Cézanne's tilted tables, Van Gogh's brushwork, Gauguin's flat colour, Seurat's dots — four painters who took Impressionism somewhere it had not agreed to go, and who were only grouped together long afterwards.
Post-Impressionism is not a group that met, agreed on anything or exhibited under that name. Tate defines it as the changes in Impressionism from about 1886, which is the year of the last Impressionist group show in Paris.[1]
The name arrived twenty-four years later and from another country. The British artist and critic Roger Fry used it in 1910 for an exhibition he organised in London called Manet and the Post-Impressionists.[1] None of the four painters it is usually applied to had any say in it; two of them were dead by then.
The four are Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh, and what holds them together is a starting point rather than a style. Tate's phrasing is that they developed and extended Impressionism in distinctly different directions.[1] They all began from what the Impressionists had established and none of them stayed there.
It is worth taking the four separately, because the differences are the point.
Cézanne kept painting from nature and did it with more rigour than anyone, wanting, in his own phrase, to redo Poussin from nature.[1] What came out was not more accurate but less: solid, weighted, and built rather than observed.
The Basket of Apples of about 1893 is the demonstration. The Art Institute of Chicago points out what a second look finds: the tabletop does not line up from one side of the cloth to the other, the bottle leans, the apples are mid-cascade, and a tower of langues de chat biscuits stacks at an angle that stops just short of falling out of the picture.[2] The museum calls the effect controlled chaos.[2]
Nothing there is a mistake. A single fixed viewpoint is what he gave up, and once a painter is allowed more than one, the road to Cubism is open.
Seurat went the opposite way, applying a scientific approach to Impressionist light and colour and producing the movement within a movement known as Neo-Impressionism, or Divisionism.[1] Where Impressionism was quick, he was slow; where it was instinctive, he was systematic.
Gauguin kept the intense colour and dropped the naturalism, bringing imagined subjects back into painting after the Impressionists had spent twenty years removing them.[1]
Van Gogh went on painting from nature but developed a use of colour and brushwork so personal that the marks describe his response to the subject as much as the subject itself.[1]
None of this sold easily, and the question of who would hang it is a large part of why the work survived. The Art Institute of Chicago names the few dealers in Paris showing avant-garde painting before the mid-1890s: Père Tanguy, Théo van Gogh at Boussod and Valadon, and Le Barc de Boutteville.[3]
Julien Tanguy sold artists' colours on the rue Clauzel and took paintings in exchange for goods, as well as on deposit to help sell them.[4] For painters with no income that arrangement was the difference between working and not.
Van Gogh painted him at least twice. One portrait is at the Musée Rodin, which is candid about what it does not know: the date and circumstances of Rodin's acquisition are not recorded.[4][5]
Vincent's brother ran a branch of Boussod, Valadon et Cie and began cautiously showing avant-garde artists there in the second half of 1887.[6] Gauguin and the Van Gogh brothers may first have met in that gallery.[6] By December 1887 Gauguin was writing to his wife that the Maison Goupil had become the centre of the Impressionists.[6]
Vollard rented a small shop at 37 rue Laffitte in September 1893 and later moved to a larger one at 39, opening it in 1895 with a Van Gogh exhibition.[3]
In November 1895 he gave Cézanne his first solo exhibition, having obtained about a hundred and fifty works through the painter's son. The Art Institute's assessment of what that show did is blunt: before it, Cézanne had been virtually unknown in Paris.[3] He was fifty-six.
The other route around the official Salon was to build a rival with no jury at all. The Société des Artistes Indépendants was founded on 29 July 1884, and the first article of its statutes set out the principle: the abolition of admission juries. Its motto was Ni Jury, ni Récompense — no jury, no prizes.[7]
Odilon Redon prompted the founding, and Albert Dubois-Pillet, Redon, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac are named among its founders. The first Salon opened on 1 December 1884 near the Palais de l'Industrie, and the society describes it becoming the refuge of the rejected. Seurat showed Une baignade, Asnières there, and Signac the Pont d'Austerlitz.[7]
In May 1889, while the Exposition Universelle filled Paris, Gauguin and his circle mounted a show of their own in a café on the Champ-de-Mars run by a man named Volpini, calling themselves the Impressionist and Synthetist Group.[8]
The exhibitors were Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Émile Schuffenecker, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin, Léon Fauché, Louis Roy and Georges Daniel de Monfreid. A set of Gauguin and Bernard lithographs printed on canary-yellow paper by Edward Ancourt could be seen on request and cost twenty francs.[8]
It converted at least one visitor. Paul Sérusier was won over to the group there, which is the thread that runs from this café to the Nabis and to Symbolist painting.[8]
Painting · Post-Impressionism in Montmartre
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted the customers and performers of the Moulin Rouge as a group portrait of people he knew by name, including himself. It is at the Art Institute of Chicago.
1884
The Société des Artistes Indépendants is founded on 29 July with no admission jury; its first Salon opens on 1 December.
1886
The last Impressionist group exhibition is held in Paris. Tate dates Post-Impressionism from about this year.
1887
Théo van Gogh begins showing avant-garde painters at Boussod, Valadon et Cie in the second half of the year.
1889
Gauguin's circle exhibits as the Impressionist and Synthetist Group at the Café Volpini during the Exposition Universelle.
1892
Toulouse-Lautrec begins At the Moulin Rouge, finished about 1895.
1893
Cézanne paints The Basket of Apples. Ambroise Vollard opens his first shop on the rue Laffitte in September.
1895
Vollard gives Cézanne his first solo exhibition in November, after which the painter stops being unknown in Paris.
1910
Roger Fry organises Manet and the Post-Impressionists in London and coins the term.
The changes made to Impressionism from about 1886, the year of the last Impressionist group show in Paris. Tate applies the term chiefly to Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh, who extended Impressionism in distinctly different directions rather than sharing a single style.
The British artist and critic Roger Fry, in 1910, for an exhibition he organised in London called Manet and the Post-Impressionists. The painters had no part in the naming and it came twenty-four years after the period it describes begins.
Impressionism was broadly a shared project about light and the moment. Post-Impressionism is four painters leaving that project in four directions: Cézanne toward structure and solidity, Seurat toward scientific method, Gauguin toward flat colour and invented subjects, Van Gogh toward brushwork that carries feeling. The label groups them by what they departed from, not by what they had in common.
Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh are the four almost always named. Paul Signac is usually included through Neo-Impressionism, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is often grouped with them, though institutions differ on whether he belongs.
Because its errors are deliberate. The Art Institute of Chicago notes that the tabletop does not align across the cloth, the bottle tilts, and the stacked biscuits lean at an impossible angle — what it calls controlled chaos. Cézanne gave up the single fixed viewpoint that European painting had assumed since the Renaissance, and Cubism followed from that.
The Musée d'Orsay holds the largest concentration, including work by all four painters. The Musée Rodin owns one of Van Gogh's portraits of the colour merchant Père Tanguy, who took paintings in exchange for materials when almost nobody was buying them.
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