Paintings of the French Impressionists Essay

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Monet used brushstrokes and many shades of vivid greens and pinks to portray the garden as if it were viewed through a mist.

In 1910, English writer Roger Fry coined the phrase "post impressionism" as he organized an exhibition in London (Shone, 1979, p. 9). Just as the paintings of the impressionists caused a scandal in the art world some forty years earlier, the post impressionist work of artists such as Gaugin and Van Gogh "outraged all notions of what good painting should be" (Shone, p. 9).

The post-impression movement included, in addition to Gaugin and Van Gogh, artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and the later work of Cezanne. Like the Impressionists, these artists used real-life subjects, portraying them with distinct brushstrokes, thick paint, and bright colors. Times were changing, and the post-Impressionists responded by modernizing what the Impressionists had done, imposing more form and structure to show greater depth of expression and emotion. The post-Impressionists wanted to demonstrate more careful renderings of the world around them. A famous example is Georges Seurat's a Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886), a painting that is now part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. In Sunday Afternoon, Seurat employed a new technique, pointillism. Instead of laying down lots of color quickly to give an impression of people at the shore, Seurat used tiny dots of color and placed them very close together. One can see the individual dots upon close inspection of the work, but from afar, the eye blends the colors, making the shapes very clear and with distinct edges.

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Another famous example of post-Impressionism is Van Gogh's Starry Night. That soft and misty glow of Impressionist paintings is gone. In its place is a brightly colored sky that swirls and appears to move. The stars and the moon are bright above a peaceful village. A somewhat ominous shape looms up on the left side of the painting. It is impossible for the viewer to tell exactly what it is, but it provides another layer of depth and emotion to what would otherwise be a much simpler painting, that of a little village asleep.

Impressionism was a radical idea. Objects in nature were not represented as they really were, but as the impression they left, almost as if one took a quick look and then glanced away. Impressionists wanted to capture the essence of color and light, as if pulling them from the ether and capturing them on canvas. The post-Impressionists also wanted to capture color, but their use of it seems much more impassioned. The post-Impressionists set the stage for artists in the twentieth century, who had modern ideas about colors and shapes. Their work provided a bridge from the misty garden pools of Monet to the bold cubist work Picasso produced in his early years and the geometric shapes of artists such as Mondrian. The revolutionary methods of the Impressionists made twentieth century art forms possible, freeing the artists to paint more of what they felt and not just what they saw......

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