c. 1886–1905

Post-Impressionism

Impressionism had captured fleeting light. For a younger generation that was not enough. Cézanne sought the solid order behind things, Van Gogh expression, Gauguin the symbol, Seurat a scientific system of colour. From these four paths emerged the art of the 20th century.

An exhibition that invented a name

November 1910, the Grafton Galleries in London. The critic and painter Roger Fry showed pictures by Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, together with younger Frenchmen such as Matisse and Picasso. The London public laughed; critics spoke of madness and fraud. For the title of the show, Fry reportedly settled on a makeshift solution: “Manet and the Post-Impressionists”.

The term stuck. It denotes neither a group nor a shared style, but a generation of artists who started from Impressionism and moved beyond it. Many of them were already dead by 1910.

Seurat: painting as science

In 1886 the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition included a picture that looked like a counter-proposal. Georges Seurat had worked for two years on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Instead of fleeting brushstrokes, he placed countless small dots of colour side by side, meant to blend only in the viewer’s eye. His basis was the colour theory of scientists such as the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. His strollers on the banks of the Seine look as rigid as figures on an ancient frieze.

That same year the critic Félix Fénéon named the new direction “Neo-Impressionism”. Pointillism found its most important continuator in Paul Signac. Seurat died in 1891, aged only 31.

Van Gogh: colour as feeling

Vincent van Gogh only began to paint seriously at the age of 27. In Paris, from 1886, he encountered the Impressionists and Japanese colour woodcuts; in 1888 he moved to Arles in the south of France. There, in a burst of activity, he painted the Sunflowers, the Yellow House and the Bedroom. Colour was no longer meant to describe but to express emotion. He often applied it thickly, in visible strokes.

In October 1888 Paul Gauguin arrived in Arles. Their time working together ended after about nine weeks in a crisis during which Van Gogh cut off part of his ear. The following year, in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, he painted The Starry Night. On 29 July 1890 he died of a gunshot wound in Auvers-sur-Oise. His letters to his brother Theo are among the most important artists’ testimonies in the history of art.

Gauguin: the search for the primordial

Paul Gauguin had worked as a stockbroker before devoting himself entirely to painting. In Brittany, together with Émile Bernard, he developed a painting of flat areas of colour and dark outlines. Vision after the Sermon of 1888 shows Breton women who see, in their mind’s eye, Jacob wrestling with the angel, set against a brilliant red ground.

In 1891 Gauguin went to Tahiti, and later to the Marquesas Islands, where he died in 1903. There he sought a supposedly unspoilt paradise and created pictures of great chromatic power. Today his work is also viewed critically, because of his colonial gaze and his relationships with very young Tahitian girls. Exhibitions such as the National Gallery’s in London in 2019 have addressed these questions openly.

Cézanne: the construction of pictures

Paul Cézanne worked away from Paris, mainly in Aix-en-Provence. Again and again he painted the same mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, as well as apples, card players and bathers. He is said to have wanted to make of Impressionism “something solid and durable”. His brushstrokes join into planes of colour; objects seem built from blocks, and a picture often shows things from slightly different viewpoints at once.

In a letter of 1904 he advised the young Émile Bernard to treat nature “by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone”. The dealer Ambroise Vollard gave him his first solo exhibition in 1895. After his death in 1906, the Paris Salon d’Automne mounted a large memorial exhibition in 1907. Picasso and Braque studied his pictures closely, and Cubism emerged shortly afterwards.

Montmartre: Toulouse-Lautrec and Valadon

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec drew and painted the nightlife of Montmartre: dancers, singers and brothels. With posters such as Moulin Rouge – La Goulue of 1891, he made lithography an art of the street. Suzanne Valadon first modelled for Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir, then became an important painter and draughtswoman in her own right. In 1894 the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts admitted her as a member.

The road to Germany

German collectors and museum directors were early enthusiasts for the Post-Impressionists. Karl Ernst Osthaus acquired works by Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne for his Folkwang Museum in Hagen; the collection moved to Essen in 1922. In 1912 the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne showed more than a hundred works by Van Gogh and made him a model for the young Expressionists. Under National Socialism, many of these works were confiscated as “degenerate” and sold.

Why it still matters

The four paths of the Post-Impressionists led to the great movements of modernism: Van Gogh influenced Expressionism, Gauguin the Fauves and the Symbolists, Cézanne Cubism, and Seurat the colour theory of abstraction. At the same time, their pictures are today among the most popular in the history of art. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is one of the most visited museums in the Netherlands.