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Understanding Post – Impressionist Art

Edvard Munch said that “Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye… It also includes the internal images engraved in the soul.”

Indeed, nothing could be truer when looking at the works of the (so-called) Post-Impressionist artists.

Post-Impressionism comprises a wide range of different artistic styles, whose common denominator is the motivation to create a new response to the Impressionist movement, a new expression in Art, that would allow the artist to show his vision of the world and of life – a vision increasingly his own.

The stylistic variations that emerged were brought together under a single name – Post-Impressionism – encompassing, for example, Seurat’s so-called Neo-Impressionism (or Pointillism), a science-driven artistic expression, and Gauguin’s almost extravagant Symbolism.

However, they all focused on the artist’s subjective vision.

Note that this movement emerged precisely in the wake of an era in which the traditional concept of beaux-arts was transcended by the need to express what was going on in the artist’s deepest inner self.

Art was now a window into the soul and thought of the artist.

As Walter Hess says of the artists of the late 19th century and turn to the next century:

“For the artist, reality then becomes something which he must begin by creating out of nothing and with purely artistic means. He does not represent, but truly creates, and is faced with the task of advancing into the unknown through a disorderly variety of phenomena, giving them order, meaning, and cohesion, which he has to make visible, or at least perceptible, only by means of his artistic process, and to bridge the distance between Self and Nature – the inner and outer world – only by means of art. The point of cohesion of the world shifted decisively to the creative act.” [in Documents for Understanding Modern Painting]

The aesthetic impact of Post-Impressionism will create more movements, more divergent artistic groups throughout the turn of the 20th century, such as Expressionism and Cubism, as well as other even more recent movements.