Lecture Notes
Post Impressionism
Post Impressionism was a term coined by the art critic Roger Fry in 1910 for the artistic developments in France, or influenced by the French, after the heyday of Impressionism in the 1880s. Fry was himself an artist and a member of the Bloomsbury Group.Impressionism was transmuted into numerous forms during the 1880s, the most influential of which were Van Gogh's expressive art, Bernard and Gaugin's analysis of objects into colour planes, Cezanne's geometrical art and the colour theories of a subgroup of the Post Impressionists, the Neo-Impressionists Pissarro, Seurat and Signac.
For better or worse it was the Post-impressionists who changed the Realism of the Impressionists to the Abstraction of the twentieth century.
Emile Bernard
Emile Bernard (1868-1941) was an artist and also an author, art critic and poet.
Emile was largely raised by his grandmother. She was a successful businesswoman who supported him in his artistic career.
He attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. In 1885 he studied art at the Atelier Cormon, an art school run by Fernand Cormon who was a successful academic artist, but Emile was expelled in 1886. He met Louis Anquetin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec whilst at the Atelier Cormon.
In the summer of 1886 he went to Brittany and briefly met Gauguin at Pont-Aven. When he returned to Paris he exhibited work alongside van Gogh, Anquetin and Toulouse-Lautrec at the Avenue Clichy.
He returned to Brittany in 1888 and formed a friendship with Gauguin. They worked together and Emile enthused Gauguin with his new ideas about colour.
It is clear from the “Iron Bridges at Asnieres” that Bernard was already developing a style involving zones of colour within dark borders.
After painting together at Pont-Aven Bernard seems to have convinced Gauguin to use his new style. The style was called “Cloisonnism” by the art critic Edward Dujardin, after cloisonné enamel work.
Bernard wrote of his move to Cloisonnism: "everything that is superfluous in a spectacle is covering it with reality and occupying our eyes instead of our mind. You have to simplify the spectacle in order to make some sense of it. You have, in a way, to draw its plan."
"The first means that I use is to simplify nature to an extreme point. I reduce the lines only to the main contrasts and I reduce the colors to the seven fundamental colors of the prism. To see a style and not an item. To highlight the abstract sense and not the objective. And the second means were to appeal to the conception and to the memory by extracting yourself from any direct atmosphere. Appeal more to internal memory and conception. There I was expressing myself more, it was me that I was describing, although I was in front of the nature. There was an invisible meaning under the mute shape of exteriority."
Although Emile's explanation of Cloisonism sounds convincing both he and his friend Toulouse-Lautrec were forced to be commercial artists producing posters in a limited range of colours...
Cloisonnism is classified as being part of Synthetism, a term coined to express how some impressionists sought to embody in their painting:
- The outward appearance of natural forms.
- The artist’s feelings about their subject.
- The purity of the aesthetic considerations of line, colour and form.
In 1891 Emile joined a group of Symbolist painters that included Odilon Redon and Ferdinand Hodler.
He became disenchanted with the “avant guard” and travelled to Egypt, Spain and Italy from 1893. His art from this moment became more academic but he left the world one last artistic gift when he visited Spain: the inspiration for Picasso's Blue Period.
As a young man, Picasso was greatly influenced by this painting:
His later work was in a realist, academic style:
Paul Renee Gauguin
Gauguin (1848-1903) was another eccentric artist. He was born in Paris but his family moved to Lima, Peru when he was 18 months old. His father, a journalist, died on the boat leaving the Gaugin family to live with Gauguin's uncle. The family returned to France when Gauguin was 7. He left school at 17 and joined the merchant navy and then the French navy. At 23 he left the navy and his mother's boyfriend found him a job in the Paris Bourse as a stockbroker. In 1873 he married a Danish woman, Mette-Sophie Gad, and then had five children and a successful business career over the next 11 years.
It was also in 1873 that Gauguin first started painting part time. He became a friend of Pissarro's and exhibited at the Impressionist exhibitions of 1881 and 1882.
In 1884 he moved with his family to Copenhagen to sell French tarpaulins. The commercial venture failed and he was asked to leave by his wife in 1885. His son, Emil, wrote of these times: 'When I was 10 years old, I saw my father bloody my mother's face with his fist.'
After being forced out of his family he returned to Paris. In 1887 he travelled to Panama and Martinique.
His painting at this time was fairly pedestrian Impressionism, charming but scarcely the stuff of a new art movement.
When Gauguin returned to France he stayed with Van Gogh at Arles and went on painting expeditions with Van Gogh and Emile Bernard. The change was dramatic. Gaugin learnt from both artists and took Emile Bernard's Cloisonnist style to its logical conclusion.
Emile Bernard, Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin practising Cloisonnism:
However, look at the Symbolism in Gaugin's version.
After contact with Bernard and Van Gogh Gauguin had found his style. The style is almost fully expressed in the “Yellow Christ”:
Gauguin's other innovation was to make figures and objects conform to the styles found in tribal, indigenous works of art.
Gauguin's introduction of tribal and indigenous art into mainstream painting particularly affected later artists such as Pablo Picasso. However, Gauguin's most immediate influence was on a group of artists who were pupils at the Academie Julian in Paris in the late 1880s. Led by Paul Serusier (1863-1923), these formed a group who called themselves The Nabis (The Prophets).
