Post-Impressionism: four answers to the same problem

Post-Impressionism is the most misleading label in art history, because it sounds like a movement and is not one. There was no manifesto, no group exhibition, no shared café. The English critic Roger Fry invented the term in 1910 for a London show called Manet and the Post-Impressionists, needing something for the poster, and it stuck because the alternative — four difficult painters with nothing in common except what they were reacting to — will not fit on a poster.

That is also the key to spotting them. Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh and Gauguin all began from Impressionism, all agreed on the same complaint, and all took it in a different direction. Once you know the complaint and the four directions, the pictures sort themselves.

The shared complaint

Impressionism had won an argument about light and lost something else. In pinning down the transient optical sensation — this hour, this weather, this flicker — it had given up structure, permanence and meaning. Nothing in a Monet holds still; nothing in a Monet means anything beyond itself.

All four keep the bright unmixed palette Impressionism had bought at such cost. All four discard the fleeting moment. What they want instead differs:

• Cézanne wants solidity. “To make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums.”
• Seurat wants method. A repeatable, optically scientific procedure that yields permanence.
• Van Gogh wants feeling. Colour and line chosen for emotional force rather than accuracy.
• Gauguin wants meaning. Flat decorative design carrying symbol and idea.

Cézanne: structure and the shifting viewpoint

Look for small, flat, roughly parallel patches of colour — the constructive stroke — laid at a consistent angle, building volume rather than describing texture. Look for form modelled not by light and shade but by colour modulation: warm hues brought forward, cool hues pushed back, so an apple turns through hue. Look for blue contours drawn round objects two or three times over, each a different attempt at where the edge really is.

Then look at the geometry, because this is the part that catches people out. The tabletop tips up towards you while the jug is seen from the side. The left and right edges of a table do not meet behind a cloth. Cézanne is combining multiple viewpoints in a single canvas, giving you what you know about an object as well as what one eye from one spot would see. Picasso and Braque built Cubism out of that, which is why Cézanne gets called the father of modern painting.

Palette: Provençal ochre, terracotta, dusty green, strong blues. Subjects: Mont Sainte-Victoire, over sixty times; apples, jugs and crumpled cloth; the Card Players of the early 1890s; and the Bathers, ending in the Large Bathers of 1900–06.

Seurat: the dot as a system

Seurat’s canvases are covered in small, even, regular dots of contrasting colour, intended to fuse in the eye rather than on the palette. He preferred divisionism — dividing a colour into its components and applying them separately — to the more famous pointillism, and the critic Félix Fénéon named the circle Neo-Impressionism in 1886.

The theory is genuine and specific. Michel Eugène Chevreul, a chemist who ran the dye works at the Gobelins tapestry factory, published De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs in 1839. Its law of simultaneous contrast holds that adjacent colours shift each other towards the complementary of the other, so orange beside blue reads more orange still. Seurat added Ogden Rood and Charles Blanc, and built a picture from the law upwards.

The result is the opposite of what the palette suggests. Impressionist subject matter — Sunday crowds, bathers, a riverbank — rendered with immense patience into something motionless and monumental. Bathers at Asnières (1884) and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86) took years apiece. Figures stand in strict profile or frontality, silhouettes simplified almost to cut-outs, the design locked to horizontals and verticals. Seurat often painted a dotted border onto the canvas itself, so his colour was not contaminated by the frame.

He died in 1891 at thirty-one. Paul Signac carried the method on, and after about 1900 his touch enlarges into mosaic-like rectangular tiles — the easiest way to tell late Signac from Seurat.

Van Gogh: impasto and emotional colour

The surface tells you first. Impasto — paint laid on so thickly it stands proud and holds the ridge of the brush — plus strokes that run in rhythmic, directional lines, curling and swirling so that a sky churns and a wheatfield heaves. Nothing is flat, and you can read the speed of the hand.

Colour is expressive rather than descriptive. Writing to his brother Theo about The Night Café (1888), Van Gogh said he had used red and green to express the terrible passions of humanity — the café is red and green because that is what it felt like, not what it looked like.

Dating is unusually easy from the palette alone:

Gauguin: flat blocks and Symbolism

Gauguin’s surfaces are the flattest of the four. Areas of saturated, often arbitrary colour, unmodelled, each bounded by a dark contour — the technique called cloisonnism, after cloisonné enamel where metal strips separate the coloured fields. No cast shadows, no recession: the ground tips up and the horizon is often pushed off the top of the canvas.

He worked it out with Émile Bernard at Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1888, and Vision after the Sermon is the founding picture: Breton women in white caps, eyes shut, seeing Jacob wrestle the angel on a field of pure vermilion. The red is not a description of a field. The related term Synthetism names the ambition — to synthesise the subject’s appearance, the artist’s feeling about it and formal design into one simplified image.

Behind it is Symbolism: the conviction that art should carry idea and mystery, not report appearances. Gauguin’s search for an unspoilt believing culture took him to Brittany and then, in 1891, to Tahiti — a search modern scholarship reads as colonial fantasy as much as spiritual quest. The pictures borrow from medieval stained glass, Japanese prints, Javanese reliefs and Peruvian pottery, and carry enigmatic titles, often in Tahitian: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98).

The nine weeks Gauguin spent in Van Gogh’s Yellow House at Arles in the autumn of 1888 produced pictures of the same motifs by both men, and are the best exercise in telling them apart. Same café, same sitter, same avenue of tombs: Van Gogh loaded and restless, Gauguin flat and deliberate.

Where it leads

Paul Sérusier brought a tiny cloisonnist panel back from Pont-Aven in 1888 — The Talisman, painted under Gauguin’s instruction — and a group of young painters made it a totem. The Nabis (Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, from the Hebrew for prophets) took Gauguin’s flatness indoors into densely patterned domestic interiors. Denis wrote the sentence in 1890 that closes the argument: a painting, before it is a warhorse or a nude, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

Toulouse-Lautrec belongs on the edge of the group: thinned oil on bare cardboard, acid greens and yellows, Montmartre cabarets, drawing from Degas and flat poster design from Japan.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Is the palette bright but the moment not fleeting? Impressionist colour with a still, considered, structured picture means you are after 1885.
2. Check the regularity of the mark. Uniform systematic dots: Seurat or Signac. Varied and flickering: Impressionism proper.
3. Feel the surface. Thick ridged paint standing proud, with curling directional strokes: Van Gogh.
4. Check for outlines round flat colour. Dark contours bounding unmodelled saturated areas, no cast shadow: Gauguin and the cloisonnists.
5. Check for blocky parallel patches and doubled blue contours. Cézanne.
6. Test the perspective. A tabletop tipping up while the objects on it are seen level means Cézanne’s shifting viewpoints.
7. If it is Seurat-like, look at the dot size. Enlarged mosaic tiles rather than fine points push you past 1900 and towards Signac.
8. If it is Van Gogh, read the palette for the date. Brown means before 1886; yellow and blue means Arles onwards; writhing line means Saint-Rémy or later.
9. Read the colour for truth or feeling. A red field under a religious vision, or a green-and-red café, tells you colour has stopped describing and started meaning — Gauguin or Van Gogh, not Monet.
10. Remember the term is a bucket. “Post-Impressionist” narrows you to roughly 1885–1905 in France; it never tells you the hand. The hand comes from steps 2 to 5.