Post-Impressionism

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By the mid-1880s, a group of younger painters working in and around Paris had grown restless with Impressionism, the movement that had dominated advanced French painting for a decade. Impressionists such as Monet and Renoir had devoted themselves to capturing the fleeting, momentary appearance of light on a scene, painting rapidly outdoors to record an instant of visual sensation. The painters who came after them, chiefly Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat, kept Impressionism's bright, unmixed color and its freedom from academic subject matter, but rejected the idea that painting should stop at recording appearances. Each pursued instead a personal, often symbolic or structural vision of the world. The English critic Roger Fry gave the group its name only retrospectively, in 1910, when he organized a London exhibition presenting Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh and others as a coherent response to Impressionism, a label the artists themselves never used or agreed to. Cezanne, the eldest of the group, spent much of his career in Provence analyzing landscape and still life into underlying geometric structure, famously advising that nature be treated in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, an approach that fed directly into the development of Cubism a generation later. Van Gogh, working in Arles and Saint-Remy in the late 1880s, used thick, agitated brushwork and intense, often unnatural color to convey emotional and spiritual states rather than observed fact. Gauguin, dissatisfied with both Impressionism and Western civilization generally, developed a flat, boldly outlined style called Synthetism during stays in Brittany and later Tahiti. Georges Seurat took the opposite route, applying contemporary color science to build luminous compositions from thousands of small, distinct dots of pure pigment. These four approaches shared little beyond their historical moment and their departure from Impressionist naturalism, which is why historians still debate whether Post-Impressionism is a real style or simply a convenient label for painters working in France between roughly 1880 and 1905.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Rather than a single school, Post-Impressionism is best understood as four distinct artistic experiments that unfolded alongside one another in France during the 1880s and 1890s, each of which shaped a different strand of twentieth century modern art. Georges Seurat's Pointillism, sometimes called Divisionism or Neo-Impressionism, applied scientific theories of optical color mixing to painting, building large compositions such as A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte from countless small dots of unmixed color that the viewer's eye blends at a distance. Seurat's rigorous, almost mathematical method attracted followers, notably Paul Signac, and represented an attempt to put Impressionist color on a scientific footing. Vincent van Gogh took a nearly opposite approach, using thick impasto, swirling, directional brushwork and saturated, often symbolic color, as in The Starry Night and his late wheat field paintings, to externalize emotional and psychological states, a path that fed directly into twentieth century Expressionism. Paul Gauguin's Synthetism simplified form into flat planes bounded by strong outlines and used color for symbolic rather than descriptive effect, an approach he developed partly through contact with Breton folk art and later Polynesian culture, and which influenced the Nabis group and, eventually, Fauvism. Paul Cezanne pursued the most structural of the four paths, treating landscape, still life and the human figure as arrangements of underlying geometric volumes built through repeated, faceted brushstrokes, a method that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque would draw on directly when they developed Cubism after 1907. The four painters rarely worked together and left no shared theoretical statement; their grouping under a single name is the invention of the critic Roger Fry, writing a generation after the fact. That the label has nonetheless endured, and that each of the four approaches can be traced forward into a distinct branch of early modernism, is part of why Post-Impressionism remains a pivotal, if contested, chapter in the history of Western painting.