Original subtitles

If Impressionism is the key that unlocked the door to Modernism, then maybe Post-Impressionism

is the dynamite that blew the door off its hinges.

Because Post-Impressionism seemed to explode all the boundaries of painting, all the rules,

all the classical methods and techniques handed down in artist studios for centuries went

right out the window. Color, light, perspective, proportion, space, figure, atmosphere, blending,

texture. The Post-Impressionists turned them all on their head. Most painters challenged

just one or two formal aspects individually, but collectively they had completely overturned

the rules of painting.

All bets were off, no holds barred, artists were running free. Free from the traditional patrons

of art like the church and the state. Free from the tyranny of nature, the requirement

to have art true to life. Free from thousands of years of history and tradition. Free to

explore any possible idea in any possible style. Post-Impressionism changes and mutates, fractures

and splits, divides and divides again, spinning off like eddies in a stream.

In the wake of Post-Impressionism, we see dozens of new movements take hold. Fauxvism, Expressionism,

Dadaism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Suprematism, Constructivism, to name a few. Indeed, the massive

social, economic, technological, political, and cultural changes that have helped drive Post-Impressionism

only increased in scale and pace in its wake. Artists in the early 20th century were confronted

with the airplane and the automobile, the rise of communism, women's suffrage, the pharmaceutical

revolution, motion pictures, mass production, and the radio.

But if there was a definitive break in the timeline—a point where Post-Impressionism likely

ended—it was the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. The First World War brought the good

times of the Bell Epoch to an abrupt end. And soon, the industrial-scale slaughter and misery

of the conflict completely changed the outlook of a generation. Where the Bell Epoch had captured

the excitement of a new age of technology and entertainment, now people ask themselves,

what kind of world were we heading towards? For many, it seemed the inevitable destruction

of humanity as they knew it. It would be impossible to sum up everything that was happening in Post-Impressionism's

wake. Matisse, Picasso, Dali—some of the biggest names in art come out of this incredible period

of artistic change. These artists all deserve courses of their own. I'm not going to be able to do

them justice here. Instead, in this last lecture, I want to just focus on a handful of interesting

artists who straddled the transition from Post-Impressionism to modern art. My goal here is to show all the fascinating

directions art went during the early 20th century—without us getting too distracted by the big names and famous

paintings you already know about. The most important and influential movement to come out of Post-Impressionism

was Cubism. Made famous by Picasso, Cubism is a revolutionary movement which lays the foundations

for abstract art. The Cubists, instead of flattening space, expanded space and time beyond three dimensions.

Even beyond traditional linear perspective, they wanted to know what it would look like if you could see

multiple perspectives simultaneously. Cubism breaks down everyday objects, analyzes them, and then reassembles

them as a series of shapes and planes. Hopefully you remember that one of the Post-Impressionists

had already started this, Paul Cezanne. In our lectures on Cezanne, we looked at images of his apples and landscapes,

where he started experimenting with strange angles and odd perspectives. He was physically leaning to the left,

leaning to the right. He was moving around his still life, trying to see as much of the objects as possible,

trying to take in a greater sense of reality than a single perspective can give you.

And you can recognize the roots of Cubism in a painting like this portrait, where the hard edges and shadows

create a blocky, geometric feeling. This style made Cezanne quite different even from his fellow Post-Impressionists,

and his work was widely admired by the early Cubists, who built on his foundation and took it to the next level.

One of those artists was Juan Gris, a Spanish painter and contemporary of Picasso, who, like many of our artists,

ended up spending most of his career in France. Although the slightly younger Gris regarded Picasso as a teacher,

because Juan was so good, Gertrude Stein once wrote that Juan Gris was the only person whom Picasso wished away.

Juan Gris initially studied engineering in Madrid, where he would make satirical political drawings for the local periodical.

His love for drawing and painting would ultimately pull him away from engineering and from Spain, and he moved to Paris in 1906.

Though he started out doing political cartoons in Paris, he was quickly blown away by a radical new cohort of artists,

that included George Braque, Fernand Leger, and of course his fellow countryman, Picasso.

