The ARTnews Guide to Post-Impressionism

Any appreciation of Post-Impressionism’s impact on 20th-century art should begin, perhaps, with its most recognizable and formalistic technique: Pointillism, first seen in Georges Seurat’s masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884). Depicting a cross-section of Parisians on a weekend at the eponymous park, La Grande Jatte was painted in a morse code of daubs that were indecipherable at close range but resolved into coherence once viewers took several steps back.

Realizing that if two colors were juxtaposed closely enough they would resolve into a third, Seurat (1859–1891) relied on the eye, rather than the brush, to blend pigments together. He called the process chromoluminarism, which evolved from his readings of the critic Charles Blanc and the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. The idea would become fundamental to Seurat’s work, which he compared more to science than to art.

In essence, Seurat replaced illusionism with optical legerdemain, offering the first hints that the accepted norms of pictorial space were a fiction. He painted bands of dots around his scenes, as he did in La Grande Jatte, and spilled them out onto the frame, as he did in his seascape Evening, Honfleur (1886), to underscore a work’s nature as an object—something that wouldn’t be emphasized again until the second half of the 20th century. Pointillism proved so potent that it fomented a movement in its own right, attracting numerous artists—most notably Paul Signac (1863–1935) and Henri-Edmond Cross (1856–1910).

Signac, who coined the term Neo-Impressionism, was a close friend of Seurat who imbibed the same literature on color theory, resulting in one painting, at least, that was as cutting-edge as anything by Seurat. Titled Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon (1890), it featured a three-quarters-length portrayal of Fénéon, an art critic and dealer, standing in profile against a pinwheeling display of bright colors and motifs that filled the entire background. There’s no sense of depth to speak of, and indeed, Fénéon appears pasted in place like a cutout. Distinguished by a dramatic goatee, he’s dressed in a yellow ochre frock coat, with top hat, gloves, and walking stick in one hand and an orchid gently pinched between forefinger and thumb in the other. The proto-psychedelic swirl behind him was purportedly inspired by a book on Japanese kimono designs. Jaunty and dynamic, Portrait of Félix Fénéon was startlingly avant-garde for its time.

In contrast to Signac, Cross was a latecomer to Pointillism, adopting it only after a decade or so painting in the vein of Édouard Manet. At first, he strictly applied Seurat’s formula to various still lifes, landscapes, and portraits but eventually found it tedious. He began enlarging dots until they became mosaic-like tiles of color whose choice was governed by personal license rather that by Seurat’s empirical rigor. The results would hugely influence the Fauvist work of André Derain and Henri Matisse.

Without a doubt, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was the artist most responsible for bridging Post-Impressionism and early 20th-century art. The facets and fractures of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), for example, would be scarcely imaginable without the precedent of Cézanne’s brushstrokes, which resembled chisel marks or angular splotches, and his dismantling of perspectival conventions.

Cézanne was a contemporary of the Impressionists and participated in their third exhibition, in 1877. But after negative reactions to his submission, he never showed with them again. He painted the first of his celebrated still lifes featuring apples around that time, but he also became known for his renditions of the craggy Mont Sainte-Victoire in the South of France and for figurative studies of bathers that evoked neo-classicism and depictions of stolid men playing cards. In all these works, Cézanne compressed elements into an overall composition that relied on an interplay of warm and cool hues to lead the eye around the canvas—a strategy he called “little sensations.”

Cezanne underscored the materiality of paint, and along with other artists such as Lautrec and Gaugin went far in questioning illusionism. Still, it took an 1890 essay by the artist and critic Maurice Denis (1870–1943) to put these developments into words. Just 19 at the time, Denis, writing under the name Pierre Louis, pointed out that “a painting, before being a battle horse, a nude woman or any anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors in a certain assembled order.” With these words, Denis turned a seemingly obvious fact into a cornerstone for modernism.

Denis’s own paintings minimized details and modeling. His themes were often religious, as in his cryptic Landscape with Green Trees (1893), in which a group of ghostly nuns in white habits proceed single file through a forest of attenuated forms resembling asparagus stalks more than trees. An earlier painting, Le Christ vert (1890), is even more reductive, rendering Jesus on the cross as a scumbled green silhouette on a red and yellow field.

