Symbols, colors and brushstrokes
OTHER POST-IMPRESSIONISTS
GEORGES SEURAT
Georges Seurat, painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism. Using this technique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Une Baignade, Asnières (1883–84) and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 (1884–86).
After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat turned away from such establishments, instead allying himself with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884 he and other artists (including Maximilien Luce) formed the Societe des Artistes Independants. There he met and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac. Seurat shared his new ideas about pointillism with Signac, who subsequently painted in the same idiom. In the summer of 1884 Seurat began work on his masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which took him two years to complete.
PIERRE BONNARD
Pierre Bonnard, French painter and printmaker, member of the group of artists called Les Nabis and afterward a leader of the Intimists; he is generally regarded as one of the greatest colourists of modern art. His characteristically intimate, sunlit domestic interiors and still lifes include The Dining Room (1913) and Bowl of Fruit (1933).
During the 1890s Bonnard became one of the leading members of the Nabis, a group of artists who specialized in painting intimate domestic scenes as well as decorative curvilinear compositions akin to those produced by painters of the contemporary Art Nouveau movement. Bonnard’s pictures of charming interiors lighted by oil lamps, nudes on voluptuous beds, and Montmartre scenes made him a recorder of France’s Belle Époque. It was typical of his humour and taste for urban life at the time that he illustrated Petites scènes familières and Petit solfège illustré (1893), written by his brother-in-law Claude Terrasse, and executed the lithograph series Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris (“Aspects of Paris Life”), which was issued by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard in 1899. He also contributed illustrations to the celebrated avant-garde review La Revue blanche. A new phase in book illustration was inaugurated with Bonnard’s decoration of the pages in Paul Verlaine’s book of Symbolist poetry, Parallèlement, published by Vollard in 1900. He undertook the illustration of other books during the 1900s.
HENRI DE TOLOUSE-LAUTREC
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, French artist who observed and documented with great psychological insight the personalities and facets of Parisian nightlife and the French world of entertainment in the 1890s. His use of free-flowing, expressive line, often becoming pure arabesque, resulted in highly rhythmical compositions (e.g., In the Circus Fernando: The Ringmaster, 1888). The extreme simplification in outline and movement and the use of large colour areas make his posters some of his most powerful works.
Physically unable to participate in most of the activities typically enjoyed by men of his age, Toulouse-Lautrec immersed himself in his art. He became an important Post-Impressionist painter, art nouveau illustrator, and lithographer; and recorded in his works many details of the late-19th-century bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec also contributed a number of illustrations to the magazine Le Rire during the mid-1890s.
Toulouse-Lautrec was drawn to Montmartre, an area of Paris famous for its bohemian lifestyle and for being the haunt of artists, writers, and philosophers. Tucked deep into Montmartre was the garden of Monsieur Pere Foret where Toulouse-Lautrec executed a series of pleasant plein-air paintings of Carmen Gaudin, the same red-head model who appears in The Laundress (1888). When the nearby Moulin Rouge cabaret opened its doors, Toulouse-Lautrec was commissioned to produce a series of posters. Thereafter, the cabaret reserved a seat for him, and displayed his paintings. Among the well-known works that he painted for the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian nightclubs are depictions of the singer Yvette Guilbert; the dancer Louise Weber, known as the outrageous La Goulue ("The Glutton"), who created the "French Can-Can"; and the much more subtle dancer Jane Avril.
FAMOUS CRITICS
ROGER FRY
Roger Eliot Fry (16 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry". The taste Fry influenced was primarily that of the Anglophone world, and his success lay largely in alerting an educated public to a compelling version of recent artistic developments of the Parisian avant-garde.
FÉLIX FÉNÉON
Félix Fénéon (1861–1944) was an art critic, journalist, publisher, editor, collector, and anarchist. He championed some of history’s most beloved artists before they became well known, including Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani. He became particularly close with Seurat, Signac, and Matisse and coined the term Neo-Impressionism to describe Seurat’s and Signac’s novel use of bright contrasting colors, and pointillism, a dot-by-dot technique, they used to build their landscapes, portraits, and, occasionally, visions of an anarchist utopia. Just as the vivid touches of paint in these works came together to form a cohesive image, so, too, did Fénéon and these artists unify as intellectual partners and close friends to change art history forever.
ARTISTS THAT CONTINUED LEGACY
Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin became an inspiration fo rmany artists that continued their legacy by further experimenting with the style and techniques, forming new movements and giving rise to many other different offshoots. For instance, the specific manner of painting adopted by the Post-Impressionist artists was beoken down and reassambled again in works of Seurat and Signac, founders of Neo-Impressionism and Pointilism. The most obvious influence becomes visible closer to the beginning of the 20th century, as the first Fauvist exhibition marked an end to the Post-Impressionist era.
Deviating more and more from traditional standards of painting, taken up by the wave started with Impressionists, artists strived to find new ways of communicating with the audience, not only presenting a certain scene but also telling a person who looks at the work about their feelings regarding the scene and its objects. This feature was inherited by the Fauvist artists such as Henri Matisse and amplified by extensive use of color. This movement found its place in Germany under the name Die Brücke through the artists such as Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and others, giving rise to a new movement called Expressionism.
Pablo Picasso, a famous Cubist alongside with Georges Braque, called Cezanne 'a father of us all' referring to the fact that the famous Post-Impressionist's revolutionary approach to painting was the reason for all the later avant-garde movements to emerge, including Surrealism and Abstractionism, an engine that drove the train of art revolution to what we can see today.