It was around this time Picasso painted Les Des Moines d'Avignon, one of the most revolutionary paintings in art history,

and became an icon of modern art. The painting forgoes any realistic sense of perspective and completely flattens the plane.

The women are heavily abstracted into sharp angles and geometric shapes, while some of their faces rendered as African masks.

It won't actually be shown in public until 1916, and given that post-impressionists were rejected from the salon just for their brushwork being too rough,

you can imagine how the academic art establishment reacted to this full frontal assault on traditional aesthetic values.

Excited, Grease turns his sharp mind and talented drawing skills towards cubism.

And what we see in his works, like many of the cubists, is that the abstraction starts slowly.

In their earliest works, you can still make out most of what the subject is,

and details disappear and become confusing, but the broad outlines are there.

As we see here in Man in a Café, this gentleman in a top hat looks like he could have been in a political cartoon,

but then fractured in a mirror or a kaleidoscope.

All the pieces are there, but they all seem to be jumbled up, overlapping and repeating.

It's almost like your eyes are playing tricks on you.

But you can still clearly recognize what things are—the top hat, cocktail glass, his shoes,

even the wallpaper and cityscape in the background are all easily spotted.

I like how the largest and simplest shapes are his feet and shoes at the bottom,

and they gradually get smaller and more detailed the closer we get towards his face.

Then, the face is super detailed, but not in the traditional way.

It's been broken up, messed up, rearranged into a somewhat coherent puzzle of his face.

But what we see with the cubists is that as they gain confidence, they get bolder,

and increasingly push the boundaries of what is possible.

And as Gris developed his skills, he began experimenting more with color and composition.

This painting was made just three years later,

and looks much more sophisticated than the Man in the Café.

Multiple scenes from multiple angles collide together.

Colors are sectioned off, but not limited to the space they're depicting.

And, since it's called still life before an open window,

we have some clues as to what we're looking at here,

knowing that we can start to make out a table with maybe some magazines and a bottle on it.

Gris was also experimenting with other conventions of drawing and collage and framing.

He's using actual pages from an actual book to depict a book. Can you do that?

But there's so many interesting things going on here.

Look at the background, for example.

You see what looks like the frame of a window off to the side?

But there's no view through it.

There's only a curtain or wallpaper inside that frame.

He's inverting colors and values, so the black sections look like an X-ray,

a new and exciting technology in 1915.

The colors look very contemporary to me.

I feel like I could walk into a gallery in Chelsea in New York City

and not be surprised to see a painting like this hanging on the wall.

Here's another confusing jumble of overlapping shapes, objects, and values.

Once you think you've got the hang of what it's doing, it flips over into something else.

The large oval creates a frame within a frame, the gray on the outside.

It's titled still life, the table.

But I don't know if we are looking down at that oval table or what,

but it's quite engaging with a muted palette and simple composition.

It lets us get lost in the very complex spatial construction happening within.

His shapes have become flatter and more abstract.

There are fewer recognizable objects anymore.

All that's left of this table is a bit of faux woodgrain.

You can just make out a newspaper amongst the clutter,

and the headline in French reads,

The True and the False.

And that's exactly what he's trying to create here.

Various slices of reality all colliding into each other on a single plane.

Like what Cezanne was doing in his still lives, but on steroids.

By 1917, you can see Gris has really gone all out with his abstraction.

The title here is Glass and Checkerboard.

We can just barely make out these two objects towards the bottom corner.

But what the heck is the rest supposed to be?

It almost feels like I'm falling as the space jumbles around my field of vision.

Gris and the Cubists are pioneers in this strange new land of abstract art.

So Cubism and Abstraction is one direction that will emerge out of Post-Impressionism.

Another major movement that came straight after it was Fauxvism.

And again, you can see how this movement builds on the experimentation of Post-Impressionism

and takes it to new, undiscovered realms.

Fauxvism is all about color.

Bigger, bolder, louder colors.

So many of the Post-Impressionists expanded their palette using all the lurid new colors,

made possible by technology in exciting ways.

And Divisionism and Neo-Impressionism are the parents of Fauxvism.

Henri Edmond Cross is a good example of an artist who spans this transition.

Here you can see his style looks very much like Seurat, using dots of bright colors and optical effects

to create a scene dazzling with color.

