NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
Postimpressionism Postimpressionism was a movement in late- 19 th-century French painting that emphasized the artist's personal response to a subject. Postimpressionism takes its name from an art movement that immediately preceded it: Impressionism. But whereas impressionist painters concentrated on the depiction of a subject's immediate appearance, postimpressionist's focused on emotional or spiritual meanings that the subject might convey. Although impressionist artists interpreted what they saw, their approach nevertheless remained rooted in observation of the natural world. Postimpressionist's conveyed their personal responses to the world around them through the use of strong, unnatural colors and exaggeration or slight distortion of forms. Postimpressionism can be said to have begun in 1886, the year that French painter Georges Seurat exhibited Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jane (1884 - 1886), and to have ended in 1906, the year French painter Paul C'elaine died.
British art critic Roger Fry, however, coined the term postimpressionism, in 1910 when he organized an exhibition of French paintings at the Grafton Galleries in London. Fry is said to have been dissuaded from using the word expressionist to describe the work of C'elaine, Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, and others, and to have finally declared: 'Oh, let's just call them post-impressionists; at any rate, they came after the impressionists. ' The term was firmly established when Fry held a second show of post impressionist art at the Grafton Galleries in 1912. The Postimpressionist's The painters most closely associated with postimpressionism all took part in Fry's first exhibition: C'elaine, Seurat, Gauguin, Matisse, and van Gogh. Although their styles differed greatly from one another, these artists shared an ability to communicate concepts, emotions, or personal sensation through their art. Unlike other postimpressionist's, Paul C'elaine did not create symbolic equivalents between elements of his paintings and particular emotions or concepts. Instead, C'elaine, who began his career as an impressionist, felt that he could communicate the intensity of his personal sensation through his painted observations of nature.
He repeatedly turned to traditional artistic subjects, such as landscapes, still lifes, and nude bathers. However, his rendition of these subjects was far from conventional. The first of C'elaine's three Large Bathers paintings (1894 - 1905) reveal the artist's typical distortions of shape and color. The unnaturally blocky forms of the bathers' bodies conform to the angularity of the trees that frame them. To unify different parts of the composition, he used shades of green, brown, and blue interchangeably in the depiction of sky, earth, flesh, and foliage. The unfinished quality of C'elaine's paintings and his choppy, unbounded brushstrokes convey the immediacy of his personal experience.
His technique appealed strongly to other postimpressionist's seeking ways to evoke emotional responses in viewers. Seurat and van Gogh also drew their subjects from the world around them; Seurat concentrated primarily on the urban life of Paris, while van Gogh focused on rural scenes. The symbolist movement, a literary movement that stressed the expression of the artist's inner vision as the purpose of art, influenced both artists, along with Van Gogh's friend Paul Gauguin. While in Paris in 1886, Vincent van Gogh experimented briefly with neoimpressionism, but found its techniques too restrictive. Instead, he used broader brush strokes and incorporated large zones of single colors into his compositions. A former preacher, van Gogh gave his paintings a spiritual charge through technique, subject matter, and color.
The thick, energetic brushstrokes in Crows in the Wheatfields (1890), which he painted just two and a half weeks before his suicide, suggest turbulence. Dark birds hover in a brilliant blue sky over golden fields. The infusion of black darkens the blue of the sky and evokes a mood of pessimism that seems to reflect the artist's self-doubt and loneliness, which he described in letters to his brother. Impact of Postimpressionism Although the public initially derided exhibitions of post impressionist paintings, postimpressionism had a major impact on later art. Soon after originating in France, postimpressionism attracted followers elsewhere in Europe, including James Ensor in Belgium and Edvard Munch in Norway. German expressionist painters, especially members of a group called Die Br " use, drew strongly on postimpressionism in their use of unnatural colors and distorted forms to convey emotion.
C'elaine's blocky figures and his use of color to build and unify a composition inspired Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and French artist Georges Braque in their development of cubism. Postimpressionism's most significant legacy is a change in attitude toward art making. By placing more value on the artist's response to nature than on efforts to represent nature's appearance, postimpressionist's created the basis for many of the major art movements of the 20 th century. Postimpressionism's emphasis on the subjective rather than objective qualities of an artwork continues to shape our understanding of modern art today. Paul C'elaine (1839 - 1906) The French painter Paul C'elaine, who exhibited little in his lifetime and pursued his interests increasingly in artistic isolation, is regarded today as one of the great forerunners of modern painting. Both for the way that he evolved of putting down on canvas exactly what his eye saw in nature and for the qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass, and color.
C'elaine was a contemporary of the impressionists, but he went beyond their interests in the individual brushstroke and the fall of light onto objects, to create, in his words, " something more solid and durable, like the art of the museums. '' C'elaine was born at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France on Jan. 19, 1839. He went to school in Aix, forming a close friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He also studied law there from 1859 to 1861, but at the same time he continued attending drawing classes. Against the implacable resistance of his father, he made up his mind that he wanted to paint and in 1861 joined Zola in Paris. His father's reluctant consent at that time brought him financial support and, later, a large inheritance on which he could live without difficulty. In Paris he met Camille Pissarro and came to know others of the impressionist group, with whom he would exhibit in 1874 and 1877.
C'elaine, however, remained an outsider to their circle; from 1864 to 1869 he submitted his work to the official SALON and saw it consistently rejected. His paintings of 1865 - 70 form what is usually called his early ''romantic'' period. Extremely personal in character, it deals with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in harsh, somber colors and extremely heavy paintwork. Thereafter, as C'elaine rejected that kind of approach and worked his way out of the obsessions underlying it, his art is conveniently divided into three phases. In the early 1870 s, through a mutually helpful association with Pissarro, with whom he painted outside Paris at Adverse, he assimilated the principles of color and lighting of Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork. Yet he retained his own sense of mass and the interaction of planes, as in House of the Hanged Man.
In the late 1870 s C'elaine entered the phase known as ''constructive, '' characterized by the grouping of parallel, hatched brushstrokes in formations that build up a sense of mass in themselves. He continued in this style until the early 1890 s, when, in his series of paintings titled Card Players (1890 - 92), the upward curvature of the players' backs creates a sense of architectural solidity and thrust. The intervals between figures and objects have the appearance of live cells of space...
Free research essays on topics related to: vincent van gogh, van, french painter, post impressionist, paintings
Research essay sample on Vincent Van Gogh French Painter
