2. Post-Impressionism:
Between Impressionism & Modernism
• Artistic reaction to the Impressionist movement (1870s and 1880s).
• Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne; NOT a group!
• Particular issues, individual sensibility. The link: focus on subjectivity.
• Seurat = a new technique – scientific approach.
• Cézanne = sketchy multiperspectival views.
• Gauguin = fascination with the primitive and exotic.
• Van Gogh = convey human experiences.
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
3. Post-Impressionism:
a Reaction to
Impressionism
• Impressionism = France – late
1870s and 1880s.
• Focus on capturing the effects
of light and fleeting moments in
time.
• Vibrant colors and short, quick
brushstrokes.
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (French:
Impression, soleil levant) 1872, Oil on canvas,
48 cm × 63 cm (8.9 in × 24.8 in). Musée
Marmottan Monet, Paris
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
5. Impressionism:
an Experience
Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, The Portal. Oil on
Canvas. Four canvases Musée d’Orsay, Paris (1894)
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
6. Impressionism: an Experience.
Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral
Museum label + Description
• over 30 canvases - Rouen Cathedral
• 1892 and 1893 rent a studio across
the street
• several canvases for a different
moment of the day and a different
effect of light
• as the Sun moves he would need to
change canvases and then he would
come back to it day after day and
also different weather effects
Aim
• Monet was always interested in
capturing the fleeting effects of
something that he saw but here it’s
become the exact subject of the
painting
• he takes longer and longer to paint it
and to finish it, not outside, but in the
studio
• their subject is really about light and
the way light constructs form
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
7. Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, The Portal. Oil on
Canvas. Four canvases Musée d’Orsay, Paris (1894)
Style (rendering)
• not solid forms; they lack a sense of heavy three-
dimensionality
• His interest in the Gothic Cathedral had to do with
the enormous complexity of the surface: it's the
complexity of light and shadow on the facade
• he’s choosing something very identified with
France: the Gothic style feels to me like there's
something nationalistic here
• effects of different times of day: the morning mist
- the Sun coming out - the heat of the afternoon
• different parts of the cathedral protrude and
recedes in different ways in different light
Results
• mutable experience in that:
- the building is shaped and reshaped by
the way that light hits it
- and that the very architecture is
transformed
- and in a sense it is the triumph of the
optical over the physical
• what Monet seems to be telling us here
in the end of the 19th century is what we
see is what there is that there is truth to
our experiential
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
8. Post-Impressionism:
a Reaction to Impressionism
• 1886! = new methods and styles:
Independent artists including:
• Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges
Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh followed their
own artistic directions.
• 'Post-Impressionism' 1910 - Roger Fry - an
exhibition at London's Grafton Galleries:
'Manet and the Post-Impressionists'
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
9. Trends
Impressionists
• light and color within nature.
• vibrant colors and short, quick
brushstrokes.
Post-Impressionists
• emotional expression,
symbolism, synthetism
geometric structure, and artistic
subjectivity;
• following their own artistic
paths.
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
10. Post-Impressionism:
Trends
•Pointillism =
placing tiny dots of
color side by side
on a canvas.
•From a distance =
optical blend of
color
George Seurat, The Circus, 1891,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
11. Post-Impressionism:
Trends
•Symbolism = they looked for
deep meanings in their subjects
and tried to express them.
•Synthetism = the outward
appearance + the artist's
emotional reaction + peculiar
choices of color, form, and line.
Gauguin, The Yellow Christ, 1889,
Albright-Knox Art Gallery di Buffalo
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
12. Post-Impressionism:
Trends
• Emotion =
-the artist's feelings were
conveyed by intense colors
and brushstrokes;
- the subject's form was
even distorted and its
natural colors altered.
Van Gogh, Yellow House-The Street,
1888, Amsterdam
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
13. Post-Impressionism:
Trends
•Focus on capturing the
geometric form and
structure of the subjects
= cones, spheres, and
cylinders.
•Geometric planes of
color to give their work
depth, harmony, and
unity.
Cezanne, Still Life with Apples, 1895-’98.
MOMA
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
14. Resuming + Test
•Post-Impressionism ushered in an era during
which painting transcended its traditional
role as a window onto the world;
•instead it became a window into the artist's
mind and soul.
•Kahoot!: Assessment
CLIL - Liceo «Agnesi» Milano Silvia Caldarini