His colors are way more intense than what Seurat would have used, though.

Some of the trees are nearly harsh to look at.

In this next one, made a few years later, you see Cross has traded in the very fine points

and precision of Divisionism for big, watery brushstrokes.

And instead of making a very detailed and disciplined scene,

he's just using vivid colors with watercolor to evoke a sensorial, dreamlike landscape bathed in light.

It's all about those colors.

Henri Matisse will be the most important and influential of the Fauxvists.

Like Picasso, he's one of the pillars of modern art.

And around the same time Picasso is painting the ladies of Avignon that will shake up the art world,

Matisse reveals his own groundbreaking piece called the Bonheur de Vibre, or the Joy of Life.

Again, Matisse is taking what was happening in Post-Impressionism

and starting to push it much further.

He's taking the bold focus on color contrast from the Divisionists

and going to new extremes with them.

Fauxvists' colors are crazy.

They're not realistic.

They're intense, way beyond what the Impressionists were doing.

Artists like Paul Gauguin loved using Cadmium Yellow,

one of those new industrial pigments that got you an intense color that was hard to make previously.

Matisse goes crazy with it.

It's also a very dreamlike landscape full of metaphors, mythological references, and hints of the erotic,

taking several cues from the Symbolists who loved doing the same.

But the Fauxvists weren't completely untethered from reality.

They used value and color strategically to correspond to the light.

It was anything but arbitrary.

Using lower contrast and lighter colors in the distance,

they were still able to show space and depth and atmosphere.

Strategically placing high contrasting colors and darker colors

created extreme vibrancy and dynamic shifts in space.

Fauxvism was actually a fairly brief movement.

Officially, they just had a few years of shows in Paris.

But its impact was huge.

Artists all over the place start getting bigger and bolder with their colors.

Artists like Franz Marc in Germany.

Born in 1880, Franz is usually more associated with the expressionism movement.

But Marc's painting shared a similar palette with the Fauxvs,

with bright, bold, and unexpected color combinations unrestrained by reality.

Franz loved painting animals, specifically horses out in nature.

He had his own interpretation of color.

He said,

blue was used to portray masculinity and spirituality,

yellow represented feminine joy,

and red encased the sound of violence.

And what we see increasingly is that cubism and Fauxvism start coming together in the work of many artists,

combining bright colors with hard geometry.

In The Mandrill from 1913, we see how Marc mashes the two together with the abstract geometric shapes of a Picasso

and the vibrant palette of a Matisse.

Like many painters of this era, Marc's career was tragically cut short.

At the age of 34, he was drafted into service during World War I,

and after two years in the military, Franz died at the Battle of Verdun.

Ironically, in the next World War, the Nazis would declare Franz Marc's paintings degenerate,

despite fighting and dying for Germany.

Several other artists would start combining new styles.

In fact, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, an artist couple in France,

would found a movement called Orphism, which explicitly merged Fauxvism and Cubism together.

Robert, however, tended to lean more towards flatter shapes, brighter colors, and simpler forms over time.

His work was heavily influenced by his wife's flat, colorful quilt shapes,

so they inspired and encouraged each other to take the style further and further.

For example, we see an early combination in this exciting sports painting, The Cardiff Team,

where we see big shapes and highly saturated colors.

But there's still lots of recognizable pieces here, including text, signage, and a Ferris wheel.

But see how quickly that changes.

Within just a few years, he starts looking less at reality and more at highly saturated colors

and interesting interlocking shapes and patterns from his own mind.

In this portrait of a nude woman reading, we can make out some table legs on the left,

with a book on the table.

I think I see a pink jacket hanging on the back of a chair on the right.

The woman is almost indecipherable.

But the colors—a beautiful, bold color palette that, again, looks quite contemporary to me.

And then check out this work from just another year later.

The edges are sharper, the colors bolder, and the subject even less decipherable, if that's possible.

We can still make out a few recognizable things from life here,

before he completely abandons nature in favor of hard-edge abstraction.

A striking thing about the aftermath of Post-Impressionism is just how international the art scene became.

Romanticism, realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism—the biggest art movements of the 19th century—

were driven and dominated by French artists, with regional variations across Europe and North America.

