
married the last year of his life.

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

Rodin's interests continued to broaden. Between 1879 and 1882 he worked at

ceramics, and between 1881 and 1886 he produced a number of engravings. By
1880 his fame had become international, and that year the minister of fine arts
commissioned him to design a doorway for the proposed Museum of Decorative
Arts.
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.