Effect Of Postimpressionists On The Next Generatio Essay Example For Students

Effect Of Postimpressionists On The Next Generatio Essay nPostimpressionism Postimpressionism was a movement in late-19th-century French painting that emphasized the artists personal response to a subject. Postimpressionism takes its name from an art movement that immediately preceded it: Impressionism. But whereas impressionist painters concentrated on the depiction of a subjects immediate appearance, postimpressionists focused on emotional or spiritual meanings that the subject might convey. Although impressionist artists interpreted what they saw, their approach nevertheless remained rooted in observation of the natural world. Postimpressionists conveyed their personal responses to the world around them through the use of strong, unnatural colors and exaggeration or slight distortion of forms. Postimpressionism can be said to have begun in 1886, the year that French painter Georges Seurat exhibited Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886), and to have ended in 1906, the year French painter Paul Czanne died. British art critic Roger Fry, however, coined the term postimpressionism, in 1910 when he organized an exhibition of French paintings at the Grafton Galleries in London. Fry is said to have been dissuaded from using the word expressionist to describe the work of Czanne, Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, and others, and to have finally declared: Oh, lets just call them post-impressionists; at any rate, they came after the impressionists. The term was firmly established when Fry held a second show of postimpressionist art at the Grafton Galleries in 1912. The PostimpressionistsThe painters most closely associated with postimpressionism all took part in Frys first exhibition: Czanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Matisse, and van Gogh. Although their styles differed greatly from one another, these artists shared an ability to communicate concepts, emotions, or personal sensation through their art. Unlike other postimpressionists, Paul Czanne did not create symbolic equivalents between elements of his paintings and particular emotions or concepts. Instead, Czanne, who began his career as an impressionist, felt that he could communicate the intensity of his personal sensation through his painted observations of nature. He repeatedly turned to traditional artistic subjects, such as landscapes, still lifes, and nude bathers. However, his rendition of these subjects was far from conventional. The first of Czannes three Large Bathers paintings (1894-1905) reveal the artists typical distortions of shape and color. The unnaturally blocky forms of the bathe rs bodies conform to the angularity of the trees that frame them. To unify different parts of the composition, he used shades of green, brown, and blue interchangeably in the depiction of sky, earth, flesh, and foliage. The unfinished quality of Czannes paintings and his choppy, unblended brushstrokes convey the immediacy of his personal experience. His technique appealed strongly to other postimpressionists seeking ways to evoke emotional responses in viewers. Seurat and van Gogh also drew their subjects from the world around them; Seurat concentrated primarily on the urban life of Paris, while van Gogh focused on rural scenes. The symbolist movement, a literary movement that stressed the expression of the artists inner vision as the purpose of art, influenced both artists, along with Van Goghs friend Paul Gauguin. While in Paris in 1886, Vincent van Gogh experimented briefly with neoimpressionism, but found its techniques too restrictive. Instead, he used broader brush strokes and incorporated large zones of single colors into his compositions. A former preacher, van Gogh gave his paintings a spiritual charge through technique, subject matter, and color. The thick, energetic brushstrokes in Crows in the Wheatfields (1890), which he painted just two and a half weeks before his suicide, suggest turbulence. Dark birds hover in a brilliant blue sky over golden fields. The infusion of black darkens the blue of the sky and evokes a mood of pessimism that seems to reflect the artists self-doubt and loneliness, which he described in letters to his brother. Impact of PostimpressionismAlthough the public initially derided exhibitions of postimpressionist paintings, postimpressionism had a major impact on later art. Soon after originating in France, postimpressionism attracted followers elsewhere in Europe, including James Ensor in Belgium and Edvard Munch in Norway. German expressionist painters, especially members of a group called Die Brcke, drew strongly on postimp ressionism in their use of unnatural colors and distorted forms to convey emotion. Czannes blocky figures and his use of color to build and unify a composition inspired Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and French artist Georges Braque in their development of cubism. Postimpressionisms most significant legacy is a change in attitude toward art making. By placing more value on the artists response to nature than on efforts to represent natures appearance, postimpressionists created the basis for many of the major art movements of the 20th century. Postimpressionisms emphasis on the subjective rather than objective qualities of an artwork continues to shape our understanding of modern art today. Paul Czanne(1839-1906)The French painter Paul Czanne, who exhibited little in his lifetime and pursued his interests increasingly in artistic isolation, is regarded today as one of the great forerunners of modern painting. Both for the way that he evolved of putting down on canvas exactly what his eye saw in nature and for the qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass, and color. Czanne was a contemporary of the impressionists, but he went beyond their interests in the individual brushstroke and the fall of light onto objects, to create, in his words, something more solid and durable, like the art of the museums. Czanne was born at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France on Jan. 19, 1839. He went to school in Aix, forming a close friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He also studied law there from 1859 to 1861, but at the same time he continued attending drawing classes. Against the implacable resistance of his father, he made up his