American Artists
During the Impressionist Period

Not on the Test

James Whistler: 1834-1903
John Singer Sargent: 1856-1925

Post-Impressionism
You can still call it impressionism for the test

• When photography began to take over the business of realistic image making, artists had to find a new primary reason to create work. Beginning with the impressionists, and continuing with the post-impressionists, the reason for painting became less and less about slavishly reproducing reality, and more about bringing the unique thoughts and vision of a creative person (the artist) to bear on the image.

• Thought that the intellectual system an artist used to create pictures was the most important aspect of painting
• Invented pointillism
• Helped to create color theory and an understanding of how the eye sees color
• Communicates both aesthetic ideas, and philosophical ideas.
• Aesthetically, Seurat communicates his ideas about color theory. Colors will appear more pure if you let the eye mix them. He also communicates ideas about how the artist works to structure a picture. The painting is very organized and almost geometric.
• Philosophically, he presents everyday people, emphasizing the importance of democracy, yet they are also within themselves, isolated even in groups.

Paul Cezanne: 1839-1906

• Proclaimed by Picasso to be the father of modern art.
• Believes that painting should have an intellectual component.
• Works to equalize objects on the surface of his paintings
• Makes the painting seem sculptural
• Thinks of painting in a more abstract way
• Cezannes primary focus in painting this landscape was not to present the mountain as it was, but to communicate instead ideas about aesthetics (composition, color, pattern) while using a mountain as raw subject matter.
• He flattens the picture plane, shattering the idea of a painting as a window into another time or place.
• He presents us with the idea that a painter is not necessarily a person who faithfully reproduces nature, but is instead a person who filters nature through ideas and personal aesthetics.
• This painting is meant to communicate ideas about painting, not the identity of the sitter.
• Cezanne works to transform everything he can into geometry, primarily in the service of flattening, and fracturing the picture plane.
• The perspective, the foreshortening of the figure, and the skewed background all serve the purpose of making the viewer aware of the painting as an object, not a window.
• Cezanne wants to communicate the thought that painters are not cameras, and that ideas about composition, color, and form are as important as the ability to paint realistically.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec: 1864-1901

• Brought a new edgy social commentary into the art world
• Documented the seedy, lower class parts of Paris
• Invented the graphic poster
• Brought into the spotlight aspects of Parisian life that were officially ignored
• Toulouse-Lautrec was a documentary artist. In At the Moulin Rouge he communicates to us what an evening in the seedy district of Paris was like. We see the stupefied absinth drinkers, the prostitutes, Henri and his friend.
• He presents us with a microcosm of his life with the startling realism of a snapshot. He exposed a part of Paris life that everyone knew about, but that was officially swept under the carpet.

Vincent Van Gogh: 1853-90

• Pioneered the idea that the expression of feeling should be the dominating force in art
• Seen as the first expressionist
• Used color as metaphor

Zundert, Holland
Goupils, Hague Loyers London
Paris: 1886-87
Self portraits: 1886, 1887, 1888 Arles

• I've done the portrait of M. Gachet with a melancholy expression, which might well seem like a grimace to those who see it. . . . Sad but gentle, yet clear and intelligent, that is how many portraits ought to be done. . . . There are modern heads that may be looked at for a long time, and that may perhaps be looked back on with longing a hundred years later. VINCENT VAN GOGH, JUNE 1890

