POST IMPRESSIONISM Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism while rejecting its limitations. They continued using: vivid colors, often thick application of paint real-life subject matter, More Inclined To: emphasize geometric forms, distort form for expressive effect, unnatural or arbitrary colour.

Georges SeuratGeorges Seurat  - sometimes called a “Neo-Impressionist”  - was interested in optical and color theories.  Seurat believed that by placing tiny dabs of pure colors adjacent to one another, the eye "mixed" the colors visually.  Simplified human forms to get the “feeling” of the summer bathers Bathing at Asnières; x 118 1/2 in

Georges Seurat  men, women and children enjoying the sun on the island in the Seine (river in Paris)  Many figures have bourgeois propriety though the lady may show eccentricities of `high life' by having a pet monkey on a lead.  It took Seurat two years to complete this 10- foot-wide painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, /4 x 121 1/4 in. (about 7’ x 10’) Pointillism Pointillism ( this optical painting with dots) was first used by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists, and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation

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Vincent Van GoghVincent Van Gogh  Van Gogh was very troubled and did not begin his career as a painter early in life: banking, preaching etc.  In 1880 he decided art would be how he gave back to humanity.  Van Gogh's early pictures are coarsely rendered images of Dutch peasant life  `I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamp- light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food'. The Potato Eaters 1885

Van Gogh  His new mission, painting, he attacks with a single-minded frenzy, and although he often suffered from extreme poverty and undernourishment he creates about 800 paintings and a similar number of drawings  Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them for this purpose.  “ I have tried to express with red and green the terrible passions of human nature.' The Night Café 1888;

Vincent Van Gogh  After his voluntary commitment to an asylum in 1889, he painted several pictures with agitated lines, brilliant colors, and distorted perspective  His mental illness is well known.  He painted furiously in the last 70 days of his life making 70 paintings  He committed suicide shooting himself in the chest in a wheat field and dying 2 days after. Starry, Starry Night x 36 1/4"

He sold only one painting during his lifetime. In 1990 this painting sold for 82.5 million dollars!