Post Impressionism: New symbols and expressions.

Post-Impressionism


Post-Impressionism was a movement in Western painting based in France at the end of the 19th Century. It represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. The Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with the triviality of subject matter and the loss of structure in Impressionist paintings, though they did not agree on the way forward.

The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.
 Georges Seurat and his followers concerned themselves with Pointillism, the systematic use of tiny dots of colour. Paul Cézanne set out to restore a sense of order and structure to painting, to "make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums". He achieved this by reducing objects to their basic shapes while retaining the bright fresh colours of Impressionism. Vincent van Gogh used colour and vibrant swirling brush strokes to convey his feelings and his state of mind. Although they often exhibited together, Post-Impressionist artists were not in agreement concerning a cohesive movement.
 

The Post-Impressionists often exhibited together, but, unlike the Impressionists, who began as a close-knit, convivial group, they painted mainly alone and although they often exhibited together, Post-Impressionist artists were not in agreement concerning a cohesive movement. Cézanne painted in isolation at Aix-en-Provence in southern France; his solitude was matched by that of Paul Gauguin, who in 1891 took up residence in Tahiti, and of van Gogh, who painted in the countryside at Arles. Both Gauguin and van Gogh rejected the indifferent objectivity of Impressionism in favour of a more personal, spiritual expression. After exhibiting with the Impressionists in 1886, Gauguin renounced “the abominable error of naturalism.” Gauguin sought a simpler truth and purer aesthetic in art; turning away from the sophisticated, urban art world of Paris, he instead looked for inspiration in rural communities with more traditional values. Copying the pure, flat colour, heavy outline, and decorative quality of medieval stained glass and manuscript illumination, he explored the expressive potential of pure colour and line, using exotic and sensuous colour harmonies to create poetic images of the Tahitians among whom he would eventually live. Arriving in Paris in 1886, the Dutch painter van Gogh quickly adapted Impressionist techniques and colour to express his acutely felt emotions. He transformed the contrasting short brushstrokes of Impressionism into curving, vibrant lines of colour, exaggerated even beyond Impressionist brilliance, that convey his emotionally charged and ecstatic responses to the natural landscape.

Symbolism

Symbolism was a movement in art and literature, which originated in France and flourished between 1885 and 1910. It was a reaction against the literal representation of objects and subjects. Symbolist painters rejected realism and Impressionism. They felt that art should not simply depict, but should suggest ideas, moods, and psychological states through colour, line, and form. Their subjects were often mythological, mystical, or fantastic. Not so much a style of art, Symbolism was more an international ideological trend. Symbolists believed that art should apprehend more absolute truths which could only be accessed indirectly.

French Symbolism was both a continuation of the Romantic tradition and a reaction to the realistic approach of impressionism. It served as a catalyst in the outgrowth of the darker sides of Romanticism and toward abstraction. The term Symbolism means the systematic use of symbols or pictorial conventions to express an allegorical meaning. Symbolism is an important element of most religious arts and reading symbols plays a main role in psychoanalysis. Thus, the Symbolist painters used these symbols from mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul.

Symbolic artists based their ideas on literature, where poets such as Baudelaire believed that ideas and emotions could be portrayed through sound and rhythm and not just through the meaning of words. Symbolist painter styles varied greatly but common themes included the mystical and the visionary. Symbolists also explored themes of death, debauchery, perversion and eroticism. Symbolism moved away from the naturalism of the impressionists and demonstrated a preference for emotions over intellect.

Symbolism had a significant influence on Expressionism and Surrealism, two movements which descend directly from Symbolism proper. The work of some Symbolist visual artists also directly impacted the curvilinear forms of the contemporary Art Nouveau movement. The Symbolist period contributed much to the development of the abstract arts of the 20th century, and is a crucial step in understanding consecutive periods. Famous Symbolist artists include Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Gustav Klimt.

