Today we talked about post-impressionism and its two-pronged departure from impressionism through form and personal expression.
Paul Cezanne, a native of Aix-en-Provence, made a name for himself through his reductionistic and relatively abstract depictions of his native landscape. Concerned more with shape over light, Cezanne’s flat and uniform brushstrokes imbue his landscapes with a flat planarity that reduces the provincial landscape to a symphony of colorful polygons that are given depth and perspective through the properties of color. Though perhaps not as privy to the science of color as his contemporary Seurat, who didn’t mix paints on the canvas but rather placed individual dots of color for our eyes to mix (Pointillism), his paintings certainly capture the lush and verdant atmosphere of provincial France.
Van Gogh’s paintings are also richly colorful, but his choice of palette reflects the messages and ideas his works were trying to convey. In his Potato Eaters, van Gogh renders a destitute family of coal miners in a dark, earthy, color palette that reflects not only their living and working conditions but also the family’s deeper connection to the land in general, as opposed to the haughty Parisian urbanites. Similarly, van Gogh subverts the properties of warm/cool colors and their ability to render space in his Night Café. Instead of having the warmer colors closer to the front of the picture plane and cooler colors in the back, he flips the orientation of the two with a large cool green pool table standing on a strong diagonal at the center of the painting and large dark redd-burgundy walls framing the space. This inversion serves to flatten the image and create a general sense of unease within the space, that might reflect van Gogh’s personal sense of unease given his regularly poor mental and physical health.