Though a rather vague term, as it's difficult to date exactly when the
backlash against Impressionism took place, Post-Impressionism represents in many ways a return to
more formal concepts of painting - in composition, in attitudes to
subject and in drawing.
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), for one, associated only very
briefly with the Impressionists and spent most of his working life in
relative isolation, obsessed with rendering, as objectively as
possible, the essence of form. He saw objects as basic shapes -
cylinders, cones, etc - and tried to give the painting a unity of
texture that would force the spectator to view it not so much as
representation of the world but rather as an entity in its own right,
as an object as real and dense as the objects surrounding it. It was
this striving for pictorial unity that led him to cover the entire
surface of the picture with small, equal brush strokes which made no
distinction between the textures of a tree, a house or the sky.
The detached, unemotional way in which Cézanne painted
was not unlike that of the seventeenth-century artist Poussin, and he
found a contemporary parallel in the work of Georges Seurat (1859-91). Seurat was fascinated by current
theories of light and colour, and he attempted to apply them in a
systematic way, creating different shades and tones by placing tiny
spots of pure colour side by side, which the eye could in turn fuse
together to see the colours mixed out of their various components. This
pointillist
technique also had the effect of giving monumentality to everyday scenes of contemporary life.
While Cézanne, Seurat and, for that matter, the Impressionists, sought
to represent the outside world objectively, several other artists - the
Symbolists
- were seeking a different kind of truth, through the subjective experience of fantasy and dreams.
Gustave Moreau
(1840-98) represented, in complex paintings, the intricate worlds of
the romantic fairy tale, his visions expressed in a wealth of
naturalistic details. The style of Puvis de Chavannes
(1824-98) was more restrained and more obviously concerned with design and the decorative. And a third artist,
Odilon Redon
(1840-1916), produced some weird and visionary graphic work that
especially intrigued Symbolist writers; his less frequent works in
colour belong to the later part of his life.
The subjectivity of the Symbolists was of great importance to the art of
Paul Gauguin
(1848-1903). He started life as a stockbroker who collected
Impressionist paintings, a Sunday artist who gave up his job in 1883 to
dedicate himself to painting.
During his stay in Pont-Aven in Brittany, Gauguin worked with a number of artists who called themselves the
Nabis
, among them
Paul Serusier
and
Émile Bernard
. He began exploring ways of expressing concepts and emotions by means
of large areas of colour and powerful forms, and developed a unique
style that was heavily indebted to his knowledge of Japanese prints and
of the tapestries and stained glass of medieval art. His search for the
primitive expression of primitive emotions took him eventually to the
South Sea islands and Tahiti, where he found some of his most inspiring
subjects and painted some of his best-known canvases.
A similar derivation from Symbolist art and a wish to
exteriorize emotions and ideas by means of strong colours, lines and
shapes underlies the work of Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90), a Dutch painter who came to
live in France. Like Gauguin, with whom he had an admiring but stormy
friendship, Van Gogh started painting relatively late in life,
lightening his palette in Paris under the influence of the
Impressionists, and then heading south to Arles where, struck by the
harshness of the Mediterranean light, he turned out such frantic
expressionistic pieces as The Reaper
and
Wheatfield with Crows .
In all his later pictures the paint is thickly laid on in increasingly
abstract patterns that follow the shapes and tortuous paths of his deep
inner melancholy.
Both Gauguin and Van Gogh saw objects and colours as means of representing ideas and subjective feelings.
Édouard Vuillard
(1868-1940) and
Pierre Bonnard
(1867-1947) combined this with Cézanne's insistence on unifying the
surface and texture of the picture. The result was, in both cases,
paintings of often intimate scenes in which figures and objects are
blended together in a series of complicated patterns. In some of
Vuillard's works, people dressed in checked material, for example,
merge into the flowered wallpaper behind them, and in the paintings of
Bonnard, the glowing design of the canvas itself is as important as
what it's trying to represent.
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