Post-Impressionism: Can I draw a cubic apple?

HOW IS IT DIFFERENT FROM IMPRESSIONISM?

We all know that Post-Impressionism originated as a response to Impressionism in France during the 19th century, but how exactly do they differ from each other?

• Style & technique: Impressionism was characterized by the use of vibrant colors, harsh spontaneous brushstrokes, accurate depiction of the changing of light. Impressionists often used unusual angles. Meanwhile, Post-Impressionism had diverse characteristics that vary from artist to artist as there were many individual styles, such as Primitivism, Symbolism, Pointillism, etc.

• Post-Impressionism involved a more methodical and time-consuming process than impressionism.

• Impressionism captured the heat of the subject, while Post-Impressionism was based on the emotion and concept of the artist.

ARTWORKS

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cézanne was a French artist whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. His often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used “broken brushwork” technique that built up to form complex fields.

"The Large Bathers"

“The Large Bathers” was one of the finest examples of Cézanne's attempt at incorporating the modern, heroic nude in a natural setting. The series of very human nudes, no Greco-Roman nymphs or satyrs, are arranged into a variety of positions, like objects of still life, under the pointed arch formed by the intersection of trees and the heavens. The figures do not have any particular personality, since the artist assembles them for purely structural purposes. Here Cézanne is reinterpreting an iconic Western motif of the female nude, but in an exceptionally radical way. The sheer size of the painting is monumental, confronting the viewer directly with abbreviated shapes that resolve themselves into the naked limbs of his sitters. This is not yet abstraction, but in such instances Cézanne has already moved beyond the figurative tradition.

“The Basket of Apples” is a still-life oil painting, popularly known for its disjointed point of view. The painting has been portrayed as an impartial composition for its unbalanced parts. It consists of a bottle at the center, an inclined basket with green and red-colored apples, a plate with stacked biscuits and a tablecloth with several apples which seem to have rolled from the inclined basket.

Cezanne completed the piece using two different points of view. The right and left sides of the table are not in the same plane as if the table had split into two. This is a technique which Cezanne used to integrate the distinction of viewpoints into an impressionist still life. With this technique, Cezanne helped in bridging the gap between Cubism and Impressionism.

“The card player”

The artist has five paintings of card players, which he had worked on about a decade, in the early-to-mid 1890s. It contains just two card players confronting each other in strict profile, a compositional idea that first appeared in the two foreground figures in the Met’s work. In this painting, the table is narrower and cleared of all objects, with the exception of a centrally placed wine bottle. The two men study their cards intently, but no movement or move appears imminent. The details of the game have receded still further and life has been stilled. Cézanne’s card players, like many of his figures, occupy a space somewhere between the painting of figures and the painting of objects. They drift between different genres.

“Mont Sainte-Victoire”

This is one of the last landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire, favored by Cézanne at the end of his life. The view is rendered in what is essentially an abstract vocabulary. Rocks and trees are suggested by mere daubs of paint as opposed to being extensively depicted. The overall composition itself, however, is clearly representational and also follows in the ethos of Japanese prints. The looming mountain is reminiscent of a puzzle of various hues, assembled into a recognizable object. This and other such late works of Cézanne proved to be very important to the emerging modernists.

In this mature work, the colors and forms possessed equal pictorial weight. The primary means of constructing the new perspective included the juxtaposition of cool and warm colors as well as the bold overlapping of forms. The light was no longer an "outsider" in relation to depicted objects; rather light emanated from within.

Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin is one of the most significant French artists to be initially schooled in Impressionism, but broke away from its fascination with the everyday world to pioneer a new style of painting broadly referred to as Symbolism, which is a reaction in favor of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams. Gauguin was one of the key participants during the last decades of the 19th century in a European cultural movement that has since come to be referred to as Primitivism.

He had already abandoned a former life as a stockbroker by the time he began traveling regularly to the south Pacific in the early 1890s, where he developed a new style that married everyday observation with mystical symbolism, a style strongly influenced by the popular, so-called "primitive" arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia.

However, Paul Gauguin’s reputation suffered due to his sexual involvement with young girls in Tahiti. This is really problematic, since many of his paintings were of the girls that he exploited. At that time, people did not pay much attention to crimes, but critics nowadays believe we should evaluate an artwork also by its artist. The #Metoo movement, which is a movement encouraging weak people that have been exploited to speak up, also cares about this kind of predatory action of Gauguin’s.