min d that he wanted to paint and in 1861 joined Zola in Paris. His fathers reluctant consent at that time brought him financial support and, later, a large inheritance on which he could live without difficulty. In Paris he met Camille Pissarro and came to know others of the impressionist group, with whom he would exhibit in 1874 and 1877. Czanne, however, remained an outsider to their circle; from 1864 to 1869 he submitted his work to the official SALON and saw it consistently rejected. His paintings of 1865-70 form what is usually called his early romantic period. Extremely personal in character, it deals with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in harsh, somber colors and extremely heavy paintwork. Thereafter, as Czanne rejected that kind of approach and worked his way out of the obsessions underlying it, his art is conveniently divided into three phases. In the early 1870s, through a mutually helpful association with Pissarro, with whom he painted outside Paris at Auvers, he as similated the principles of color and lighting of Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork. Yet he retained his own sense of mass and the interaction of planes, as in House of the Hanged Man. In the late 1870s Czanne entered the phase known as constructive, characterized by the grouping of parallel, hatched brushstrokes in formations that build up a sense of mass in themselves. He continued in this style until the early 1890s, when, in his series of paintings titled Card Players (1890-92), the upward curvature of the players backs creates a sense of architectural solidity and thrust. The intervals between figures and objects have the appearance of live cells of space and atmosphere. Finally, living as a solitary in Aix rather than alternating between the south and Paris, Czanne moved into his late phase. Now he concentrated on a few basic subjects: still lifes of studio objects built around such recurring elements as apples, statuary, and tablecloths; studies of bathers, based upon the male model and drawing upon a combination of memory, earlier studies, and sources in the art of the past; and successive views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, a nearby landmark, painted from his studio looking across the intervening valley. The landscapes of the final years, much affected by Czannes contemporaneous practice in watercolor, have a more transparent and unfinished look, while the last figure paintings are at once more somber and spiritual in mood. By the time of his death on Oct. 22, 1906, Czannes art had begun to be shown and seen across Europe, and it became a fundamental influence on the Fauvists, the cubists, and virtually all advanced art of the early 20th century. Czanne is not an easy man to love, but professors and painters adore him. Art critics lavish him with superlatives, including a prophet of the 20th century, the most sensitive painter of his time, the greatest artist of the 19th century, and the father of modern art. But hes not quite a household name, and his posters have never been best sellers at museum shops around the world. In fact, most non-professionals wouldnt stand a chance of recognizing a Czanne unless it was clearly labelled. Even then, theres no guarantee of appeal. Not that poster sales determine an artists stature, but they do reveal something about the accessibility of his work. Czannes pictures are restrained, impersonal and remote they dont have the gut-wrenching appeal of van Goghs portraits, even before he cut off part of his ear. They cant compete with Monets lush expanses of waterlilies or Renoirs sensuous women with their come-hither looks. And lets face it, bowls of fruit and the hills and trees of Provence, where Czanne spent most of his life, are a hard sell against the Tahitian backdrops of Gauguin, with or without the naked women. Czanne is an artists artist. He was obsessed with form rather than content, so subject matter was always secondary to the act of painting itself. He wanted the methods and skills of the painter to be more important than the image. That meant the subject of the painting couldnt be so dynamic as to overshadow the artists act of creation. The more he concentrated on this, the less viewer-friendly his works became. But that suited his personality just fine. His goal was not to have a mass audience or sales appeal, it was t o satisfy himself. Czanne was a brooding, complex man, given to rages, grudges and depressions. He had few friends, and those he had he alienated. Even when success finally caught up with him, he was dogged by feelings of inadequacy. Hurricane Gilbert EssayAfter Cubism, the world never looked the same again: it was one of the most influential and revolutionary movements in art. The Spaniard Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges Braque splintered the visual world not wantonly, but sensuously and beautifully with their new art. They provided what we could almost call a Gods-eye view of reality: every aspect of the whole subject, seen simultaneously in a single dimension. The main influence for this art form probably came from Czannes style of reducing forms to their essential planes and geometric shapes. The Cubist movement in painting was developed by Picasso and Braque around 1907 and became a major influence on Western art. The artists chose to break down the subjects they were painting into a number of facets, showing several different aspects of one object simultaneously. The work up to 1912 is known as Analytical Cubism, concentrating on geometrical forms using subdued colors. The second phase, known as Synthetic Cubism, used more decorative shapes, stencilling, collage, and brighter colors. It was then that artists such as Picasso and Braque started to use pieces of cut-up newspaper in their paintings. An early 20th-century school of painting and sculpture in which the subject matter is portrayed by geometric forms without realistic detail, stressing abstract form at the expense of other pictorial elements largely by use of intersecting often transparent cubes and cones. Czanne influenced cubism, the highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created pri ncipally by Picasso and Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitation of nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously. this has been collected from various resources on the net ibiblio.org, among others