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Art & Art History vocabulary · Movements & Periods

Post-Impressionism

Meaning in art & art history, with examples

/ˌpoʊst ɪmˈpreʃənɪzəm/nounCommon term

In art & art history, Post-Impressionism means: A term for the work of artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat, who started from Impressionism in the 1880s but moved towards stronger structure, symbolism or expression.

In Turkish: Post-Empresyonizm, Ard-İzlenimcilik, Empresyonizm sonrası

How it is used

Not a single group with a shared programme: the name was coined by the British critic Roger Fry for a London exhibition in 1910. The artists are called Post-Impressionists. The movement is seen as a bridge to Cubism and Expressionism.

Example sentences

  1. Van Gogh and Gauguin are usually grouped together as Post-Impressionists.

  2. Cézanne's Post-Impressionist still lifes break objects into simple planes of colour.

Common collocations

  • Post-Impressionist painter
  • Post-Impressionist exhibition
  • French Post-Impressionism
  • ImpressionismA French art movement of the 1870s and 1880s whose painters, such as Monet, Renoir and Morisot, tried to capture light, colour and passing moments, often painting outdoors.
  • CubismAn art movement started around 1907 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which broke objects into geometric shapes and showed them from several viewpoints at once.
  • ExpressionismAn early-twentieth-century movement, strongest in Germany, in which artists distorted shapes and used intense colours to express emotions rather than show the world as it looks.
  • modern artArt made roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, when artists broke with academic traditions and experimented with new styles, subjects and materials.

More terms: Movements & Periods

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