Giants of Art: The Post-Impressionists

Linda Blair, popular local lecturer, is back by popular demand at the Athenaeum in La Jolla. If you like Cezanne, Matisse, and Van Gogh, this is her lecture series for you. This new generation of artists emerged in the 1880s. Like runners in a relay race, the Impressionists handed off the baton of artistic innovation to this these artists today viewed as giants of European art history.

Each Post-Impressionist artist pursued his own unique artistic vision, but all were united in adopting the Impressionists’ conviction that art should not be filtered through ideology, intellect or “schools of art.” Thus liberated from constraint, art, they contended, should be independent, the exclusive product of the artist’s imagination and skill. Matisse and Picasso both claimed that Cezanne was “the father of us all,” and he does stand at the cusp between traditional, realistic art and 20th century abstraction. When Cezanne and Van Gogh met in Paris in 1886, they despised each other, a contempt that spilled over in their opinions of each other’s work. Cezanne’s forms are solid and immutable; Vincent’s inanimate objects dance with a kinetic energy. We can’t find Cezanne, the man, in his paintings; in Van Gogh’s canvases we can’t avoid him. Unlike the very conventional Matisse, Van Gogh’s life was one of alienation. Keenly aware of the isolation his odd behavior caused, he poured his longing for relationships, for human communion, into his paintings. Of his friend and archrival, Picasso said, “All things considered, there is only Matisse.” In his own words, Matisse sought to create “an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.”

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