While still a student at the Académie Julian in Paris, Denis helped to organize a group of like-minded artists who called themselves the Nabis. The name, borrowed from the ancient Hebrew term for “prophet,” spoke to their ambition of heralding the arrival of a new kind of art. Two of the most notable artists among them—Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) and Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947)—created landscapes and garden views but were especially renowned for turning ordinary domestic interiors into interiorized realms. Their oeuvres were impacted by Japonisme, and each artist conspicuously featured women in their work.

Vuillard, whose mother was a seamstress, frequently painted women sewing. He also incorporated patterned fabrics and wallpaper into his compositions. He typically overlaid the first onto the second, dissolving the boundary between figure and ground. In The Suitor (1893), for example, the subjects nearly vanish into the setting’s floral decor.

Bonnard likewise diminished spatial recession by using patterns, but he also employed tilted perspectives and ordered his imagery as blocks of color. In a late-career series, he showed his wife stretched out in a bathtub, seen from above. In life she was a recluse, which Bonnard at times would echo by tightly circumscribing her body within the tub, trapping both between sections of tile on the floor and walls that were saturated with vibrating hues.

Post-Impressionism also anticipated the idea of art as a performative projection of the artist’s life, thanks to three figures—Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), and Paul Gaugin (1848–1903)—who explored new ways of linking their art to their own experiences and biographies.

Lautrec’s work, especially his graphic output, became synonymous with La Belle Époque—the “beautiful era” between 1871 and the start of the Great War in 1914, which saw rapid technological and cultural changes accompanied by a ferment in art, literature, fashion, and music. More pertinently for Lautrec, the period also birthed modern nightlife and the demimonde of bars, bistros, brothels, cabarets, clubs, and dance halls of which he was both creature and observer.

The scion of an aristocratic family from the South of France, Lautrec was distinguished by dwarfism at a time when it meant ostracism and derision. He broke both of his legs during childhood, and neither healed properly due to a genetic defect. It left him with a stunted stature that not only scarred him emotionally but also made him a walking signature.

Lautrec presented his slice of Belle Époque Paris as its sordid if beguiling underbelly, where alcohol and prostitution were prevalent temptations. He availed himself of both and, like most bohemians, was particularly fond of absinthe. This potent spirit was often depicted in 19th-century painting, and its green color became part of Lautrec’s palette for numerous paintings and pastels featuring his favorite haunt, the Moulin Rouge. One notable example from 1895, At the Moulin Rouge, includes a dark-emerald backdrop and a woman’s garishly lit face that looks like a chartreuse-tinted mask.

Sex workers frequently populated Lautrec’s work, and while his relationships with them were certainly exploitative, he identified with their marginalized place in society and portrayed them sympathetically. Lautrec also depicted the celebrities of his milieu—the dancers and chanteuses who held the spotlight—as well as the venues that put them there.

The last would figure prominently in Lautrec’s ventures into printmaking, which revolutionized the medium and made him the premier visual chronicler of Paris in the 1890s. Lautrec took advantage of the newly developed technology of chromolithography to produce large color advertisements for cabarets such as Divan Japonais and Chat Noir. Deeply indebted to ukiyo-e woodblock prints from Japan, these ads manifested the popular culture of the era, making Lautrec a sort of ur-Pop artist.

Whatever his achievements and successes as an artist, Lautrec’s life ended badly: He died of complications due to alcoholism and syphilis at age 36, making him an emblem of the artist as tormented outcast. In that regard, however, he was outclassed by Van Gogh, who became the template for that role.

Basically, Van Gogh revived Romanticism’s worship of nature and its power to inspire awe. He took plein air painting to frenetic new heights, employing manic swirls to ignite the sky in Starry Night (1889) and flamelike stabs of yellow to pictorially set Wheatfield with Crows (1890) on fire. Strokes of blues, whites, and greens writhe feverishly in his studies of irises, while in what is believed to be his final self-portrait from 1889 curlicues of similar colors rise like steam around him, as if he were sublimating in front of the viewer.

