The Post-impressionists

Book excerpt: In 1910 the critic Roger Fry organized an exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, London, of avant-garde painting which included works by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse. This exhibition became as important a landmark in the official histories of modern art as the subsequent Armory Show in America. These artists did not belong to a single unified movement defined or recognized at the time, and Fry, in a quandary as to what to call the exhibition, and losing patience at the last minute, said, "Oh, let's just call them Post-Impressionists; at any rate, they came after the Impressionists". In this way one of the important critical categories, one of the "isms" of modern art, was born. But "Post-Impressionism" was not a name which Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat or Cezanne or any artists of the period would have applied to themselves. The documents in this book, many of which appear in English for the first time, show how artists and critics in the aftermath of Impressionism did describe themselves: how they responded to tradition, to each other and to the kaleidoscope of the contemporary scene. This was a period of reconsideration, of moving on from aspects of Impressionism, and of coming to grips with the isolation that avant-garde art had imposed on the individual artist. It was a period in which the emphasis within Impressionism on the construction of painting purely by means of color had left artists with the question of how the power of this basic form related to their own feelings and to nature. New ideas were coming from poetry as well as painting that laid the basis for modernism. These issues and the personal struggles of the artists themselves are revealed in their letters, and inthe writings of friends and critics, many of whom, such as Mallarme, Laforgue, Huysmans, and Proust were novelists and poets. This book also includes commentaries from Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, and W. H. Auden as well as modern critics, artists, philosophers and art historians: Georges Bataille, Paul Klee, and Meyer Schapiro on Van Gogh; John Berger on Bonnard; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Clement Greenberg, Adrian Stokes and Lawrence Gowing on Cezanne. The text is illustrated with 119 colorplates and 125 black and white reproductions of contemporary photographs, cartoons, documents, prints and drawings.