Monet Sailboats at Argenteuil 1874 Renoir Luncheon of

Monet, Sailboats at Argenteuil, 1874 Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881 IMPRESSIONISM

POST-IMPRESSIONISM Term coined in 1910 for art that comes “after” Impressionism. Dissatisfied with merely transcribing or reproducing nature, Post. Impressionists sought to translate or interpret it, modifying their observations of nature by their personal feelings about it. Thus there is a shift from objectivity, where the impulse comes from the object, to subjectivity, where the impulse comes from the subject—that is, from the artist. Note Gauguin’s revealing statement that “I shut my eyes in order to see. ”

POST-IMPRESSIONISM To simplify matters, it can be said that Post-Impressionism has two wings: • a “left wing, ” comprising artists like Gauguin and Van Gogh, who found Impressionism unsatisfactory because it lacked emotion, imagination, and spirituality; and • a “right wing, ” including Seurat and Cézanne, who found Impressionism unsatisfactory because it seemed to lack a sense of order, permanence, discipline, and timelessness.

Paul Gauguin, The Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888 POST-IMPRESSIONISM Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881 IMPRESSIONISM

Gauguin, 1888 Degas, At the Theater, 1881 POST-IMPRESSIONISM

Gauguin, 1888 Map of France, including Brittany

Gauguin, The Day of the God, 1894 (painted on the Polynesian island of Tahiti, in the South Pacific) In 1891 Gauguin went to live in Tahiti, in order (as he put it) “to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain. . . and to do so with nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true. ”

Gauguin, The Day of the God, 1894

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 -90) Self-Portrait, 1889

Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885 About this crude but famous painting of a family of Belgian coal miners, Van Gogh wrote: “I have tried to emphasize that these people, eating their potatoes by lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor, and how they have honestly earned their food. ”

Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885 Daumier, Third-Class Carriage, 1863 -65

The Potato Eaters The color scheme of the painting has been described by a recent critic as “manure brown, ” or “the brown of dusty spuds”! Detail: note thick impasto

Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

Starry Night, 1889 Self-Portrait, 1889

Starry Night Detail

Van Gogh Monet, detail of Sailboats at Argenteuil

Van Gogh, detail of Starry Night Detail of a painting by Seurat (Seurat’s style goes by several different names: Neo-Impressionism, Divisionism, and—most popularly—Pointillism. )