"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where are we going?"

This painting was done in Tahiti, including three stages from right to left, which correspond to the questions in the painting’s title in order. Gauguin indicated that the painting should be read from left to right. The first stage of life is illustrated by three women with a child, representing childhood - the beginning of life; the middle group represents the daily existence of young adulthood; the final group represents an old woman approaching death, and has reconciled and redesigned her thoughts. The blue in the background represents what Gauguin described as “the beyond”. His art stressed the vivid use of colors and thick brushstrokes, it aimed to convey an emotional or expressionistic strength. Unlike Gaugain’s other works, this painting is not really religious but rather more personal spiritual. It is reasonable with Gauguin’s late-in-life retreat from the Western society into a culture native to what was then French Polynesia.

"Vision after the Sermon"

This painting represents a significant departure from the subject matter of Impressionism, namely the city or rural landscape, which was still quite prevalent in Europe and the United States during the last two decades of the 19th century. Instead of choosing to paint pastoral landscapes or urban entertainments, Gauguin depicted a rural Biblical scene of praying women envisioning Jacob wrestling with an angel. Traditionally, the story entails Jacob struggling with his conscience, with other men and with God, represented by his struggling with the angle for truth and redemption in the fight. After that, Jacob was able to continue his journey, across the river to the Promised Land. Gauguin's painting shows the river Jabbok in the upper right-hand corner and the Promised Land in the background. The apple tree of knowledge symbolizes humans’ decision to comprehend good and evil, caused by his fall from grace. There is also a cow in the top left corner in the painting, which symbolizes humans’ redemption.

The decision to paint a religious subject was reminiscent of the Renaissance tradition, yet Gauguin rendered his subject in a modern style derived in part from Japanese prints, his own experiments in ceramics, stained-glass window methods, and other popular and "high art" traditions, finally emphasizing bold outlines and flat areas of color.

"The Yellow Christ"

This painting is a good example for the collaboration of Cloisonnism and Symbolism. The painting sets the scene of the crucified Christ in the North of France during the peak season of autumn foliage, indeed as women in 19th-century garb gather at the foot of the cross. It shows Gauguin’s early Synthetist style. The plane of the canvas, the surface which must be respected is held by the foreground figure, the strong upright of the crucifix, and the terminating horizontal bar. Against the repeated bands of field and sky and cross, the swinging curves of the women and the trees (closed forms that contrast with the movement of the straight lines) play a graceful counterpoint. The whole is drawn together by a bright and simple pattern. The women are gentle but their peasant force is still evident.

"Tahitian Women on the Beach"

Paul Gauguin moved from Europe to Tahiti in 1891, due to suffering financially and he wanted to escape bureaucratic Europe. This inspired his painting, Tahitian Women on the Beach. In the painting, Gauguin shows two women sitting in the sand, one facing the viewer, one facing away. The young woman on the left sits with her back towards viewers, with her head down, indifferent to the viewer. Her dark hair is tied back with a yellow ribbon, an influence of western contact, contrasted with a white flower behind her hair. She leans on her right arm creating a straight hard edge within the painting. The woman on the right is shown facing the viewer while performing an action. She sits with her legs crossed as she weaves fiber to start a basket. This painting is bold and depicts the women of the island going about their everyday task in their hometown.

The strong outlines of the two women with the close attention to detail, make the image restful and gentle. They are both shown in stark contrast against the light sand they sit in. Behind them the green water of the lagoon sits before the blackness of the sea, highlighted with the white from the waves breaking. The painting shows duality in both the foreground and background. With the strong outlines, close attention to detail and also the use of color the two women are brought to life.

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. His works are nothing like anyone else’s, but throughout his life, he could only sell one painting. He was only recognized after he died at the age of 37.

The famous event of his life that he cut his ear had to be mentioned was his relationship with Paul Gauguin. There was a period that they lived together in a small town in North France. However, their friendship was doomed in the beginning. Their personality is completely in contrast to each other, and although Gauguin was supposed to be the mentor of Van Gogh, they are more like competitors. They often drew paintings with similar subjects.