Notice how the painting has the cloisonnism of Gauguin's art and intense symbolism.
Paul Ranson (1861-1909) summarises much of the intention of the Nabis in his “Nabis Landscape” of 1890:
We do not have space here to cover the Nabis artists fully. Other prominent members of the group were Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, George Lacombe, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Félix Vallotton and there were Nabis groups in other countries.
Bonnard and Vuillard changed their style from that of the Nabis to Intimisme which the writer Andre Gide described as “speaking in a low tone, suitable to confidences.” but stylistically is a partial return to Impressionism.
Henri de Toulouse Lautrec
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on the 24th November 1864. He was the first son of the Comte Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa. Although from an aristocratic family his parents separated and he was at first brought up by a nanny and then moved to join his mother in Paris at the age of eight.
Henri's parents were first cousins and he suffered from a rare genetic disorder, now known as Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome, that involved problems with the development of his leg bones.
Toulouse-Lautrec studied at the studios of Cormon (Bernard, Van Gogh, Anquetin) and Bonnat (Caillebot, Sargent, Dufy, Braques). He spent almost all of his time in Paris in Montmartre.
Toulouse-Lautrec produced 737 canvases, 275 watercolours, 363 prints and posters.
This development became full blown Art Nouveau style in the hands of the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha:
Paul Cezanne
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) has been called the “father” of modern art. He was born in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. He went to school at the College Bourbon in Aix where he became friends with Emile Zola, who was to become one of the most famous authors of all time.
At the age of 18 he attended the Municipal School of Drawing in Aix but was persuaded by his father to attend a 3 year Law Degree at the University of Aix from 1858-1861. In 1861 he decided to pursue a career in art and left for Paris. He became a pupil of Camille Pissaro and exhibited at the first Salon des Refuses in 1863. He also exhibited at the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. In 1886 his father died and he inherited 400,000 francs about £20m in modern money.
Cezanne's early paintings followed a similar pattern to those of the other Impressionists, in the early to mid 1860s he painted in the style of the Realists such as Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon painters.
This period of Cezanne's work is known as his Dark Period (1860-1870). He called these early works une couillarde.
Cezanne moved to Impressionism in 1870 and the period of his art from 1870 to 1878 is known as his Impressionist period.
In common with most of the other Impressionists, Cezanne avoided the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, moving to l'Estaque near Marseilles with his mistress Marie-Hortense Fiquet. In 1872, when the war and the Commune had ended he moved to Auvers near Paris.
Cezanne's Impressionism was always an abstraction rather than naturalism. His work tended to concentrate on landscapes, bathers, still-lifes and portraits.
Even by 1878 his Impressionist period had become highly abstract as can be seen in the Four Bathers:
What is Cezanne doing? The clearest exposition appears in his letters:
“May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, that is a section of nature or, if you prefer, of the spectacle that the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads out before our eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air.” Letter to Emile Bernard 1904.
Cezanne is working towards a Platonic idealization of perception. Certainly the reduction of perception to sphere, cylinder and cone is pure Platonism. He understood Descartes “apercevoir”, the becoming aware of sensation internally in the mind by relating it to existing forms. In his letters he said that:
"I think of art as personal apperception.” and “a harmony parallel to nature” (Communication with Joachim Gasquet).
In a letter to his mother Cezanne wrote: “I have to work all the time, not to reach that final perfection which wins the admiration of imbeciles.”
This brings us the the “Mature Period” of Cezanne's art, his work after 1878.
He starts his mature period fairly Impressionistically:
Look what happens by 1895:
By 1905 he is replacing sensation with abstraction wholesale:
It was a short step from Cezanne's landscapes to the cubism of Georges Braques in 1907:
Which Braque's friend Picasso took a stage further:
Van Gogh
We have already covered Van Gogh's life and works and will focus on his influence on other artists. Vincent was productive between 1880 and 1890 and died in 1890. It was only after his death that his art became famous. Van Gogh was particularly pivotal in the History of Art because he deeply influenced the artists who were to become the “Fauves” (“wild beasts” in French) and the Expressionists.
Henri Matisse, one of the founders of Fauvism, first came across Van Gogh's art when he visited John Peter Russell at Belle Ile in Brittany.
Here is a painting by Matisse in 1894:
and here is a picture by Matisse in 1896 at the moment he discovered the work of Van Gogh:
Edvard Munch, widely regarded as the father of Expressionism, was painting in an Impressionist style in 1885:
He moved to Paris to study in 1889 and after exposure to the work of Van Gogh he changed his style:
Although this style was heavily influenced by the philosophy of symbolism.
Van Gogh sowed the seed of both the Fauvist and Expressionist movements in art.
However, later fauvism departed from Van Gogh's style:
European Art Movements 1874-1909
1874
Impressionism
1880s
Post Impressionism/Neo Impressionism
1890s Les Nabis
1900 Intimistes
Symbolism
Aesthetic Movement
Arts and Crafts
Ruskin & Morris
The Glasgow School
British Art Nouveau
Rennie MacIntosh
Walter Crane
Art Nouveau
Jugendstil
1900s
Fauvism
Expressionism
die brucke
Cubism
Futurism
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