Homework answers / question archive / QUESTION #1: Post Impressionism is not a unified approach to making art, rather it was a way to describe the work of several artists who began their careers working in a manner that is Impressionist before moving away from that style

QUESTION #1: Post Impressionism is not a unified approach to making art, rather it was a way to describe the work of several artists who began their careers working in a manner that is Impressionist before moving away from that style

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QUESTION #1: Post Impressionism is not a unified approach to making art, rather it was a way to describe the work of several artists who began their careers working in a manner that is Impressionist before moving away from that style.  After reading the below excerpt and watching the below videos on Seraut and Post-Impressionism, be able to explain how Seraut retains elements of Impressionism in his works but also moves away from Impressionism to create a style that is uniquely his own. 

Breaking free of the naturalism of Impressionism in the late 1880s, a group of young painters sought independent artistic styles for expressing emotions rather than simply optical impressions, concentrating on themes of deeper symbolism. Through the use of simplified colors and definitive forms, their art was characterized by a renewed aesthetic sense as well as abstract tendencies. Among the nascent generation of artists responding to Impressionism, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Georges Seurat (1859–1891), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), and the eldest of the group, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), followed diverse stylistic paths in search of authentic intellectual and artistic achievements. These artists, often working independently, are today called Post-Impressionists. Although they did not view themselves as part of a collective movement at the time, Roger Fry (1866–1934), critic and artist, broadly categorized them as “Post-Impressionists,” a term that he coined in his seminal exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists installed at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910.

In the 1880s, Georges Seurat was at the forefront of the challenges to Impressionism with his unique analyses based on then-current notions of optical and color theories. Seurat believed that by placing tiny dabs of pure colors adjacent to one another, a viewer’s eye compensated for the visual disparity between the two by “mixing” the primaries to model a composite hue. The Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” (51.112.6) embodies Seurat’s experimental style, which was dubbed Neo-Impressionism. This painting, the last sketch for the final picture that debuted in 1886 at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition (today in the Art Institute of Chicago), depicts a landscape scene peopled with figures at leisure, a familiar subject of the Impressionists. But Seurat’s updated style invigorates the otherwise conventional subject with a virtuoso application of color and pigment.

Seurat, Bathers at Asniéres

https://youtu.be/9bs1iQ14LJY (Watch the video)

 

Seurat, A Sunday on La Grade Jatte

 

https://youtu.be/wNB9Vm6MoDQ (Watch the video)

Art Project:

You are going to have the opportunity to paint your own pointillism picture just like Seraut. 

BEFORE YOU WATCH be aware that you do not have to do the same project as the girl in the video: you do not need to create the color wheel, you dont have to do a monument, you dont have to do the graphite transfer, and you dont have to use paint (unless you want to!). The point of this video is to give you a better understanding what Seraut was doing with pointillism, color theory, and see someone actually do pointillism.

For our purposes, you are going to create a landscape using the pointillism techniques. You can use marker for this if you dont want to use paint! It needs to be the size of a regular sheet of printer paper and I need to be able to see the dots. REMEMBER, pointillism does not mix colors, rather it is the use of primary colors and then placing them in close proximity to create secondary colors. So for instance, if you were creating purple mountains, you would use red and blue dots. 

Email me if you have any questions!

https://youtu.be/IiVL0Nox6T0 (Watch the video)