Post-Impressionism

One of a series introducing major movements in modern art to general readers, students and gallery visitors, this text looks at the Post-Impressionists. Hard on the heels of the Impressionists came artists with a different agenda. Dissatisfied with the essentially short-term effects Impressionism had mastered, they strove in their different ways for an art of a more permanent, structured and expressive kind. By refining and codifying, or dismantling and reassembling, the procedures of Impressionism, artists such as Seurat, Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh and their associates rewrote the rules for representational painting at the turn of the 20th century. The arbitrary colour, exaggerated forms and abstraction of their works marked a new distance between artist and nature, and prepared the public for the freedoms of the next generation of innovators. This book focuses on the artists responsible for these influential stylistic changes, and sets them in their intellectual and historical contexts.