Portrait of Dr. Gachet

• 1897 sold by Van Goghs sister in law for the equivalent of $58
• 1937 Nazis track the painting down in a museum storeroom in Frankfurt and sell it for $53,000
• Kramarsky family flees the Nazis moving to New York with the painting
• Kramarsky family auctions the painting for $82.5 million in 1990 to a Japanese Billionaire
• 'The Starry Night' was not Van Gogh's first depiction of a night sky. In Arles, he had been proud of his painting of the stars and the reflection of the lights of the town in the River Rhne, one of the first results of a plan intimated to Emile Bernard in April 1888. He wanted to paint a starry night as an example of working from the imagination, which could add to the value of a painting: 'we may succeed in creating a more exciting and comforting nature than we can discern with a single glimpse of reality', he wrote. In a letter to Theo of the same date, Vincent was more explicit about the motif: 'a starry night with cypresses or possibly above a field of ripe wheat'. With his 'Starry Night', painted in Saint-Rmy, he fulfilled that promise and did so at a time when he was more determined than ever to prove himself the equal of his fellow artists.
• Van Gogh also mentioned as a joint aim 'a kind of painting giving greater consolation'. This supremely religious aspiration was no longer related to the Christian ethic for Van Gogh. His insistence that the canvases were not a return 'to romanticism or to religious ideas', though somewhat puzzling at first, was intended only to show that the works had nothing in common with earlier mystic paintings. He had once admired religious subjects from ancient art, but he now considered that the feeling of solace should primarily be evoked by the colour and design of representations of nature. 'The Starry Night' should be seen as based on religious ideas only in this specific sense.
• THIS, the last of his self-portraits and one of the greatest, was painted only months before his death.
• The compulsive, restless all-over ornament of the background, recalling the work of mental patients, is for some physicians an evidence that the painting was done in a psychotic state. But the self-image of the painter shows a masterly control and power of observation, a mind perfectly capable of integrating the elements of its chosen activity. The background reminds us of the rhythms of The Starry Night, which the portrait resembles also in the dominating bluish tone of the work. The flowing, pulsing forms of the background, schemata of sustained excitement, are not just ornament, although related to the undulant forms of the decorative art of the 1890's; they are unconfined by a fixed rhythm or pattern and are a means of intensity, rather, an overflow of the artist's feelings to his surroundings. Beside the powerful modelling of the head and bust, so compact and weighty, the wall pattern appears a pale, shallow ornament. Yet the same rhythms occur in the figure and even in the head, which are painted in similar close-packed, coiling, and wavy lines. As we shift our attention from the man to his surroundings and back again, the analogies are multiplied; the nodal points, or centres, in the background ornament begin to resemble more the eyes and ear and buttons of the figure. In all this turmoil and congested eddying motion, we sense the extraordinary firmness of the painter's hand. The acute contrasts of the reddish beard and the surrounding blues and greens, the probing draughtsmanship, the liveness of the tense features, the perfectly ordered play of breaks, variations, and continuities, the very stable proportioning of the areas of the work - all these point to a superior mind, however disturbed and apprehensive the artist's feelings.

Theo and Johanna Van Gogh. Johanna with baby Vincent.
Theo Van Gogh

Paul Gauguin: 1848-1903

• Considered the father of surrealism
• Wanted to show dreams, feelings and the inner workings of the mind
• Wanted to return to a more natural, unhindered state of being
• Sought to paint in an overall flattened pattern

1875, 1886, 1890
Tahiti: 1891 1903

Whence Do We Come? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

• "On the right (Where do we come from?), we see the baby, and three young women - those who are closest to that eternal mystery. In the center, Gauguin meditates on what we are. Here are two women, talking about destiny (or so he described them), a man looking puzzled and half-aggressive, and in the middle, a youth plucking the fruit of experience. This has nothing to do, I feel sure, with the Garden of Eden; it is humanity's innocent and natural desire to live and to search for more life. A child eats the fruit, overlooked by the remote presence of an idol - emblem of our need for the spiritual. There are women (one mysteriously curled up into a shell), and there are animals with whom we share the world: a goat, a cat, and kittens. In the final section (Where are we going?), a beautiful young woman broods, and an old woman prepares to die. Her pallor and gray hair tell us so, but the message is underscored by the presence of a strange white bird. I once described it as "a mutated puffin," and I do not think I can do better. It is Gauguin's symbol of the afterlife, of the unknown (just as the dog, on the far right, is his symbol of himself).

Edgar Allen Poe: The Raven-1845

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!