THE OFFSHOOTS OF IMPRESSIONISM

Post-Impressionism

• Bonnard (A leading figure, a post-impressionist influenced modern art, painting intimate settings with personalized colors with subjects as symbols, influenced by Japanese work).

  • Notes: We need others for inspiration. Bonnard found his work pleasurable his sketches were humble; they were his shorthand. He painted from memory. What we draw or paint from memory I call illuminated memory because it is illuminated by what was and is important to. We’re called to paint from our core values for our sketches are to be imputed with meaning, to capture our innocent naïve impression. It’s all about life, life with meaning, and to express and share that meaning.

• van Gogh (A post-impressionist known for highly intensive emotion, color and movement, became known as the father of Expressionism).

  • Notes: van Gogh wrote much about dreaming and awareness. He understood the night the stars, the movements of the wind on wheatfields, not from an intellectual understanding but from an awareness of an embodied knowing. He drew constantly. Drawing was the cornerstone for him, and journaling was for his understandings. He worked on many preliminary drawings working out the direction of his brushstrokes before he painted. Drawing is the seedbed of inspiration.

• Cezanne (Spanned the Impressionist, Post-impressionist, and Cubist movements – painted en plein air with Pissarro – was seen by Matisse and Picasso as the ‘father of us all”).

  • Notes: He did not try to recreate a pictorial representation; he took his sensations and perceptions and filtered through his intellect by conceptualizing a way of working the picture plane as an assemblage of ideas of deconstruction and reconstruction. 

·      Gauguin (Post-impressionist and a primitivist, was befriended by van Gogh).

·      Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-impressionism and art nouveau).

·      Redon (work spanned several movements).

Neo-Impressionism 

A movement founded by Seurat – Pointillists

·      Seurat

·      Cross

Fauvism

A group of early 20th century artists emphasized intense vivid unnatural colors, and wild painterly brushwork, less representational or realistic forms, influenced by Cezanne and Gauguin.

·      Derain (co-founder of Fauvism with Matisse. He said, “I do not innovate but transmit.”)

o   Notes: We are called to simplify the subject and to be free to use color in a psychological way if you choose as symbolic messengers.  Do use color a light, color as the light of the soul, and color light of the mind. The goal is color. 

·      Matisse (co-founder of Fauvism with Derain).

o   Notes: He grew in his sense of design from line crossing over giving form while moving from impressionism into color as expressed emotion with its own meaning. He did not see exactness as a goal but color.

Cubism

An early 20th century avant-garde movement pioneered by Picasso and Braque; its primary influence was the later work of Cezanne. Its offshoots lead to Futurism, Dada and Art Deco.

·      Braque

Expressionism

·      Kandinsky (art theorist, teacher, painter of the 20thC, who believed a work of art should be a child of its own age). 

o   Notes: He studied in the Academy and moved quickly into pointillism and fauvism, then onto surrealism, constructivism and onto abstraction. His initial representational, romantic, and symbolized world grew increasingly more abstracted with colored geometric and biomorphic forms in juxtaposition expressing his inner spiritual life.