Expressionism

Expressionism is a term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art and literature of the late nineteeth and early twentieth centurys. It initially developed as an 'avant-gard movement' in Germany, but quickly spread beyond, going on become more of an international climate of thought than an art movement per se. It affected not just the fine arts but also dance, cinema, literature and theatre.

Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of "being alive" and emotional experience rather than physical reality. Therefore, the expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity.

Expressionists were opposed to the academic standards that had prevailed in Europe and instead sought to emphasize the artist's own unique subjective emotional point of view, which they believed must override the importance of being faithful to the actual appearance of things.

The subjects of expressionist works were frequently distorted or otherwise altered in some way. Hallmarks of the movement were violent colors and exaggerated lines that served to contain the intense emotional expression. Expressionist were trying to pinpoint an expression of inner experience rather than solely create a realistic portrayal of something, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events aroused in them.

The expressionistic tradition was significantly indebted to a series of paintings by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh dating from the last year and a half of his life. These recorded his heightened emotional state shortly before his suicide. One of the earliest and most famous examples of Expressionism is Gogh's "The Starry Night." Whatever the cause, it cannot be denied that a great many artists of this period assumed that the chief function of art was to express their intense feelings to the world.

The German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche played a key role in originating modern expressionism by clarifying and serving as a conduit for previously neglected currents in ancient art. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche presented his theory of the ancient dualism between two types of aesthetic experience, namely the Apollonian and the Dionysian; a dualism between the "art of sculpture", of lyrical dream-inspiration, identity, order, regularity, and calm repose, and, on the other hand, the "art of music", of intoxication, forgetfulness, chaos, and the ecstatic dissolution of identity in the collective. According to Nietzsche, both elements are present in any work of art. The basic characteristics of expressionism are Dionysian: bold colours, distorted forms-in-dissolution, two-dimensional, without much use of perspective. More generally the term refers to art that expresses intense emotion. It is arguable that all artists are expressive but there is a long line of art production in which heavy emphasis is placed on communication through emotion.  

Talking Japanese, making an impression.

Japanese woodblock prints became widely accessible after 1854, when Japan was reopened to foreigners. Though western artists had previously looked at and sythesised the work of other cultures in their work, most notably the 17th and 18th century interest in chinese orientalism that had essentially been an art of fantasy and exoticism. With the rejection of conventional ideals on which western art was based that began to take hold with the romantic movement, artists of the mid to late 19th century looked toward the new  (unconventional to western eyes) aesthetics of Japanese art . The rejection of the rigid conventions of western art lead them to learn from different ways of thinking and visual representation. So potent was the impact when they did, every major late 19th century painter (with the possible exception of Cezanne) was to be influenced by it. Indeed, the history of western art is to a much greater extent than is commonly realised that of a liberating and vitialising effect of successive waves of discovery by western artists of alien cultures, first Japanese, then African and Polynesian.

Japanese prints dramatically effected the whole course of western art in the latter half of the 19th century. They provided a catalyst which helped painters throw off the spell of classical tradition, free themselves from the authority of the old masters (furthering the ideal laid down by Velasquez of the contemporary artist free of the patron, a creative intellectual  rather than a crafts man) the artists of the 19th century looked for new ways of seeing, new conceptions in art. It can also be said that this desire to find new ways of seeing was in part driven by the invention of photography, though as a medium this was still in its infancy.

Japanese prints were popular, but often deemed vulgar subject matter and unorthodox in their viewpoint by the general public. The artists saw them as being as fresh and brilliant in their bold use of colour as they were vivacious in form. Degas confessed that he learnt from them what drawing really meant - that it was a ' way of seeing form'.

The freshness of colour, unorthodoxy of design and subject matter in Japanese prints appealed to the impressionists, especially Monet. Japanese art indicated a way to solve the problem of how to combine and reconcile pictorial three-dimensional illusionism within the flat painted surface whilst rejecting standard western conventions such as perspective.

Piero Della Francesca

The influence of Japanese art even extended into the growing commercial graphic or commercial art of the time, most notably in the work of Toulouse Lautrec who confronted the problem most directly and in its simplest terms, revolutionising the art of poster making by flattening the illusionistic space in the Japanese manner and uniting the pattern of pictorial elements with that of the lettering.

