Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionism developed in the 1880s and 1890s, a period of consolidation and crisis for the Third Republic and for European culture more broadly. The Symbolist movement in literature — Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud — was pursuing a parallel project in poetry: the dissolution of conventional meaning in favor of suggestion, atmosphere, and the primacy of sound over sense. Both movements were responses to the positivist materialism that dominated official French culture, the belief that science and rational observation were sufficient instruments for understanding reality. Against this, Symbolism and the more spiritually inclined Post-Impressionists asserted that there was a reality beyond the visible, and that art's task was to gesture toward it.

The colonial context shaped Post-Impressionism in ways that later criticism has examined closely. Gauguin's flights to Brittany, Martinique, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands were enabled by French colonialism — and his idealization of non-Western peoples as naturally spiritual and uncorrupted by civilization reflected colonial tropes that his own behavior in Tahiti (where he fathered children with adolescent girls) grotesquely undermined. Yet his formal innovations were genuine, and their influence on European painting — specifically, the permission they gave to use non-Western visual sources as equals rather than exotica — was significant.

Van Gogh's career was inseparable from his mental illness and from the institutional structures of late nineteenth-century psychiatry. His voluntary commitments, his relationship with his brother Theo (whose support sustained him materially while his letters sustained him intellectually), and his eventual death by suicide at 37 made him, posthumously, the exemplary figure of the suffering artistic genius — a role that Romanticism had invented and that his biography seemed to confirm with unusual completeness. The Van Gogh myth, in its cultural pervasiveness, has sometimes made it difficult to see his paintings as the products of a rigorous and thoughtful artistic intelligence rather than pure psychological overflow.

Post-Impressionism's legacy was effectively the entire first half of twentieth-century modernism. The three major lines of development that Modernism pursued — Cubism's structural analysis of form, Expressionism's subjective emotional distortion, and Fauvism's liberation of color from description — each derived directly from one of Post-Impressionism's founders. This is not a retrospective imposition; Picasso and Braque acknowledged Cézanne directly; Matisse cited Cézanne and Gauguin; Kirchner and the German Expressionists looked explicitly to Van Gogh and Gauguin. The Post-Impressionists did not merely precede Modernism — they designed it.

The movement also permanently altered the status of the individual artist in Western culture. Van Gogh's reception — ignored in his lifetime, recognized within a decade of his death as a genius, his paintings commanding the highest prices in the world a century later — became the template for the modern understanding of artistic authenticity: the idea that the most important art is produced by individuals whose vision exceeds the comprehension of their contemporaries, and that commercial failure and critical rejection are signs of depth rather than failure. This cultural script, whatever its distortions, has shaped how Western societies have valued and collected art ever since.