Post-Impressionism was a vague label Roger Fry needed in 1910
The name is almost an apology. Roger Fry said he chose "Post-Impressionism" as the vaguest tag for French painting after Manet when he staged Manet and the Post-Impressionists in London in 1910. Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Seurat shared dissatisfaction with Impressionism—not a single style.
Post-Impressionism was a mainly French development roughly from 1886 to 1905, from the last Impressionist show to Fauvism's birth. Artists kept vivid color and sometimes impasto and painting from life, yet stressed geometry, expressive distortion, and unnatural color against Impressionism's light naturalism. Principals include Paul Cézanne ("father" of the movement), Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat. They rejected what they saw as trivial subjects and lost structure, without agreeing on a fix: Seurat pursued systematic pointillist dots; Cézanne sought to make Impressionism "solid and durable, like the art of the museums" by reducing forms to basics; van Gogh used vibrating color and conspicuous strokes for feeling. Camille Pissarro tried "scientific" Neo-Impressionism in the mid-1880s before returning to purer Impressionism. Harmony and structure outranked naturalism even when they exhibited together.
Fry used the term in 1906 and again for the 1910 Grafton Galleries show; three weeks earlier Frank Rutter had called Othon Friesz a "post-impressionist leader" in Art News (15 October 1910). John Rewald later bounded a core 1886–1892 story in From Van Gogh to Gauguin (1956), tracking Neo-Impressionism/Divisionism, Cloisonnism (Édouard Dujardin, 1888, for Anquetin and Bernard), Synthetism (1889, Café Volpini), the Pont-Aven School, and Symbolism after Gauguin claimed that mantle in 1891. Rewald called the label convenient yet imprecise when limited to French art since 1886. Alan Bowness and others extended discussion toward 1914; war declarations that summer mark a deeper cultural break. Cubism was treated as a fresh start in France and later England.
Canadian painters from James Wilson Morrice to Emily Carr and Group of Seven members absorbed related ideas; Montreal's 1913 spring show drew sharp press fire when it included Randolph Hewton, A. Y. Jackson, and John Lyman. Edvard Munch's 1895 lithograph The Scream, labeled Post-Impressionism at the Art Institute of Chicago, shows how the umbrella still gathers anguished modern feeling beyond France's borders.
Source: Post-Impressionism
