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.
