Monet, Sailboats at Argenteuil, 1874 Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881 IMPRESSIONISM
POST-IMPRESSIONISM Term coined in 1910 for art that comes “after” Impressionism. Dissatisfied with merely transcribing or reproducing nature, Post- Impressionists sought to translate or interpret it, modifying their observations of nature by their personal feelings about it. Thus there is a shift from objectivity, where the impulse comes from the object, to subjectivity, where the impulse comes from the subject—that is, from the artist. Note Gauguin’s revealing statement that “I shut my eyes in order to see.”
POST-IMPRESSIONISM To simplify matters, it can be said that Post-Impressionism has two wings: a “left wing,” comprising artists like Gauguin and Van Gogh, who found Impressionism unsatisfactory because it lacked emotion, imagination, and spirituality; and a “right wing,” including Seurat and Cézanne, who found Impressionism unsatisfactory because it seemed to lack a sense of order, permanence, discipline, and timelessness.
Paul Gauguin, The Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888 Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881 IMPRESSIONISMPOST-IMPRESSIONISM
Gauguin, 1888 Degas, At the Theater, 1881 IMPRESSIONISMPOST-IMPRESSIONISM
Gauguin, 1888 Map of France, including Brittany
In 1891 Gauguin went to live in Tahiti, in order (as he put it) “to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain... and to do so with nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.” Gauguin, The Day of the God, 1894 (painted on the Polynesian island of Tahiti, in the South Pacific)
Gauguin, The Day of the God, 1894
Self-Portrait, 1889 Vincent Van Gogh ( )
About this crude but famous painting of a family of Belgian coal miners, Van Gogh wrote: “I have tried to emphasize that these people, eating their potatoes by lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor, and how they have honestly earned their food.” Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885
Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885 Daumier, Third-Class Carriage,
The Potato Eaters Detail: note the thick impasto The color scheme of the painting has been described by a recent critic as “manure brown,” or “the brown of dusty spuds”!
Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889
Starry Night, 1889 Self-Portrait, 1889
Starry Night Detail
Van Gogh Monet, detail of Sailboats at Argenteuil
Detail of a painting by SeuratVan Gogh, detail of Starry Night (Seurat’s style goes by several different names: Neo-Impressionism, Divisionism, and—most popularly—Pointillism.)
Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,
Seurat, Grande Jatte, Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881
Grande Jatte Detail
Grande Jatte Detail
Grande Jatte Detail: trombone player and soldiers
Grande Jatte Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibémus Quarry, c Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (different example), c. 1900
Photograph of Mont Saint-Victoire Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
Detail Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibémus Quarry Detail
Detail rotated 90º
Cézanne, The Bathers, 1906 (and detail)