Attacks on artists who bucked the accepted conventions by an outraged public were a regular feature of mid 19th century life. The broad brush work and unconventional themes of the romantics rocked the establishment. Though the work of Turner, who was concerned with practice of painting as an end for itself and the fleeting effects of light than the accepted conventions of allegory had slowly become recognised by the English establishment, the centre of the artistic world at the time was Paris which was still controlled by the conventionally thinking salons.

Turner (1845)

In the 1860's a group of artists set up an exhibition of work,the salon de refuses, for work rejected by the official art world (which controlled the only road to professional acceptance and success through the salons) and lambasted by a conditioned and conservative public who were accustomed to the smooth brushwork and careful finish of salon painting, had some difficulty in reading impressionist paintings with their rough handling and broken colour patches spotted all over the surface, as if they were casual sketches. This group came to be known as the impressionists.

Renoir stated that he and Monet had" freed painting from the importance of the subject, under Louis XV I would have been obliged to paint nothing but specified subjects. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them simply flowers, without their needing to tell a story" .

Renoir

The impressionists never completely won over the official art world, but they were recognised by the cultivated intelligensia. Though the public and art establishment viewed them as rebels, they were actually far from what we would term rebels. Most were of a good, solid bourgeois origin and enjoyed the full advantages of their position. Their paintings embody precisely those values which true rebels reject. They depict a typically middle-class version of happiness, though the impressionists claimed to be uninvolved emotionally with their subject matter.

Much like the Realists, the impressionists rejected the past as a source of subject matter. They believed that artists should deal only with the world around them, they should invent nothing. For the impressionists, this meant that artists should restrict themselves to what lay within their range of vision at the time and place they were painting. For them the present became the instant of consciousness in which one is aware of existence. Baudelaire said that 'modernity is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent'. The impressionists followed this idea, concerning themselves with the truth and actuality of contemporary experience (much like the realists, only from a different point of view). But a degree of artifice inevitably entered their work, even some of the most apparently spontaneous of Monet's 'impressions' being dependent on devices learnt from Japanese prints.

When we think of impressionist work, we typically envision a landscape or other out of doors subject painted largely with a high toned palette of clear bright colours applied with varied, broken brushwork to a canvas primed with white (not the traditional raw brown linen) and then washed with a base colour. The composition, apparently as casual as a snapshot, is constructed entirely with colour and relies little on tonal contrast. All these elements had been anticipated separately by earlier painters, but their combination was new. Many of the techniques the impressionists employed had been taught at academies, though only for sketches (etudes). Sketches were traditionally made outside or on location and then brought back into the studio to be interpreted into more traditional 'finished' paintings. The impressionists dared to present the 'sketches' as finished works.

Monet was the leading proponent of impressionism. His painting Impression - Sunrise of 1872 gave the movement its name. Monet experienced nature as distant things veiled in atmosphere, as vibrations or sensations of light and colour rather than shape or form. All 'content' or subject matter, in the traditional sense, has gone too. Light and atmosphere are the subject. Simply the record of a fleeting moment.

" When you go out and paint, try to forget what object you have before you -- a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives you your own naive expression of the scene you see before you ".

Monet said he wished he had been born blind and then had suddenly gained his sight so that he could have begun to paint in this way without knowing what objects were. He often painted motifs in series; whether it was a haystack or cathedral, it didn't matter to him. He was more concerned with painting light and atmosphere through the minute changes of daylight. Monet believed that it is our knowledge of what we see which falsifies our vision.

Though impressionism was a short lived movement, as younger artists toward the end of the 19th century rejected its self imposed limitations and again began to make art with a sense of elevation and meaning, it is a key moment in art history: It could be argued that Monet and the impressionists are the forefathers of abstraction.

Monet in late life

Frank Auerbach

Mark Rothko

James Turrell

Patrick Heron

Howard Hodgkin