Post-Impressionism

Question 1

Answer 1

Paul Cézanne

• believed impressionists, in their preoccupation with color, neglected form
• everything in nature should be seen in terms of the ‘cylinder, the sphere and the cone”
• painted the Provençal countryside

Mont Ste. Victoire

Turning Road at Montgeroult, 1898

Ignored traditional precepts of perspective, color and narrative to concentrate on harmonizing man-made forms with the geometry he perceived in nature

Question 2

Post-Impressionists

Answer 2

-Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Question 3

Answer 3

Paul Gauguin

-associated with Symbolism

used color of high intensity to suggest emotional qualities rather than produce simple reality

painted Christ on the Cross in a vivid yellow to evoke a sense of searing agony

-The Day of God, 1894

Hit Cézanne’s stride in primitive Tahiti, where he painted semi-imaginary scenes in a blaze of color

Depicts a ceremony performed before an ancient god

Question 4

Answer 4

Vincent van Gogh

• deployed a palette of bold colors, which he laid thickly in short dashes to express his own inner turmoil
• Toward the end of the 19th century, painters increasingly injected their own subjective viewpoints

Portrait of the Superintendent of St. Paul’s Hospital, 1889

A haunting portrait of an official of the mental hospitals to which the artist was committed

Thickly applied, intense colors and emphatic patterns of lines betray the frenetic state of his own emotions

Question 5

Answer 5

Georges Seurat

• codified the Impressionists’ concern with sunlight by inventing a distinctive and methodical technique called pointillism
  pointillism: pure hues applied in tiny dabs of paint to merge not on the canvas but in the viewer’s eye

The Bridge of Courbevoie, 1886

Misty riverside scene epitomizes Pointillism, an approach to capture nature’s reality using a rational system that the Impressionists had explored only intuitively

Question 6

Answer 6

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

• echoed the flat pattern of Japanese art in decorative paintings and lithographs of Paris life
• compiled a record of “La Belle Époque” that has persisted as the portrait of a city at its peak of enjoyment

The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge, 1892

Caught the shape and personality of the demimode with a few lines, flat blocks of color and bold silhouettes

Question 7

Art is no longer for the Academy

Answer 7

-art is no longer for the elite

rise and proliferation of art dealers

increasing coverage of exhibitions by newspapers and journals

boom in the production of art books

“museums without walls”