Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [86]
“In sum ... he has only two qualities that make him the most divine worker that ever was. The first is a vision more profound and truly exact than that of the others. The second is a veracity and incorruptibility. And that is all, ladies and gentlemen. And now that I have told you his secret you can all become great sculptors.”
POST-IMPRESSIONISM
Post-Impressionism, like Impressionism, was a French phenomenon that included the French artists Seurat, Gauguin, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Dutchman van Gogh, who did his major work in France. Their careers spanned 1880-1905, after Impressionism had triumphed over academic art. The Post-Impressionists’ styles derived from their forerunners’ breakthroughs. Instead of the “brown gravy” of historical painting done in feebly lit studios, their canvases shone with rainbow-bright color patches. Yet the Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with Impressionism. They wanted art to be more substantial, not dedicated wholly to capturing a passing moment, which often resulted in paintings that seemed slapdash and unplanned.
Their response to this problem split the group into two camps, much like the Neoclassical and Romantic factions earlier in the century. Seurat and Cézanne concentrated on formal, near-scientific design — Seurat with his dot theory and Cézanne with his color planes. Gauguin, van Gogh, and Lautrec, like latter-day Romantics, emphasized expressing their emotions and sensations through color and light. Twentieth-century art, with its extremes of individual styles from Cubism to Surrealism, grew out of these two trends.
Van Gogh, “The Starry Night,” 1889, MoMA, NY. Van Gogh expressed his emotional reaction to a scene through color.
THE POST-IMPRESSIONIST ROUNDUP
To keep the major Post-Impressionists straight, here are their identifying characteristics.
SEURAT: POINT COUNTERPOINT. Degas nicknamed Georges Seurat (1839- 91) “the notary” because the younger painter always wore a top hat and dark suit with precisely pressed trousers. Seurat was just as meticulous in his art. “They see poetry in what I have done,” Seurat once said. “No, I apply my method, and that is all there is to it.”
His quasiscientific “method” is known as “pointillism.” It consisted of applying confetti-sized dots of pure, unmixed color over the whole canvas. Seurat theorized that complementary (or opposite) colors, set side by side, would mix in the viewer’s eye with greater luminosity than if mixed on the painter’s palette. The whole was supposed to fuse together, like a mosaic, from a distance, but actually the individual specks never completely merge, giving a grainy, scintillating effect to the surface of the canvas.
Because Seurat’s system was so labor-intensive, he finished only seven large paintings in his decade-long career. His most celebrated work, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” — so famous it inspired Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George — took him two years and forty preliminary color studies. Seurat kept the bright, unmixed colors of the Impressionists and their holiday, open-air themes, but he added a stable design based on geometric shapes and rigorously calculated patterns.
Seurat, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” 1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago. Seurat developed the pointillist technique of using small dots of pure color.
METHOD PAINTING. After 1886, Seurat decided to systematize other elements of painting. He used color and lines like engineer’s tools, assigning certain emotions to different colors and shapes to elicit predictable responses in the spectator. For Seurat, warm colors (the orange-red family) connoted action and gaiety, as did lines moving upward. Dark, cool colors (bluegreen) and descending lines evoked sadness, while middle tones, or a balance of warm and cool colors, and lateral lines conveyed