Correctly or not, the intensity of Van Gogh’s images is often ascribed to his mental illness, the most famous episode of which—a botched attempt to cut off his ear—connects to Gaugin. Younger than Gaugin by five years, Van Gogh viewed him as a mentor. In 1888 he invited Gaugin to join him in the South of France at a house in Arles, where Van Gogh dreamed of establishing an artist collective with Gaugin as its “bishop.” The latter, however, was motivated by money: Van Gogh’s brother, Theo, who acted as both men’s dealer, offered Gaugin a monthly stipend of 150 francs if he moved in with Van Gogh. It proved to be a combustible combination riven by heated arguments. Gaugin lasted only three months before storming out of town, leading to Van Gogh’s rendezvous with the razor.

Their disputes revolved, naturally, around art, with Van Gogh proclaiming that it must be derived from nature and Gaugin insisting on the primacy of the imagination. In Gaugin’s case, flights of artistic fancy required a literal escape from reality, or more precisely, conformity.

After years of working as a stockbroker, and later a tarpaulin salesman, Gaugin notoriously abandoned his wife and five children to pursue art, which took him to destinations far and wide that included Brittany, Panama, and Martinique. His work, however, is most famously associated with his travels to Tahiti, where he first sojourned between 1890 and 1893. Two years later, he relocated to French Polynesia, returning to Tahiti for six years before living out his days on the Marquesas Islands.

If Van Gogh was the poster boy for the artist driven by personal demons, then Gaugin certainly served as same for the middle-aged artist gone native. He lived in thatched huts and took girls as young as 13 as consorts, several of whom bore him children. His penchant for underage females, the persistent rumor that he infected them with syphilis, and his view of French Polynesia as a sensualist’s paradise have blighted his artistic reputation since at least the 1970s (though a newly published biography argues for a more nuanced reading of his life and work).

Gaugin’s barely adolescent lovers also appeared in his paintings, the best known of which, Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), pictures Teha’amana, the first of his three native “wives,” prone and naked on a bed. The titular apparition sits at the far left, hovering behind her.

Stylistically, Spirit embodies Gaugin’s penchant for flattening figures, which he emphasized by outlining them in black—a trope dubbed cloisonnism by the critic Édouard Dujardin due to its resemblance to cloisonné, an enameling technique in which powdered-glass pigments are fired after being organized on a copper plate divided into sections by raised wires.

Spirit also illustrated Gaugin’s mingling of the spiritual with the ordinary, as he did again in The Yellow Christ (1889), a crucifixion scene set in the landscape of Brittany. Portraying three Breton women in traditional dress seated beneath Christ, the piece, much like his other work, took Japonisme in a primitivistic direction.

While otherworldly iconography intruded upon the work of Gaugin and Denis, it became the point of departure for a group of artists known as the Symbolists, whose works resembled allegorical reveries. More than Gaugin himself, the Symbolists, including Odilon Redon (1840–1916) and Gustave Moreau (1826–98), relied on pure imagination for their art.

Redon is the most widely recognized Symbolist thanks to a series of lithographs and charcoals collectively known as “noirs.” The writer and art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans referenced them in Against Nature, his 1884 novel about a decadent aristocratic aesthete who collects Redon prints, and their inclusion in what became a literary succès de scandale helped to elevate the artist’s profile.

Among the most extraordinary of the noirs was The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (1882). Dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe, the image depicts the titular eyeball ascending the sky with a “gondola,” consisting of a head on a platter, suspended underneath. Earlier charcoals such as Guardian Spirit of the Waters (1878)—a giant head floating over a sailboat tacking along the horizon—and The Smiling Spider (1881)—a peculiarly hairy arachnid with a toothy grin—were equally crepuscular, but Redon painted as well. The Cyclops (c. 1914), a retelling of the story of Polyphemus situated within a phantasmagoric landscape, for example, is as colorful as it is unnerving.

The work of Moreau was equally hallucinatory, suffusing references to Greek mythology and the Bible with lysergic energy. Moreau was a great admirer of Théodore Chassériau, a student of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Ingres’s influence is clearly visible in Moreau’s truly strange Oedipus and the Sphinx (1864), which is based on the former’s version of the same subject. Both Oedipus and the Sphinx are depicted upright at the moment she poses her life-or-death riddles, but instead of maintaining a distance, Moreau’s chimera has leapt onto Oedipus’s chest, as if about to sexually assault him while defying gravity.

