Post-Impressionism is not a single style but a convenient label for the diverse paths that several brilliant artists carved out of Impressionism’s legacy in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The term was coined retrospectively by the English critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe a group of painters who accepted Impressionism’s liberation of color and brushwork but felt the movement had sacrificed too much: structure, emotional depth, symbolic meaning, and the enduring solidity of form. Each of the major Post-Impressionists, Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Georges Seurat, took the Impressionist revolution in a radically different direction, and each, in doing so, planted the seeds of a different branch of twentieth-century modernism.
Paul Cezanne, working in relative isolation in Provence, undertook perhaps the most profound rethinking of pictorial space since the Renaissance. Dissatisfied with Impressionism’s tendency to dissolve solid forms into flickering light, he sought to “make of Impressionism something solid and enduring, like the art of the museums.” His method was painstaking: he analyzed the visible world into interlocking planes of color, building up landscapes, still lifes, and portraits through small, deliberate brushstrokes that simultaneously describe form, suggest depth, and assert the flatness of the canvas surface. His many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire show a mountain that is at once a geological mass and an architectural construction of colored facets. Cezanne’s innovations pointed directly toward Cubism; Picasso and Braque would later call him “the father of us all.”
Vincent van Gogh arrived at his mature style through a very different kind of urgency. After years of struggle in the Netherlands and Paris, he moved to Arles in the south of France in 1888, where the intense Mediterranean light ignited his palette. Van Gogh used color not to describe appearances but to express emotions: chrome yellow for the warmth of friendship and hope, deep blue for infinity and sorrow, vermilion for passion. His brushwork, thick impasto strokes that seem to writhe and pulse across the canvas, transforms the visible world into a field of raw feeling. The Starry Night, painted during his stay at the asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, renders the night sky as a turbulent sea of swirling energy, the stars blazing like suns, the cypress tree reaching upward like a dark flame. Van Gogh’s fusion of intense personal emotion with bold formal invention made him the forefather of Expressionism and one of the most beloved artists in history.
Paul Gauguin pursued meaning in an entirely different direction, abandoning European civilization for what he believed to be more authentic, primal cultures. After a brief and disastrous stay with Van Gogh in Arles, Gauguin traveled first to Brittany, where he developed a style of flat, boldly outlined color areas inspired by stained glass and Japanese prints, and then to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. His monumental painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897), created during a period of profound despair, reads from right to left as an allegory of human life from birth to death, rendered in the rich, saturated hues and simplified forms of his Polynesian paintings. Gauguin’s embrace of non-Western art and his belief that color and form could communicate directly, without the intermediary of realistic representation, paved the way for Fauvism, Symbolism, and the broader modernist fascination with so-called “primitive” art.
Georges Seurat took still another path, applying a scientific rigor to the Impressionist study of color and light. Drawing on the color theories of Michel-Eugene Chevreul and Ogden Rood, he developed Pointillism (which he preferred to call Divisionism): a technique of applying tiny dots of pure color side by side, allowing the viewer’s eye to blend them optically at a distance. His masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, is a monumental composition of Parisians at leisure, every figure frozen in a stately, almost Egyptian stillness, every surface built from thousands of minute color points. The result is simultaneously luminous and hieratic, modern and timeless. Seurat died at only thirty-one, but his systematic approach to color and composition influenced the Fauves, the Futurists, and ultimately the entire tradition of geometric abstraction. Taken together, the Post-Impressionists demonstrated that the liberation Impressionism had achieved was not an endpoint but a beginning, the gateway to the explosive diversity of modern art.
