Art History 101
Between Impressionism’s shimmering brushstrokes and Cubism’s radical abstraction lies a vital, often overlooked bridge—Post-Impressionism. In this period, artists like Paul Cézanne paved the way for the innovations of the 20th century. Discover the legacy of the art movement.
From Waterlilies to Fractured Forms
Many are well acquainted with Claude Monet’s waterlilies and hay bales, often executed in his garden paradise at Giverny. These studies in light and color tinker with perception and experience, tempering scenes of everyday life through minutely adjusted lenses reflecting winter and summer, morning and night, sunshine or rain. His work quintessentially defines the Impressionist movement that boldly challenged the status quo of academic art in France.
Also, all too well-known were Picasso’s forays into parts unknown through Cubist reinvention. Shattered human forms reassembled with haphazard disarray. These fractured forms reinvented representation at a time when modern life took on a previously unrecognizable form with the advent of the metropolis in cities like London, New York, and Paris. Picasso stood as a figurehead of Modern Art, in large part thanks to his turn towards abstraction.
The Overlooked Middle: Post-Impressionism
These two periods of art history are likely the most well-known of all. Less well known is the period they bookend, a transitory period during which artists truly began embracing a new form of pictorial representation: Post-Impressionism. As the 20th century approached and the cityscape loomed larger than life, art became a tool to show and say more than centuries-old techniques of representation would allow.
Post-Impressionism marked a clear turning point towards abstraction in the history of art. Even Impressionism maintained some version of the status quo of representation, including variable color and form blurred through a facsimile of human vision. The most recognizable member of the Post-Impressionist movement was, by far, Vincent Van Gogh, but one artist was notably more engaged with the advent of new pictorial forms: Paul Cezanne.
Cezanne and the Birth of Modern Abstraction
Cezanne’s most characteristic work features flat swathes of brushwork, often of a single color, fragmenting the picture plane into shapes and zones of space. His most famous subject, Mont Saint-Victoire in Provence, was one Cezanne would continually disassemble and reconstitute with building blocks of warm and cool tones. By returning to the same scene repeatedly, Cezanne could focus solely on the finer points of the mountain’s representation, modulating our view of the landscape by simplifying chunks of space with striking taches of paint. His scenes become switchboards, activated by colors that codify new meaning.
Thus, Cezanne developed a style verging on geometric. The gridlike patterns of his mountain landscapes signal a complete break with the representational tradition that even Cezanne’s contemporaries, like William-Adolphe Bouguereau, were staunch disciples of. In only a matter of years, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque would change painting forever by introducing a form of painting wholly removed from the visual world we inhabit. However, Paul Cezanne’s view of Mont St. Victoire was foundational to that enterprising new mode of seeing. Under the banner of Post-Impressionism, he and others like him carried the torch of artistic innovation forward, laying the groundwork for abstraction and 20th-century art.
Art History 101
