Lecture 45: Beyond Impressionism—From Seurat to Matisse
Beyond Impressionism—From Seurat to Matisse ..........................
Lecture 45
We’re going to look at paintings by Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and
Matisse. The paintings of the last name, Matisse, would scarcely be
understandable without the ¿ rst three.
T
his lecture covers art that is classi¿ ed as Post-Impressionism and
Fauvism. The artists Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van
Gogh paved the way for 20th-century painting, and Henri Matisse
serves as the bridge between 19th- and 20th-century art. As we look at these
artists, we’ll see the move toward expressing the increasingly personal world
of the artist and away from a sense of shared meaning between the artist and
the viewer.
In my view, the term Impressionism is imprecise and, in fact, misleading,
because people have become so interested in its supposed characteristics that
they are sometimes confused by actual works of Impressionist art. Equally
misleading is the term Post-Impressionism, used to differentiate such artists
as Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat from Monet, Renoir, and Degas. All three
of the former artists, however, exhibited with the Impressionists and all three
were outlived by the latter.
Georges Seurat (1859–1891) was born in Paris, studied at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, and spent hours at the Louvre. This path was all part of normal
preparation for painting, but Seurat’s means of preparing was not. No work
of his seems to be without preparatory drawings, and for his large, imposing
paintings, he did dozens of drawings and many small oil sketches before
starting the larger work.
Of course, we must look at Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande
Jatte (1884–1886). Seurat is usually called a Post-Impressionist, but at
the time, his work was called Neo-Impressionism, and the technique with
which it was painted was called Pointillism. The practice was to apply dots
of pure color with the tip of the small brush. The theory was simply that
if complementary colors laid side by side produced a vibrant effect while