As we looked at the arts of the Post-Impressionistic movements, there was a division between the approach to the instability of the time into artists whose focus was in form and those who placed first their own personal perspective. The first group includes artists like Paul Cézanne, who repeatedly painted a location (that he himself knew really well) to express the permanence and unchanging nature of his world. Here, we observed the gradual movement towards further abstraction of shapes, from blended outlines to flat colors being used to represent shadows, with clear and sharp outlines. There is also a lack of interest in capturing exactly the moment when the painting took place, as shown with the use of strong compositions and carefully-calculated choices i.e the reduction of realistic details.
The second group of artists involves those who use art as a tool to express their individualism and their psychological world, including Van Gogh and Paul Gaugin, both of whom take the reduction and abstraction of reality to an extreme. While Gaugin strives to return to the most “primitive artistic materials” for his artworks; Van Gogh was fully immersing himself in the meanings of colors and how each color represents an aspect of one’s psyche, as well as how colors play into how the artworks would be observed. Unrealistic values (highly saturated tones and pure colors) were used by both artists directly on the canvas to convey a sense of drama and emotional intensity. A strengthened sense of moralizing message was also important to this movement, as shown in Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, in which the psychological development of a human lifetime is depicted as a vision.