Post-impressionists
Auteur: Guy Cogeval
Nombre de pages: 187 pages
ISBN: 0914427067, 9780914427063
Edition: Tabard Press
Date de publication: Tabard Press
Description: In this work we are introduced to a world in which 112 artists from 16 countries were active in the century after 1860, particularly in France. It deals with individual artists and with successive schools -- Pointillism, Pont-Aven, Nabis, Symbolists, Realists, Expressionists. The author tells the story of how Sensation, Challenge, and Disorientation in the arts reflected violent changes in society and culture in the entire period of Post-Impressionism. At a time when many of its members expressed themselves as suffocating in the mediocre climate of their surroundings, Post-Impressionism released complex, fresh, and vital energies in the arts. Whistler affirmed that "complete artistic freedom clearly went above and beyond the conventions of craft." Cézanne carried forward the exuberant romanticism of Delacroix by depicting fierce aspects of nature that transcended the forms of the leading Impressionists and led to cubism and other experiments of Picasso. Gauguin chose to emphasize basic forms and colors of a savage non-western civilization free from conventions imposed by the Impressionists in order to define his world, thus leading to the Fauves. Van Gogh, as a portraitist, landscapist, and still life painter, created a powerful French Expressionism whose immediate influence has been world-wide. Hypnotizingly disciplined, the achievement of Seurat was a neo-impressionism in the form of Pointillism, an art more precise and structural than the narrative tendency of the Impressionists. With few set theories and rare direct use of models, Toulouse-Lautrec recorded his own individual life-style, largely through the human figure, giving personal freedom of color and composition sensitive and Expressionist lines. Together, these artists and their contemporaries helped prepare the way for increased use of novelty in color and imaginative combination of realism and abstraction, leading to the formulation of rather permissive aesthetic values, which are so prevalent today. -- Inside jacket flaps