Personality Types:
Objective:- Person who seek to find order and meaning in situations.
Ce'zanne:- concentrates on composition and structure in his pictures
Seurat:- Composition plus a scientific use of colour.
Subjective:- Person who reacts emotionally to situations.
Van Gogh:- Highly emotional, uses his painting for release of tension and stress.
Gauguin:- Drops out of society, lives in Tahiti, uses colour for its visual pleasure experience.
The Post Impressionist painters reacted against the vague formless nature which impressionism had assumed. They sought to add something substantial to what had become a superficial and empty formula - a technique for its own sake. Four painters - Ce'zanne, Seurat, Van Gogh and Gauguin, although not a group and each following his own path comprised the Post Impressionist movement.
Ce'zanne and Seurat reestablished structure and composition in painting - an intellectual approach- which led to later Cubism and abstraction, while Van Gogh and Gauguin founded the highly personal and emotional approach which led to Expressionism.
Ce'zanne
(1839 to 1906) as a young man painted dark somber paintings with thick
paint in the manner of Romanticism. He became in contact with the Impressionists
and began painting outdoors using a lighter palette and the broken colour
technique.
Tiring of an empty Impressionism, Ce'zanne began building into his work a structure of lines of composition akin to the Renaissance and Classical painters in the calm stability so developed.
Unlike the Old masters, he did not apply scientific rules of perspective or light and shade but obtained recession by organizing objects into advancing and receding lines and planes, and gained solidity by modeling with advancing warm and receding cool colour.
Where necessary he distorted or rearranged to strengthen the composition which sent the Cubists in search of structural form regardless of subject matter.
The
other painter to reestablish classical structure in painting was Seurat
(1859 to 1891). Seurat's paintings are of a wholly intellectual nature
and as a result are somewhat cold and unemotional. His composition was carefully
calculated on geometric lines and proportions with objects so placed that
any change would upset the pictures balance.
Seurat's technique - "divisionism" or "pointillism" - consisted of building up colours and tones of tiny points of pure colour arranged in such proportions as to give the required effect when blended by the eye. In this way a clear luminous colouring was obtained without the heavy pant quality of Impressionism, and a carefully modeled form was achieved. At various times other artists, notably Signae and Pissarro practiced pointillism.
Vincent
Van Gogh (1853 to 1890) was a Dutchman with an early academic training
and a religious fervor so strong that he practiced as a preacher. His early
paintings depicted the poverty and dreary existence of the coal miners and
farmers of Belgium. Failures in business, preaching and painting worked on
his high strung temperament and the added excitement of life in Paris unhinged
his mind. He met the Impressionists and like Ce'zanne, lightened his palette,
adopting the broken colour technique. Van Gogh moved south to France where
he had his first fit of madness. As madness became more frequently he began
to give vent to his emotions with swirling violent brushwork and thick raw
paint giving the most simple of objects a demoniac energy. The distortion
and vigorous technique inspired the Expressionist school of painters.
Gauguin
(1848 to 1903) Until the age of 35, Gauguin was a well-to-do share broker's
clerk, but left his wife and family to become a full time painter and sink
to eventual poverty. He thought that Impressionism had defiled art and sought
to establish new values - what he called Synthesism in which he sought a
balance of simplified form and flat colour calculated for emotional effect
rather than natural colouring.
Disgusted with the artificiality of civilization, Gauguin went to Tahiti where he abandoned western conventions, living the simple life of the Islanders.
His work conveys, with a simple nobility, the primitive life close to nature in terms of colour and shape. He rejected the illusory tricks of perspective, modeling, spatial depth and all unnecessary detail to create simple patterns of colour which the Fauves later made their inspiration.