Post Impressionism

• Between 1906 and 1910 there were 2 exhibitions in London, "Manet and the Post-Impressionists."

• The Post-Impressionists were all working in their own individual style. 

• Post Impressionism is impossible to define in terms of style. It covers the last 20 years of the 19th century. The second industrial revolution resulted in a huge economic boom and many technological advancements were made. Although the Post-Impressionist artists were all different, they still exhibited together. 

• The late 19th century saw immense wealth across Europe, due to the expansion of imperialism. (The Age of Imperialism 1770-1915). Hitherto unprecedented - 50 years of peace. 

• The artists reacted in completely different ways; the one common denominator was that all of the artists strived toward abstract art. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1864-1901

• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec depicted the demi-monde/bohemian lives. He was the son of two aristocrats, the son of the Count of Toulouse. His mother and father were cousins, Henri had a genetic disease and never recovered. He was sent to Paris as an outcast from his family. He developed a unique technique and was interested in depicting the lower classes, admired the work of Degas. He was a great painter, with exceptional skill. He decided to take a more abstract path, diluting oil paints with turps. Being an outcast, he was an attraction for nightclubs, circuses and prostitution. This also meant that he could sympathise with the other outcasts of the bourgeois. He exhibited his work in the circuses. Made his fortune through his posters - the first artist to create posters, completely revolutionised them, and the poster expands with the second revolution. Consciously because of his condition, he completely avoided the establishment. Courbet, Manet, Monet etc. all refused the Salon, but they all flirted with the Salon, and understood that the Salon was the place to display their art. Lautrec places himself, the real bohemian artist, completely outside the establishment. 

Moulin Rouge, Paris

Moulin Rouge, Paris

• Moulin Rouge, the one of the most famous cafe/nightclub of the time. People of all classes would gather and mingle at these huge nightclubs, there were dancing and acting performances, and lots of drinking. These nightclubs were the first models for the mass entertainment of the 20th century. This is where Lautrec based his activity. 

Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1889, Art Institute of Chicago, USA

• His technique of diluting oils with turps gave the effect of looking almost translucent in some areas. He didn't care about that the critics said about him. Most of his works have an unfinished air about them, his primary concern was creating a sense of immediacy. He died at the age of 36 because of alcoholism. Absinth was always depicted as green, and gave the the user have green tinted hallucinations. Absinth was banned in France in 1908. Lautrec's paintings were very distorted, although he wasn't an expressionist, there is an element of that here, not a realistic image of nature. The nightlife of Paris seen through the eyes of an alcoholic. 

Banning of Absinth

Toulouse-Lautrec, Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, 1889, Art Institute of Chicago, USA

Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

• It is interesting to compare Lautrec's Ball at the Moulin de Galette and Renoir's Le Moulin de la Galette. Lautrec's has strong contour lines, it's very graphic, uses a lot of black (uncharacteristic of Impressionists), but in the sense of immediacy it is very Impressionistic. His paintings look like drawings, rather than oil paintings, transposing one medium into another. The brushstroke is very evident, looks as though it's charcoal. 

• Many of his paintings were displayed that the Galette and the Moulin Rouge, but were rarely sold. 

Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue arriving at the Moulin Rouge, 1892, MoMa, New York

• His paintings showed compositional logic. He too was obsessed with Japanese prints, this is clear in his use of zones of colours, his playful relationship between foreground and background. Completely abstract composition. 

Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge 1891, Lithographic Poster

• Lautrec was the inventor of the modern poster, using text and the subject to make an impact. He exploited the conventions of Japanese printmaking. Lithography is a print made through the super imposition of different stones. The Limestone absorbs the colour and transfers it. It is limited to just three or four colours, uses contour lines. Forms and lettering are used together. 

Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Circus Fernando, 1888, Art Institute of Chicago, USA

• This painting is very caricatural, he uses the distorting techniques of caricatures. 

Toulouse-Lautrec, Au Salon de la rue des Moulins, 1894, Musée d'Orsay

Toulouse-Lautrec, La Toilette, 1889, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Toulouse-Lautrec, In Bed, 1893

• Post-Impressionism is of course a later label, coined by Roger Fry who organised many exhibitions for the Post-Impressionists. Post-Impressionism was not a movement at all, but an incredible advancement of individual experimentation. All of the Post-Impressionists prized abstraction over representation. It was a movement toward abstraction, focused on the individual values of the artists. The representation of nature becomes more and more subjective. 

"The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years"

Charles Péguy, 1913

• This Charles Péguy quote is of course an exaggeration but pretty true. The process of drastic change that started with the industrial revolution cuts the relationship with nature. If the industrial revolution created cuts with nature, you could say that art followed the same path as art also cuts its ties with nature. 

George Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, 1884, National Gallery, London
(Exhibited at the 1st exhibition of the Artistes Indépendants, 1884)

• George Seurat was a Parisian and died at the age of 31. He created a few paintings but his method was very laborious. He is a paradox, a middle class man who embraced socialism. He wanted to create something that was scientifically solid, and wanted to retransform the art of the Impressionists into something that was as meaningful as Classical art. The setting is very similar to that of the Impressionists, for example the background is reminiscent of the Chimneys in Monet's Asnieres paintings. 

• Monet's technique was the flickering effect of light, using rapidity to create spontaneous moment. Seurat's technique was based on the optical studies of an American scientist, Ogden Rood - who's theory was subsequently found to be wrong. Very mosaic-like. The method he invented was called Divisionism/Pointillisme/Neo-Impressionism.

George Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884, Art Institute of Chicago, USA

Seurat applying Odgen Rood's colour theory: Colours are more intense when mixed optically by the eye rather than on the palette. 

• A Sunday Afternoon on the island of la Grande Jatte displays solid figures. He wanted to recreate a sort of simplicity and rigidity of forms as early Greek art. "I want to make the moderns file past like figures on Phidias' Pan-Athenaic Frieze on the Parthenon, in their essential form." He applied some of Vitruvious' principles, frontal, three-quarter and profile figures. Most of his paintings depicted a combination of all classes, representing both the working class and bourgeoisie at leisure. These fascinating paintings were composed purely of colour, no lines. 

• These images were carefully constructed in the studio, never en plein air due to their laborious nature. The subjects are reduced to their essential forms, giving them a primitive flavour. They are also carefully constructed with correct perspective. Seurat is a strange, hybrid artist, he embraces the colours and pushes it to the extremes, but still uses principles from academic art.

Piero della Francesca, Meeting of Salomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1452-66, Arezzo

• Seurat was also influenced by artists such as Piero della Francesco, in adopting mathematically constructed (mostly profile) figures. 

Paul Signac, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon, 1890, MoMa, New York

• Cézanne's formal research goes in a completely direction. He studied in Paris, tried to exhibit at the Salon but was rejected. He then left Paris to study with Pisarro. 

"To make of Impressionism something solid, like the art in the museums."

• He strove for a self-reflective art.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1885-87, Courtauld Gallery, London

• Cézanne was obsessed with showing the fact that an image is something that is constructed and is not a reflection of nature. Not a view of nature, but the artificial product of a man. He was interested in revealing that painting is not linked to reality but independent, autonomous with the canvas. Cézanne investigated how a painting constructed an image. 

Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1905, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA

Cézanne, detail Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1905, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA 

George Braque, Houses at l'Estaque, 1908

George Braque, Composition with Ace of Clubs, 1912

• His work can be understood very clearly by other painters because he shows the process by doing what appealed intellectually to other painters. Close to the canvas, his work is completely abstract, as he has deconstructed the forms. Without Cézanne, works of cubism for example by Braque and Picasso, would be completely impossible. 

Cézanne, Still Life with a Plaster Cupid, c. 1895, Courtauld Gallery, London

• He abandoned the association of painting and reality. Cézanne subverts the perspective and plays with what we consider to be the real space of the painting and the painted space within the painting. Playing with what we assume is reality and fiction within painting. 

"A man, a tree, an apple are not represented, but used by Cézanne in building up a painterly thing called a 'picture'." 

Wassily Kandinsky, 1912

Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• Van Gogh took a completely different path. Not only was his scorned by the academy but his paintings were problematic for his fellows - they didn't understand his paintings. 

• He travelled a very lonely path. His father was a Protestant pastor. Through painting he could create what he wanted, he was very driven and he was very much on the side of the working class. He depicted local scene and was a self-trained artist. His style is completely different to that of Cézanne and Seurat. In a way, Van Gogh distorts reality in order to express his own vision of reality. 

• In his Potato Eaters, despite the incorrect formal elements, we can see his expression - Tormented. However in his early painting years his mental state was stable. One of his great influencers was Millet, in that he liked to depict peasants. The strong chiaroscuro and use of lots of black is reminiscent of Rembrandt. 

• After this phase he went to Paris in 1884. He saw the last exhibitions of the Impressionists, and was inspired by their exploration of luminosity and use of colour in art.

Van Gogh, Portrait of Père Tanguy, 1887-88, Musée Rodin, Paris

• This portrait by Van Gogh shows the art dealer Tanguy, surrounded by Japanese prints. Van Gogh was obsessed with colourful nature and the juxtaposition of foreground and background etc. After a period in Paris where he embraced colour, he understood that Paris was too bourgeois for him.

Van Gogh, Night Café, 1888, Yale University Art Gallery, USA

• Van Gogh's paintings spoke a language of distortion. Night Café, like many of his paintings, is painted in thick oils, an almost 3D use of paint, with many areas of impasto. It is a working class den. He used red and green, the distortion of ambiance, as well figures express the sadness of this place. He talks about colour in an emotional way, to convey atmosphere and feelings. He tries to convey through his brushstrokes, his perception of reality and in doing so, distorts. Other artists considered his art naïve. 

Van Gogh, Bedroom in Arles, 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• Everything in Bedroom in Arles has an acidic quality. The perspective is all wrong, and distorted. The point of this painting is not the subject but how he sees his very humble little room. 

• Gauguin and Van Gogh were a partnership at the beginning but their friendship ended in tragedy. In a moment of desperation and rage he cut off his ear. He is one of the great heroes of the modern age. 

Van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889, Musée d'Orsay, Paris 

Van Gogh, Self-Portrait, 1889, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with bandaged ear, 1889, Courtauld Gallery, London

• In his Self-Portrait with bandaged ear, he was able to depict the horrors of alienation in the modern world. His style was much more immediate than other painters. He is able to summon an emotional state with the way in which he uses colour and brushstrokes. His work is immensely diverse compared to meticulous artists such as Seurat.

Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889, MoMa, New York

• Starry Night was painted from the mental asylum. It is still a landscape with the moon and stars... but is it? Certainly not, in a way. The balance between representation and expression of a state of being, of personal vision of the landscape and of nature. Tormented hallucination. 

Van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

• This was the last painting that Van Gogh painted. It is an abstract vision of reality. It is very typical of Art Historians to read this painting retropectively, as prefiguring his death. This is an anachronistic reading of the painting. It is certainly not a pacified vision of reality but not a message.