MODERNISM IN THE 19TH CENTURY (IMPRESSIONISM, POST-IMPRESSIONISM,

POINTILLISM/NEO-IMPRESSIONISM)

A. Impressionism
Impressionism is a 19th century movement known for its paintings that aimed to
depict the transience of light, and to capture scenes of modern life and the natural world in
their ever-shifting conditions.

Key Points
 The term ” impressionism ” is derived from the title of Claude Monet’s painting,
Impression, soleil levant (“Impression, Sunrise”).
 Impressionist works characteristically portray overall visual effects instead of details,
and use short, “broken” brush strokes of mixed and unmixed color to achieve an
effect of intense color vibration.
 During the latter part of 1873, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley organized the
Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs
(“Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers”) to
exhibit their artworks independently to mixed critical response.
 The Impressionists exhibited together eight times between 1874 and 1886. The
individual artists achieved few financial rewards from the impressionist exhibitions,
but their art gradually won a degree of public acceptance and support.
 Impressionists typically painted scenes of modern life and often painted outdoors or
en plein air.
 Impressionist paintings can be characterized by their use of short, thick strokes of
paint that quickly capture a subject’s essence rather than details.
 Impressionist paintings do not exploit the transparency of thin paint films (glazes),
which earlier artists manipulated carefully to produce effects.
 Thematically, Impressionists works are focused on capturing the movement of life, or
quick moments captured as if by snapshot.

B. Post-Impressionism
A group of artists inspired by the Impressionist movement came to be known as the
Post-Impressionists. They were not a cohesive group of artists but the Metropolitan Museum
describes them as “breaking free of the naturalism of Impressionism in the late 1880s, a
group of young painters sought independent artistic styles for expressing emotions rather
than simply optical impressions, concentrating on themes of deeper symbolism. Through the
use of simplified colors and definitive forms, their art was characterized by a renewed
aesthetic sense as well as abstract tendencies.” The most well-known Post-Impressionist
artists include Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gaugin, and Edvard Munch (pronounced “moonk”).

Key Ideas
 Symbolic and highly personal meanings were particularly important to Post-
Impressionists such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. Rejecting interest in
depicting the observed world, they instead looked to their memories and emotions in
order to connect with the viewer on a deeper level.
 Structure, order, and the optical effects of color dominated the aesthetic vision of
Post-Impressionists like Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, and Paul Signac. Rather
 than merely represent their surroundings, they relied upon the interrelations of color
and shape to describe the world around them.
 Despite the various individualized styles, most Post-Impressionists focused on
abstract form and pattern in the application of paint to the surface of the canvas.
Their early leanings toward abstraction paved the way for the radical modernist
exploration of abstraction that took place in the early-20th century.

C. Pointillism/Neo Impressionism
Neo-Impressionism, movement in French painting of the late 19th century that
reacted against the empirical realism of Impressionism by relying on systematic calculation
and scientific theory to achieve predetermined visual effects. Whereas the Impressionist
painters spontaneously recorded nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light, the
Neo-Impressionists applied scientific optical principles of light and colour to create strictly
formalized compositions. Neo-Impressionism was led by Georges Seurat, who was its
original theorist and most significant artist, and by Paul Signac, also an important artist and
the movement’s major spokesman. Other Neo-Impressionist painters were Henri-Edmond
Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Maximilien Luce, Théo Van Rysselberghe, and, for a time, the
Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. The group founded a Société des Artistes
Indépendants in 1884.
The terms divisionism and pointillism originated in descriptions of Seurat’s painting
technique, in which paint was applied to the canvas in dots of contrasting pigment. A
calculated arrangement of coloured dots, based on optical science, was intended to be
perceived by the retina as a single hue. The entire canvas was covered with these dots,
which defined form without the use of lines and bathed all objects in an intense, vibrating
light. In each picture the dots were of a uniform size, calculated to harmonize with the overall
size of the painting. In place of the hazy forms of Impressionism, those of Neo-
Impressionism had solidity and clarity and were simplified to reveal the carefully composed
relationships between them. Though the light quality was as brilliant as that of
Impressionism, the general effect was of immobile, harmonious monumentality, a
crystallization of the fleeting light of Impressionism.
Pointillism, also called divisionism and chromo-luminarism, in painting, the practice of
applying small strokes or dots of colour to a surface so that from a distance they visually
blend together. The technique is associated with its inventor, Georges Seurat, and his
student, Paul Signac, who both espoused Neo-Impressionism, a movement that flourished
from the late 1880s to the first decade of the 20th century.