Equally redolent with perverse eroticism, Moreau’s most famous canvas, The Apparition (1874–76), recasts the New Testament tale of John the Baptist’s head being delivered on a platter to Salome into a delirious apparition of his severed pate floating in front of her barely clothed presence.

As noted above, Surrealism and Expressionism had roots in Post-Impressionism, specifically in the oeuvres of James Ensor (1860–1949) and Edvard Munch (1863–1944); both lived long enough to see the seeds of their work flower into two of modernism’s most momentous movements.

Ensor spent much of his life in Ostend, Belgium, a resort on the Flanders coast. His family ran a gift emporium catering to tourists there, and it was especially busy during the city’s annual carnival, when the shop sold masks to revelers who lent a macabre air to Ostend’s picturesque streets. These items became the iconic components in Ensor’s exploration of the dark undercurrents bubbling beneath fin de siècle Europe.

Ensor broadened Cezanne’s patchy paint handling, using colors inspired by the seashells and other maritime tchotchkes in his parents’ store. The loud palette (which included pinks and bright greens) resulting from this “gleaming opulence,” as Ensor put it, contrasted with the curmudgeonly contempt for humanity that crept into his art along with a generous dollop of self-loathing.

This attitude reaches its apocalyptic apogee in Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888). Transposing Jesus’s triumphal arrival in Jerusalem on Passover eve to the Belgian capital, Christ’s Entry depicts a disorderly mob of heads in gaudy disguises—many of them caricatures of Ensor’s family, officials, and historical personages like the Marquis de Sade. Ensor portrays himself at center as the tiny figure of Christ, sarcastically suggesting his suffering as an overlooked artist.

Ensor’s monstrosities, however, were grounded in reality, a combination of props—masks, costumes, skulls—posed and painted from life. In Masks Confronting Death (1888), for instance, an assembly of the titular items swathed in fabric crowd around an effigy of the Grim Reaper—just a cranium, really, wearing a woman’s hat with a large, white, napkinlike cloth crammed under his chin.

Munch’s neurosis certainly matched, if not exceeded, Ensor’s own and was equally borne out in his work. His childhood was marked by chronic ailments, the untimely demise of a sibling, and a fear of falling victim to a family history of insanity. As Munch himself noted, “From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side.”

That much is evident in the litany of titles (Despair, Melancholy, At the Deathbed), assigned to his paintings and works on paper from the 1890s. These works all share a tendency to depict figures as ectoplasmic forms surrounded by undulating ribbons of color that trap them in a psychological limbo. Nowhere is this truer than in Munch’s chef d’oeuvre, The Scream (1893). A rendering of a wraithlike figure standing on a bridge and howling under an infernal sky, it is indubitably one of art history’s most famous paintings, a veritable incarnation of the human condition transformed by the Industrial Revolution.

However, this interpretation tends to overlook The Scream’s connection to the Romantic sublime and Munch’s own real-life encounter with it. “I was walking along a path with two friends, [when] suddenly the sky turned blood red,” he wrote. “I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.” The Scream, then, is a document of Munch’s epiphany, with its overwhelmed character standing in for himself.

Post-Impressionism spread to Italian art in the form of Divisionism, which adopted Seurat’s theory of chromoluminarism while also politicizing it at times. A massive 1901 canvas by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868–1907), for example, portrays a phalanx of striking workers striding toward the viewer.

Aspects of Post-Impressionism also lingered into the 20th century, including the transfiguration of facture that not only characterized Fauvism, as mentioned previously, but also early examples of Italian Futurism. A pair of paintings by Giacomo Balla from 1912, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash and Child Running on the Balcony, both evince elaborations of Seurat’s dots. More direct allusions to them appear in Picasso’s Synthetic Cubist canvas, Still-Life with Compotier (1914–15).

More directly, Symbolist themes carried on in the work of artists like Gustav Klimt, who elaborated on them by, for instance, injecting aspects of Byzantine art—particularly the use of gold backgrounds—into paintings such as The Kiss (1907–08) and The Embrace (1905–09).

For all of the different directions Post-Impressionism took, its importance grew precisely out of a diversity of styles and temperaments. However varied they were separately, together they led to the greatest transformation of Western art since the Renaissance.