The artists who followed Impressionism were influenced by the earlier Impressionist maestros, and took various features of the art movement in vastly different directions. One of the most influential was Paul Cézanne-disillusioned with the lack of solid form in the generally quixotic Impressionist works, Cézanne aimed to redefine art when it came to form.
He suggested that a painting could be structured as a series of planes with a clear foreground, middle ground, and background and argued that the objects in the painting could all be reduced to their simplest underlying forms—a cube, a sphere, or a cone. Here we should note the obvious influence that these ideas, presented first by Cézanne, later had on the development of Cubism in the early twentieth century. The ongoing search for more and more brilliant color was a unifying feature for many of the Post-
Impressionists. The work of Georges Seurat(1859–91) placed an emphasis on the scientific rules of color. Seurat applied his colors in small dots ofcomplementary colors that blended in the eye of the viewer in what is called optical mixing. The results were vibrant, though the emphasis on technique also resulted in relatively stoic compositions.
As Seurat was attracting attention and Cézanne was formulating his rules for painting, a young Dutchpainter named Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) was studying art. Van Gogh, using theories of contrasting color and very direct application of paint, created vigorous brushwork and twisting forms, both designed to capture an intense response, and though his career was short, many of his works have become very well known. Van Gogh developed the idea that the artist’s colors should not slavishly imitate the colors of the natural world, but should be intensified to portray inner human emotions. The intense and jarring yellows, greens, and reds in the poolroom of Van Gogh’s Night Café (1888), included below , was somewhere that van Gogh considered a place of vice. This work illustrates his very influential idea of color coordinations.
