On Monday, April 22nd, our class focused on the Post-impressionism Era. We began class, focusing on the form of French painters, Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat and the personal expression of that of Vincent Van Gogh and French painter and sculptor Paul Gauguin.
The First work we focused on consisted of Cézanne’s Monte Sainte-Victoire; a landscape painting portraying Cézanne’s hometown, a common landscape displayed in many of Cézanne’s works. The painting shows natural greenery and catches the viewers attention right away, however the mountains are a seen to be accentuated to stand as the focal point, as the vantage point and depth of the painting increases the importance of the geometrical shapes and lines in the painting. Monte Sainte-Victoire contain natural green, yellow, brown, and blue tones with swift, varying brushstrokes throughout the work. We compared Monte Sainte-Victoire and Cézanne’s Scene from Bibemus Quarry, both very similar in natural colors and tone. We also focused on the differences of the two paintings, specifically the intense abstraction of Scene from Bibemus Quarry. Cézanne’s two works both encompass his belief to “…treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone…” (Paul Cézanne, class PowerPoint from Post-Impressionism class). We continued class by focusing on the art of the still-life, depicting Cézanne’s Still Life with Peppermint Bottle, Still Life with Apples in a bowl, and Basket of apples.Still Life with Peppermint Bottle stood out to me most by the geometrical details and modernism of the bottle.
Georges-Pierre Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party each portray a technique known as “pointillism.” Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, though, by being commissioned with a material known as conté crayon, the work leaves little detail of the people compared to the faces, body language, and rich clothes Renoir depicts in his work.
To wrap up the class period, we focused on Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh. van Gogh’s works consist of a wide range of colors and styles, evoking a variety of different emotions. While we looked at eight different works of van Gogh’s. The last work of Van Gogh’s consists of his Starry Night, encapsulating his intense, swift brushstrokes (just one of the many details and meanings behind this work).