Post Impressionism

According to artstory.org, post-impressionism encompasses a wide range of distinct artistic styles that all share the common motivation of responding to the opticality of the Impressionist movement. The stylistic variationns range from scientifically oriented Neo-Impressionism to lush Symbolism, but they are all concentrated on the subjective vision of the artist. Painting became a window to the soul and mind instead of a window onto the world.
Post-Impressionist era became an influence to some groups in the 20th century, like the Expressionists, and some contemporary movements like the identity-related Feminist Art.

Key Ideas:

• Artists looked to connect with the viewers of their art on a deeper, more personal level. They looked into their memories and emotions to do so and symbolic and personal meanings were important to them as well. 
• The aesthetic vision of the post-impressionist artists was dominated by structure, order, and the optical effects of color. They used color and shape to describe their surroundings instead of just representing them.
• Most post-impressionist artists focused on abstract from and pattern when applying the paint onto the canvas. This paved way for the radical modernist exploration of abstraction int eh 20th century.

 Post-Impressionism has been grouped into two general stylistic trends:
- The structured or geometric style
      This was the precursor to Cubism.
- The expressive or non-geometric side
     This led to Abstract Expressionism








Claude Monet, the famous French painter who gave name to Impressionism, altered the path of painting in 1872. He achieved this through Impression, Sunrise in which he used each visible stroke to record exactly how the light fell upon the steamships and the water.
The core membership of Post-Impressionism was conformed by Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas.




The Impressionist artists eventually became known as Post-Impressionist artists, this term grouped together varying individual artistic styles from the artists themselves.
Paris was the fount of Post-Impressionism. The life of the city was no longer the dominant subject for artists because of the emphasis on symbolic and expressive content.

Georges Seurat was the one that broke with Impressionism by developing a style of painting known as Pointillism. The largest stylistic movement of Seurat is known as Neo-Impressionism, chromo-luminarism or divisionism. He explored a new scientific point of view for color and extended the interest in optics for Impressionist artists.

If you want to know more about this: http://www.theartstory.org/movement-post-impressionism.htm