Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The Art Of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, And Picasso

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What is ‘Post-Impressionism’? This term was invented by the English painter and art critic Mr Roger Fry, to cover various art movements which came after Impressionism, and since some of these movements have been developments of Impressionism, while others have been a reaction from it, confusion can only be avoided by considering separately the principal movements and the artists associated with them.

From the days of Giotto down to the close of the nineteenth century, the development of the main stream of European painting was in the direction of a more perfect representation of the appearances of natural forms. In the nineteenth century two causes contributed to change the direction of painting. One was the invention of Photography, which set painters wondering what part the representative element really played in a picture; the other was the new color science of the Impressionists, who seemed to have pushed truth of representation to a point where further developments were impossible. Ambitious painters sighed, like Alexander, for new worlds to conquer: the problems of foreshortening, of perspective, of the true color of shadows, all had been solved triumphantly by their predecessors. What was there left to be done by a painter who did not wish to imitate the work of any other artist? It was inevitable that a reaction should set in. Painting, had become, as we have seen, a highly complicated and scientific business. A new generation began to argue that, after all, painting was not a science but an art, and that its primary function was not the accurate representation of Nature but the expression of an emotion. A fresh start was made in a new direction. Emphasis was now to be laid on expressing an idea rather than on rendering appearances, and it was held that by reducing the facts of phenomena to a minimum the idea might be able to shine forth more brightly. The vessel of art having become overloaded, it was thought advisable to lighten the ship by throwing some of the cargo overboard.

Already there had been a forerunner in this direction. Honoré Daumier (1808-79), though chiefly known to his contemporaries as a pungent caricaturist and lithographer, also executed oil paintings which have become highly esteemed since his death. These pictures, sometimes satirising the Law Courts whose ‘justice’ roused him to fury, often based on some illuminating incident in the history of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, were unlike any other pictures of his time, and always expressed an idea with a maximum of intellectual force and a minimum of color and pictorial means.

Half a century before his time, he had the courage to eliminate trappings and redundancies from his painting, and to give us plastic conceptions o rugged simplicity. In so doing he anticipated the most interesting and fruitful of modern pictorial movements.

It was from the heart of Impressionism itself that that most powerful reaction began, and the artist usually regarded now as the ‘Father of Post-Impressionism’ is Paul Cézane (1839-1906), who during his lifetime exhibited with the Impressionists and was long thought to be one of them. But though the friend and companion of Pissarro, Renoir, and Monet, Cézanne differed from them in many ways. To begin with, he was a southerner, born at Aix in Provence, while all the others belonged to Northern France; secondly, while accepting their color theories, he never wholly adopted in practice their prismatic palette; thirdly, while they were primarily occupied with registering fugitive effects of light, he was always most concerned with eternal verities. His aim is best explained in his own words: ‘I wish to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the Old Masters.’

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)