“Starry Night” is often considered to be Van Gogh's pinnacle achievement. Unlike most of his works, it was painted from memory, and not out in the landscape. The emphasis on interior, emotional life is clear in his swirling, tumultuous depiction of the sky - a radical departure from his previous, more naturalistic landscapes. Here, Van Gogh followed a strict principle of structure and composition in which the forms are distributed across the surface of the canvas in an exact order to create balance and tension amidst the swirling torsion of the cypress trees and the night sky. The result is a landscape rendered through curves and lines, its seeming chaos subverted by a rigorous formal arrangement. Evocative of the spirituality Van Gogh found in nature, the painting is famous for advancing the act of painting beyond the representation of the physical world.

Self portrait

Throughout his life, Vincent van Gogh painted over 30 self-portraits between the years 1886 and 1889. His collection of self-portraits places him among the most prolific self-portraitists of all time. He could not afford hiring a model so he painted himself, as a way to improve his skills.

This was Van Gogh’s final self-portrait and was painted only a few months before his death. The brushwork and paint usage some physicians say can be evidence that the painting was done in a psychotic state. The background is reminiscent of his earlier work Starry Night. This is seen in not only the pattern and brushwork but also the similar color palette. The pattern background is also carried into his outfit and face.

“Café Terrace At Night”

This was one of the first scenes Van Gogh painted during his stay in Arles and the first painting where he used a nocturnal background. Using contrasting colors and tones, Van Gogh achieved a luminous surface that pulses with an interior light, almost in defiance of the darkening sky. The lines of composition all point to the center of the work drawing the eye along the pavement as if the viewer is strolling the cobblestone streets. The café still exists today and is a "mecca" for van Gogh fans visiting the south of France. Painted on the street at night, Van Gogh recreated the setting directly from his observations, a practice inherited from the Impressionists. However, unlike the Impressionists, he did not record the scene merely as his eye observed it, but imbued the image with a spiritual and psychological tone that echoed his individual and personal reaction. The brushstrokes vibrate with the sense of excitement and pleasure Van Gogh experienced while painting this work.

Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat is chiefly remembered as the pioneer of the Neo-Impressionist technique commonly known as Divisionism, or Pointillism, an approach associated with a softly flickering surface of small dots or strokes of color. That is why he is set apart from other Post-Impressionists.

“Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte”

Seurat's “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte” was one of the stand-out works in the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, in 1884, and after it was shown later that year, it encouraged critic Félix Fénéon to invent the name “Neo-Impressionism.” The picture took Seurat two years to complete and he spent much of this time sketching in the park in preparation. the scene has a busy energy, and, as critics have often noted, some of the figures are depicted at discordant scales. Here, Seurat employed tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint that allow the viewer's eye to blend colors optically, rather than having the colors blended on the canvas or pre-blended as a material pigment.

“Bathers at Asnières”

Seurat's first important canvas, the Bathers is his initial attempt at reconciling classicism with modern, quasi-scientific approaches to color and form. It depicts an area on the Seine near Paris, close to the factories of Clichy that one can see in the distance. Seurat's palette is somewhat Impressionist in its brightness, yet his meticulous approach is far removed from that style's love of expressing the momentary. The scene's intermingling of shades also demonstrates Seurat's interest in Eugene Delacroix's handling of shades of a single hue. And the working class figures that populate this scene mark a sharp contrast with the leisured bourgeois types depicted by artists such as Monet and Renoir in the 1870s.

“La Seine à la Grande-Jatte”

“La Seine à la Grande-Jatte” of 1888 shows the artist returning to the site of his most famous painting - A Sunday on La Grande Jatte painted two years prior. This later composition demonstrates Seurat's continued interest in form and perspective, but reveals a much softer and more relaxed technique than La Grande Jatte. The soft atmosphere is made up of a myriad of colored dots that mix optically to mimic the effects of a luminous summer day.

"Young Woman Powdering Herself"

This painting is a portrait of Seurat's mistress Madeleine Knobloch. It is an adoring likeness that jokingly contrasts the classical monumentality of the figure against the flimsy Rococo frivolity of the setting. It is also strongly marked by Seurat's increasing interest in caricature and popular art, sources which lent a new expressiveness to his work which accorded with the growing contemporary interest in Symbolism. Knobloch was a working-class woman with whom Seurat maintained a long term secret relationship, keeping her separate not only from his bourgeois family but also from his bohemian friends.

IMPORTANCE

All artists in this school of art bring to viewers a specific style and technique, which makes them separated from each other and from previous Impressionists. Here, they do not draw based on what they see but based on what they feel. They can make a round object become square in their paintings, if that is how they look at it. More than that, Post-Impressionists paved the way for Cubism, Fauvism and modern art in the 20th century.