Postimpressionism

1
Post-impressionism
Salon of 1910 dubs the term

• Extending the light
• Increasing the expression
• Furthering the fragmentation

2
Georges Seurat (1859-91)
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte,
1884-85

• Pointillism

3
Seurat
The eye mixes the colors
Bathing at Ausnieres, 1883
light can be measured in particles as well as
wavelengths
Boats, Low Tide 1885
4
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90)

• Sold just one painting in his lifetime
• Was tortured throughout life with mental illness
• When moves to Paris from Holland, becomes friends
  with Seurat and Degas
• Moves to south of France, Arles, and befriends
  Gauguin

Bedroom at Arles, 1888
5
Van Gogh
The Potato Eaters, 1885
Sunflowers, 1888
Irises, 1888

• From the dark realities of his native Dutch
  heritage.
• to the beauty and light of Southern France

6
Van Gogh

• The Starry Night, 1889
• painted a year before his death

Wheatfield and Crows, 1890 The place of Van
Goghs suicide
7
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

• Left his middle class life as a stockbroker and
  father of 5 to devote himself to art
• Lived with Van Gogh in Arles
• Traveled to Tahiti to pursue spiritual purity,
  the noble savage
• Although missionaries had introduced the less
  than ideal aspects of Europe to the Tahitians,
  Gauguin chose to paint the spiritual and the pure

Self-portrait, 1893
When Will You Marry?, 1892
Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, 1897
Where Do We Come From? Where are We Going? ,
1897 Painted after his daughter dies and he falls
into a deep depression
8
Gauguin

• Replaces impressionistic brushstrokes with large,
  flat areas of saturated color
• Loosely woven canvas shows through paint, giving
  added texture
• Was fascinated by Tahitian women, whom he felt
  embodied dignity and wisdom

Symbolist and Post-impressionist
Two Tahitians with Mango Blossoms, 1899
Paint the essence of the object

• Day of the Gods, 1894
• Tahitian god, Hina, in the center
• 3 figures represent birth, life and death
• pool is abstract collection of vibrant forms,
  suggesting that art should reflect and symbolize
  underlying essences, not surface realities

9
GauguIn

• Vision After the Sermon, 1888
• Old testament story of Jacob wrestling with an
  angel, finally seeing the face of God
• Gauguin is watching with the crowd of the
  faithful, but is not separated by the
  intersecting tree branch
• The colors of the crowd are earthbound black
  but the inner vision space is intense, vivid,
  colorful

10
Henri de Toulouse Lautrec (1864-1901)

• Son of a count with aristocratic lineage 1,000
  years old
• Sickly as a child broke left leg at 12 and right
  leg at 14 that did not mend as an adult, was 4
  ½ tall
• Loved Parisian night life, brothels and bars
  died an alcoholic
• Known for his fluid line and balanced composition

At the Moulin Rouge, 1892
11
Lautrec
The Bed, 1901

• Showed bohemian life as it was, sometimes showy,
  sometimes seamy, sometimes without glamour

Jane Avril , 1899
Two prostitutes, 1894
12
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)
Self Portrait, 1875 Cranky, self-absorbed and
short-fused
Still Life with Plaster Cupid, 1895
Mme Cezanne in a Striped Skirt, 1877 Hortense
Fiquet, Cezannes counter-muse

• Still Life with Apples, 1890

13
Cezanne
Mount St. Victoire "Everything in nature takes
its form from the sphere, the cone, and the
cylinder. 1897 1902

• The father of modernism and cubism
• Concerned with form, not content
• Broke up images into their most essential parts