Hi,
Welcome to Looking Around Boston, a weekly newsletter about art and culture in Boston and beyond. If you aren’t already signed up, you can do that here.
Today I thought I’d write a follow-up to last week’s newsletter, which was about everyone’s faves, the Impressionists. If you missed it, you can read all about them here.
The Impressionists were so influential that art historians call the period immediately following Impressionism “post-Impressionism,” to mark how closely the two styles are related and how one birthed the other. Of course, with the perspective of nearly 150 years, we can acknowledge that movements in art history aren’t always clearly delineated and can sometimes bleed into one another. But as we’ll see, post-Impressionism did develop out of the ideas and styles the Impressionists had originated.
Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Most scholars mark the post-Impressionist period from the mid-1880s (a decade and a half after the first Impressionist show) to around 1905 (when Fauvism, the next big movement in French art, began). As with the Impressionists, most of the well-known post-Impressionist artists are French and male. Unlike the earlier group, though, the post-Impressionists weren’t an organized group of artists working together—they didn’t come together for group shows, and many had wildly diverging styles.
Recall from last week that the Impressionists had broken the rules of formal painting, producing fleeting glimpses of natural scenes that weren’t measured against the standard of photorealism. The post-Impressionists continued to push the boundaries of conventional art. They were even less concerned with naturalism than their predecessors; painters like Van Gogh often used unrealistic colors and forms to convey a heightened sense of emotion. This unconventional use of exaggerated or distorted shapes and colors was the precursor to Cubism, and later, twentieth-century abstract painting.
Post-Impressionists, like the Impressionists, weren’t afraid to show viewers the paint on their canvas. Where earlier painters would try to artfully hide their brushstrokes, you can easily see each painter’s technique in the below images—and in some cases (Van Gogh), the actual paint on the canvas in three-dimensional layers. It’s a great example of why you should see art in person whenever you can…though we’ll have to make do with computer screens for now.
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-86. The Art Institute of Chicago.
Just as the post-Impressionist artists were less of a coherent group in real life than the Impressionists, they also used a wider variety of techniques and styles in their painting. Georges Seurat, the Pointillist painter who created Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte with a million tiny dots, belongs to the same artistic movement as Vincent Van Gogh’s swirling The Starry Night and Paul Cezanne’s angular still lifes of fruit. That’s what I love about this time period—the freedom that artists felt to experiment and come up with new ways to use paint and canvas to convey emotion.
Here are some of the leading post-Impressionist artists, and examples of their work that you can find on the walls of the MFA in Boston when social distancing is over.
Vincent Van Gogh, Houses at Auvers, 1890. Like many of Van Gogh’s paintings, this one is an explosion of colors, shapes, and lines. I love the curly treetops sprinkled throughout the painting. It’s also one of the less unnerving pieces Van Gogh made in Auvers before he took his own life, just a few months after this painting was completed.
Paul Gauguin, Landscape with Two Breton Women, 1889. Paul Gauguin’s work is languid, dreamlike, and beautiful. He also has a track record of fetishizing other cultures, specifically women from other cultures, that he saw as “simpler” and less caught up in the sophistication of the city—like these French peasants.
Paul Cezanne, Fruit and a Jug on a Table, 1890-94. Surrounded by Impressionist and post-Impressionist landscapes and figures in a museum gallery, it’s easy for the eye to skate over a Cezanne still life. But don’t—you’d be missing so much. Look at the way he uses the slanted table to play with space and perspective, and color with the white sheet (that he paints with almost no white at all).
That’s all for today. Let me know what you think of these, and if you have any post-Impressionist faves of your own, please share with us in comments.
Stay safe,
Cordelia