Post Impressionism

Vincent Van Gogh

Paul Cezanne

Paul Gauguin

Vincent Van Gogh 1853 -1890

• Van Gogh was born in Belgium but moved to Paris, where his brother Theo worked as an art dealer.

• There, Van Gogh discovered the work of the Impressionists, which had an enormous influence on his painting.

• He began to use brighter colours and more energetic brushstrokes.

• Compare his early work, The Potato Eaters, with one of his many images of sunflowers

• This self portrait shows Van Gogh’s characteristic bright colours, bold brush work and thick application of paint (impasto)

Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh - Irises

Van Gogh – The Starry Night

• The Starry Night is probably Van Gogh’s best known painting.

• In this work you see the twisting brushstrokes of the cypress trees and the finger work that give the painting its incredible energy and forcefulness.

• The swirling, sweeping brushstrokes in the sky create movement and drama and express Van Gogh’s sympathetic response to the forces of nature.

Starry Night Over the Rhone

• • Van Gogh

• Café at Night

Van Gogh - Siesta

Van Gogh – Room at Arles

Van Gogh – self portrait with a bandaged ear

Crows in a Wheatfield

• Despite his genius, Van Gogh suffered from epileptic seizures and depression for most of his adult life.

• Despite the continual loving support of his brother, Van Gogh became mentally unstable. After he was rejected by a lover, he tried to cut off his ear and send it to her as an expression of his despair.

• On a July evening in 1890, he walked into a wheat field and shot himself. He died two days later. He was just 37 years old.

• He had sold only one painting in his lifetime. His works now number among the most valuable in the world.

Van Gogh – Crows in a WheatfieldThis final painting was completed

just days before his suicide.

Paul Cezanne

1839 - 1906

• Cezanne painted and showed with the Impressionists, but began to believe that Impressionist work lacked the structure and solidity of the old masters.

• While he revered the old masters, he did not want painting to return to realism. He was the first to reverse the trend toward realism that began with Giotto in the 14th century.

• He searched for another way to restore that missing structure. His method involved using flat patches of colour to represent the planes of objects.

• Think of a curving wall made of bricks, with each brick at a slightly different angle. Cezanne would use a separate stroke, in a separate colour to represent each “brick” of a curving surface, whether it was an apple or a face.

• He began his experiments with still life objects, which he could study at length.

• His still life paintings are carefully composed so that the objects balance and complement each other.

Still Life with Curtain and Flowered Pitcher

Still Life with Apples

Still Life with Onions and a Bottle

• Cezanne’s “building block” method is evident in his many paintings of Mt. St. Victoire as well (more than sixty).

Mt. St. Victoire

Mt. St. Victoire - 1886

Paul Cezanne – Mt. St. Victoire

Cezanne – The Card Players

• Cezanne’s figures do not shimmer or dissolve in the light like those of Renoir or Monet.

• These card players have an almost sculptural solidity to them. Their clothing looks stiff and heavy. This gave them the weight and solidity and monumentality that Cezanne wanted in his paintings.

Cezanne – Boy in a Red Vest

Cezanne – Woman in a Green Hat

• One day, while he was painting in the fields, it began to rain. Cezanne refused to stop working and finally collapsed from exposure.

• He was taken home by a man passing in a cart, but died a few days later of pneumonia.

Paul Gauguin

1848 - 1903

Gauguin – Les Miserables

• Gauguin gave up a successful career as a broker in Paris to become a painter.

• His family was reduced to poverty, but he was convinced that he would be a great painter, and he moved to the South Pacific to find the exotic settings he wanted to paint.

• In Tahiti, Gauguin found the intense hot colours that characterize his work.

• Broad areas of flat colour are apparent in many of his paintings. He was less interested in creating the illusion of depth or three dimensional objects and people than he was in creating beautifully designed images.

• His flat colourful shapes, and curving contour lines produce rich, decorative patterns.

Jacob Wrestling with an Angel

Fatata ti Miti – By the Sea

Gauguin – Spirit of the Dead Watching

Spirit of the Dead Watching

• This haunting image shows a young Maori girl lying on a bed, while a black robed figure in the background gazes at her.

• Gauguin explained that the Maori people believed they were watched by the spirits of the dead and were fearful of these ghosts.

• Notice that the girl’s figure is modeled in three dimensions but the bed she lies on appears as a flat two dimensional shape.

• Gauguin did not feel he had to be a slave to realism; he would use naturalism when it suited his purposes, but did not always feel it was necessary.

• Gauguin succeeded in freeing himself, and the artists who followed him, from the idea of copying nature. After Gauguin, artists no longer hesitated to use colour as it suited them.