What struck me the most from class today was the contrast between individuals who valued formal features like as structure and color and others who emphasized personal, expressive traits in their work.
On the one hand, we have painters like Cézanne and Seurat, who attempted to simplify their themes to their core geometric forms and scientific color correlations. Cézanne’s innovative method of “painting the cylinder, the sphere, the cone” established the groundwork for later abstractions. Seurat’s pointillist method, with its precisely placed dots of pure color, represented a highly ordered, almost mathematical approach to painting. In contrast, Van Gogh and Gauguin preferred an expressive, subjective approach that stressed personal expression over technical considerations. Van Gogh’s Night Café, with its swirling, agitated brushstrokes and skewed perspectives, creates a distinct feeling of psychological tension. And his Self-Portrait, with its intense stare and brilliant, nearly clashing hues, feels like a glimpse into the artist’s own volatile inner life.Gauguin, too, shifted away from realism and toward a more symbolic, emotive approach, as seen by his powerful, flattened shapes and vivid, non-naturalistic palette. For these painters, painting was as much about channeling their emotions and spiritual beliefs as it was about representing the observable world. What I find most appealing about post-impressionism is how it demonstrated the possibility of art existing in the tension between these two poles: formal and expressive, objective and subjective. The variety of methods we witnessed, ranging from Cézanne’s minimalist geometries to Van Gogh’s raw, visceral paintings, reflects the depth and complexity of this period in art.