Post- Impressionism

     The term "Post-Impressionism" was invented by Roger Fry as he prepared for an exhibition at Grafton Gallery in London in 1910.

Post-Impressionists pushed the ideas of the Impressionists into new directions. The word "Post-Impressionism" indicates their link to the original Impressionist ideas and their departure from those ideas (their modernist journey from the past into the future).

For example, Vincent van Gogh intensified Impressionism's already vibrant colors and painted them thickly on the canvas. Van Gogh's energetic brushstrokes expressed emotional qualities.

George Seurat took the rapid, "broken" brushwork of Impressionism and developed it into the millions of colored dots that create Pointillism, while Paul Cézanne elevated Impressionism's separation of colors into separations of whole planes of color.

Here are some paintings of George Seurat using Pointillism:

     Pointillism is my favorite style of painting that we have reviewed in class so far. I find it quite amusing how someone manages to make a person, landscape or anything by using millions of little points. And they're also really colorful.

Honore Daumier & Litography

      Honore Daumier in France continued William Hogarth’s tradition of using popular print, newspaper and magazine illustrations to make social and political commentary. He was best known for his caricature works and he used the classic caricature techniques of physical absurdity to lay bare the cruelty, unfairness and pretension of 19th century French society and politics. 

At the age of 16, Daumier began receiving training in the art of lithography with Alexandre Lenoir and studying at the Academie Suisse.

The medium of lithography allows for quick, sketchy, images, which create a sense of movement - and also a sense of a candid moment.

Here’s a video of how the process of lithography is developed:

        In my opinion, it is a time-consuming process; you really need to have a lot of patience and dedication, that’s why we should consider it as art. People used to work a lot harder back then and therefore feel more gratification with what they had done with their hands, nowadays it’s become so easy to just click a button and have something printed from a printer machine.