Post-Impressionism

• 1. Introduction

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  Post-Impressionism was a name no painter ever asked for. The art critic Roger Fry coined it in 1906, and reached for it again in 1910 when he needed a label for an exhibition of modern French painters at the Grafton Galleries in London. He admitted he chose it almost by default. For purposes of convenience, he wrote, it was necessary to give these artists a name, and he picked the vaguest and most non-committal one he could find. It said nothing about what the work looked like. It said only where these painters stood in time, just after the Impressionists. Yet behind that bland label sat some of the most restless figures in French art. Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat. They exhibited together but agreed on almost nothing. So what actually held this movement together? Why did a single word stretch to cover dot-by-dot science, distorted color, and dreams of the South Seas? And why do historians still argue about when it ended?

• 2. A Reaction Against Light

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  Roughly between 1886 and 1905 a generation of French painters decided Impressionism was not enough. The starting line was the last Impressionist exhibition; the finish was the birth of Fauvism. These painters had grown dissatisfied with what they felt was the triviality of subject matter in Impressionist work, and with its loss of structure. They thought the older painters had chased the naturalistic depiction of light and color and lost something solid in the process. Their answer was to push past those limits rather than abandon the gains. They kept the vivid colors. They kept impasto, the thick application of paint, and they kept painting from life. What changed was emphasis. Where Impressionism dissolved the world into shimmer, these artists leaned toward geometric forms, toward distorting form for expressive effect, and toward color that was unnatural or deliberately modified. Abstract concerns of harmony and structural arrangement now took precedence over naturalism. The reaction, then, was not a rejection of color but a hunt for the bones underneath it.

• 3. Four Restless Painters

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  Paul Cezanne earned a title the others did not: the father of Post-Impressionism. He wanted to restore order and structure to painting, to make of Impressionism, in his words, something solid and durable, like the art of the museums. His method was to reduce objects to their basic shapes while keeping the saturated colors he had inherited. Georges Seurat took structure in a colder direction, building pictures from pointillism, the systematic use of tiny dots of color. He and his followers approached color and composition as a meticulously scientific problem. Vincent van Gogh moved the opposite way. He used vibrant color and conspicuous brushstrokes to carry his feelings and his state of mind onto the canvas. Even Camille Pissarro, an Impressionist by origin, wandered into this territory. Between the mid-1880s and the early 1890s he experimented with Neo-Impressionist ideas, growing discontented with what he called romantic Impressionism. He investigated pointillism, which he named scientific Impressionism, before returning to a purer Impressionism in the last decade of his life. Four temperaments, four roads, no shared map.

• 4. A Cluster Of Isms

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  Cloisonnism lasted barely longer than the word that named it. The art critic Edouard Dujardin introduced the term in 1888 to promote the work of Louis Anquetin, and it was later applied to paintings by his friend Emile Bernard. A year later, in 1889, came Synthetism, coined to set recent works by Gauguin and Bernard apart from the more traditional Impressionists who exhibited alongside them at the Cafe Volpini. Neo-Impressionism carried its own quarrel over naming. Contemporary critics and even artists ridiculed it as Pointillism, while Seurat and Signac would have preferred other terms, Divisionism among them. The Pont-Aven School implied little more than that its artists had worked for a while in Pont-Aven or elsewhere in Brittany. Then in 1891 the labels shifted again. Vanguard critics warmly welcomed Symbolism, and Gauguin dropped Synthetism the moment he was acclaimed as the leader of Symbolism in painting. Add Les Nabis, who sought a synthesis of tradition and brand new form, and the picture is clear. Post-Impressionism was less a movement than a crowded room of overlapping, short-lived names.

• 5. Naming The Unnamed

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  Frank Rutter beat Roger Fry to print by three weeks. In a review of the Salon d'Automne in Art News, dated the 15th of October 1910, Rutter described Othon Friesz as a post-impressionist leader, and the same journal carried an advert for a show called The Post-Impressionists of France. Fry's own exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, defined the term as the development of French art since Edouard Manet. The serious scholarly work came later. John Rewald narrowed the scope in his pioneering 1956 book, Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin, limiting it to the years between 1886 and 1892. He treated it as a continuation of his 1946 History of Impressionism, and focused on early Post-Impressionists active in France: van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Redon. Rewald planned a second volume, Post-Impressionism: From Gauguin to Matisse, reaching into the first decade of the 20th century and folding in Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau le Douanier, Les Nabis, Cezanne, the Fauves, the young Picasso, and Gauguin's last trip to the South Seas. That second volume remained unfinished.

• 6. Where The Story Ends

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  Rewald conceded the term was not a very precise one, though a very convenient one. He preferred a narrative approach over an analytic one, believing it best to let the sources speak for themselves. The disagreement is about the finish line. Alan Bowness and his collaborators pushed the period forward to 1914 and the start of World War I, but kept their attention largely on the 1890s in France, pushing other European countries back to standard connotations and excluding Eastern Europe entirely. For both Bowness and Rewald, Cubism was an absolutely fresh start, and that is how Cubism has been seen in France from the beginning, and later in England. Eastern European artists cared less for western traditions and moved toward manners of painting called abstract and suprematic. Rival labels never sat as neatly. Modernism and Symbolism spilled across literature and architecture and into other countries, while Post-Impressionism stayed tied to French visual art derived from Impressionism since 1886. The declarations of war in July and August 1914 signaled more than a world war. They marked a major break in European cultural history too.

• 7. Crossing The Atlantic

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  Canada produced its own offshoot. In 1913 the Art Association of Montreal's Spring show included work by Randolph Hewton, A. Y. Jackson, and John Lyman, and the reaction was harsh. The Montreal Daily Witness and the Montreal Daily Star reviewed it with sharp criticism. The label stretched to cover a painting by Lyman, who had studied with Matisse and wrote in defense of the term, defining it and citing the British show he described as a great exhibition of modern art. A wide and diverse range of Canadian painters came to carry the name, among them James Wilson Morrice, David Milne, Tom Thomson, members of the Group of Seven, and Emily Carr. In 2001 the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa organized a travelling exhibition, The Birth of the Modern: Post-Impressionism in Canada, 1900-1920. The wider continent had been surveyed earlier. The Advent of Modernism: Post-Impressionism and North American Art, 1900-1918, the catalogue for a 1986 exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, gave a major overview by Peter Morrin, Judith Zilczer, and William C. Agee, carrying the loose French label far from where it began.