SESSION 12 Neo-impressionism and Post-impressionism (Monday 4th November & Tuesday 3rd December) 1. Georges Seurat 1.1. Island of La Grande Jatte 2. Paul Cezanne 2.1. The Basket of Apples c1893, oil on canvas, (65 x 80cm) Art Institute of Chicago 2.2. Mont Sainte-Victoire 1902-04, oil on canvas (73 x 91.9cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art canvas (130 x 162cm) National Gallery 3. Vincent van Gogh 3.1. Hospital at St Remy 3.2. Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles 1888 4. Paul Gauguin 4.1. Vision after the Sermon 4.2. Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892, oil on burlap mounted on canvas, (116 x 134cm) Buffalo, NY 5. Henri Rousseau 5.1. Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) 1891 Oil on 6. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 6.1. At the Moulin Rouge, 1893-95, oil on canvas (123 x 141cm) Art Institute of Chicago 7. Pierre Bonnard 7.1. Women in the Garden (1890-91), in the Japanese kamemono style 7.2. Nude against the light (1908), Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium 8. Edouard Vuillard 8.1. Large Interior with Six Figures 9. Felix Vallotton 9.1. The Visit 1899 Distemper on cardboard (55 x 87cm) Kunthaus, Zurich By the 1880s some artists were attempting to move forward from the rather narrow, imitative style of Claude Monet and his followers. Artists such Georges Seurat began to make the short brushstrokes of Impressionism into a more objective regular size – eventually dots of colour (Neo-Impressionism). In 1910, Roger Fry needed a collective noun for the artists he was presenting at the Grafton Gallery in London – and invented the term ‘Post-Impressionist’ which has stuck. The problem for us struggling to comprehend the story of modern art is that they had disparate objectives and employed very disparate techniques, yet their influences on 20th Century painting was immense. Georges Seurat in Island of the Grand Jatte uses a new technique (Divisionism or Pointillism or Chromoluminarism) that he recently invented of getting the viewer’s eye to do the ‘colour mixing’ of pure dots of primary colours. Artists since Leonardo had known that putting complementary colours (eg red and green) adjacent to each other would make the red ‘redder’ and the green ‘greener’. Seurat’s innovation was to add the dots, without touching, on a pure white background to give a shimmering, vibrant surface. The painting includes nearly 50 people, eight boats, three dogs, numerous trees and a monkey. The figures are reminiscent of ancient Egyptian friezes; do we see Parisians enjoying a leisurely Sunday outing – or as the Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch, saw “one single mosaic of boredom”? Paul Cezanne is sometimes called ‘The father of modern art’ – these titles are open to challenge but his work had undoubted influence over major artists of the early 20th century such as Picasso and paved the way for modernism. The Impressionists tried to capture the changing effects of light, at the expense of solid ‘form’ – Cezanne tried to encapsulate form as experienced by the ‘sensations’ of the viewer. One example would be his recognition that we have two eyes – and the ‘image’ they capture is slightly different. He worked very slowly (ignoring ephemeral changes) -using methodical carefully selected brushstrokes to ‘construct’ a picture – attempting to give every portion of the canvas a contribution to an overall structural integrity. When we look we move our heads– we are not bound by the single point linear perspective that had held sway since the 15th Century. A still life, such as The Basket of Apples, provided a subject where these ideas could be explored. He repeatedly painted very similar still lifes, and repeatedly painted Mont Saint-Victoire – using almost geometrical shapes to ‘carve out’ and image. Van Gogh also used carefully applied directional brushstrokes, but to display an emotional response, to give ‘expression to’, and to give a unity to the whole painting together. Looking at a slide of Hospital at St Remy isn’t entirely satisfactory – we cannot appreciate how the brightly coloured paint has been caked onto the canvas to give a three dimensional property to the work. (We have seen something like this with Velazquez and Rembrandt’s late self portraits). Café Terrace on the Place du Forum illustrates ‘simultaneous contrast’ between complementary colours rather well; for example, the orange rear windows next to pure ultramarine can give shimmering glow to the windows. The late 19th Century saw an upturn in ‘symbolist’ art and literature – a focus on dreamlike imagery. Vision after the Sermon is sometimes identified as the first real Symbolist painting – true or not, it is probably Paul Gaugin’s first. He was fascinated by the religiosity of Breton women and their headdresses. The influence of decorative Japanese prints is apparent – the flat areas of pure colour, the branch dividing the ‘real’ from ‘visionary’ world, and the posture of the wrestlers in the style of Hokusai’s manga drawings. Gaugin’s style (sometimes referred to ‘Synthetism’) relied on working from memory more than nature, with vivid colour schemes express emotion not natural hues. He famously sought out a less ‘artificial’ lifestyle by emigrating to Tahiti – and Spirit of the Dead Watching portrays his thirteen-year-old consort apparently (according to his account) lying terrified in the presence of the spirit of an old lady. Without admiring the man, we may admire his use of colours and undulating horizontal lines to create the atmosphere inside the hut and of the fearful girl. Henri Rousseau (Le Dounier) also had a taste for the exotic – but despite his fantasies probably never left France, his knowledge of jungles relied on visits to zoos and hot-houses. A ‘Sunday’ painter, a naif, he took advantage of the fairly open access to the ‘new’ art exhibitions; despite the almost childlike disregard for the compositional skills of trained artists his work was taken up by them – and they seem to have a genuine affection for him and his work. Surprise! is fairly typical, and I think does have its idiosyncratic charm. If Van Gogh epitomises the largely mythological ‘mad genius’, then Toulouse-Lautrec was the archetypal ‘bohemian artist’ and his posters in particular have become a symbol for fin-de -siècle Paris. At the Moulin Rouge is one of his genre paintings of Parisian night life with their mixture of glamour and seediness and includes portraits of the cabaret’s regular clientele. The startling effects of the new electric lights give a spooky greenish glow to the face of the English dancer, May Milton, and the group around the cabaret’s floor table include two photographers. He, like Degas and others, was heavily influenced by Ukiyo-E `Japanese prints – and the painting reflects their asymmetric composition. The Nabis (Hebrew for ‘prophets’) were one of the Post-Impressionist art groups of the Ecole de Paris. They dabbled with the trends in Symbolism and Mysticism that were significant in the late 19th Century [we need to examine these more closely sometime] and were influenced by Gauguin in particular. Realism was set aside for the emotional use of colour and for decorative symbolism. Pierre Bonnard is considered one of the most important artists of the Nabis, and Women in the Garden is an early example of his more decorative works – flat colourful silhouettes on a flat background. The influence of Japanese decorative panels is obvious, and originally, he seems to have conceived them as part of a screen. Like many others Bonnard was a keen amateur photographer and used snaphots of his naked model, mistress and then wife, Marthe, as studies of the casual female form for paintings such as Nude Against the Light. In the background form is sacrificed for the expressive joy of colour. Édouard Vuillard was similarly entranced by the decorative possibilities of pattern and colour but Large Interior with Six Figures also portrays a personal family drama. Vuillard’s sister, Marie, is portrayed on far right, blending into the corner of the room, while her seated mother confronts her husband’s mistress standing in front of her. The complex pattern of furnishings and. distorted perspectives create an unsettling ambience to what must have been an uncomfortable evening. The Swiss artist Felix Vallotton is probably better known on the continent than in this country. The Visit was one of the paintings in a London exhibition this Summer. I like the power of the flat areas of colour and the narrative suspense, typical of his scenes of forbidden love and heartbreak. © Patrick Imrie 2019 .