But things really open up in the 20th century.

New avant-garde movements start to appear in Berlin, Vienna, and the Netherlands.

And even New York is building momentum to overtake Paris as the art capital of the world.

Take, for example, Futurism—another very influential movement from Italy in the 1910s—on the heels of Post-Impressionism.

Futurism was an exciting and bold movement that was all about embracing the modern age—speed, youth, technology, cars, airplanes, factories.

The world was changing, and the Futurists wanted their art to reflect and promote it.

Contrast that with many of the French Post-Impressionists, who were socialists and communards,

and very skeptical of modernism and the drudgery it brought.

This proud figure marching forward into the future was a mascot that represented the hope of the Futurists, sculpted by Umberto Boccioni.

He also made some astoundingly intricate and bizarre paintings and sculptures before his early death at the age of 33.

You can see in his painting, States of Mind 2, Those Who Go, a chaotic and detailed composition that shows the constant movement and intensity of modern life.

Ghostly faces swirl in the aggressive speed of machinery, smoke, and fire.

It's hard for me to enjoy the Futurists, though, because of the dark side of their movement.

On the one side, the style is gorgeous and intricate, but the Futurists embrace war and violence in all its ugliness.

One of their treaties, entitled The Manifesto of Futurism, declared,

We will glorify war, the world's only hygiene, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers,

beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

Doesn't sound so good, does it?

It certainly hasn't aged very well.

And the aesthetic of Futurism would be a huge influence on the look and feel of Italian fascism.

You can see that combination in a painting like The City Rises, which has all the speed, chaos, and confusion of a battle.

It's bold and exciting, but the undertone is violence.

The look and feel of Futurism, though, would also influence a lot of other artists and designers,

as well as the general excitement about the modern age.

Art Deco, for example, embraces the style of the times, sans the violence.

We even see American artists of this time starting to break away from centuries of copying France

and starting to break out on their own.

It was an exciting time in America when the early 20th century was taking over as the world's largest economy,

and where groundbreaking new technologies like airplanes, skyscrapers, and automobiles were speeding up modern life.

You can see why young American artists were also excited about the future.

Morton Schomburg, for example, painted machine portraits, both real and imaginary, spurring a movement called Precisionism,

one of the first truly American art movements.

As the name suggests, this style is a more focused and precise type of Cubism.

Joseph Stella is particularly interesting because he sort of fuses Cubism, Precisionism, Fauxvism, and Futurism all at the same time.

Born in Italy in 1877, Joseph was sent by his family to New York City in 1896 to study medicine.

Out of the watchful eyes of his parents, he ditched medical school and signed up to study at the Art Students League,

where he was proven to be a gifted draftsman.

In 1909, dissatisfied with America, especially the cold weather, Joseph goes back to Italy,

where he met Umberto Boccioni and learned about Futurism.

He's immediately hooked, and in 1913, Stella returns to America to give it another shot.

With fresh eyes, he becomes fascinated with the geometry of the architecture of New York City.

And in an incredible composition like Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras, you can see all his influences coming together.

It's colorful, abstract, precise, and exciting, capturing all the sights and dynamism of the greatest amusement park of its age.

Stella predates psychedelic painting by a few generations, but his paintings are undeniably trippy.

A wild, swirling mass of color and shape pulsating, glowing, and roaring.

These paintings must have been breathtakingly new and bizarre to see back then.

No one was making paintings like this.

In Russia and the Ukraine, artists are getting weird in their own ways.

Their politics is not the only thing about to get revolutionary.

They're going to take what the cubists and futurists are doing and go completely non-representational.

One of the most famous painters to yank post-impressionism in this direction was Wassily Kandinsky.

Born in Moscow and raised in Odessa, Ukraine, as a card-carrying contrarian, he decides to do art school first,

then go straight-laced and study law and economics.

At the age of 30, though, he returns to art, studying and teaching in Germany,

and eventually settling in France after World War I, where he spends the last decade of his life painting.

In his earlier works, like this one, Houses at Murnau, we see someone fully investigating post-impressionism,

divisionism, fauvism, and symbolism.

We can see him starting to twist reality, but for now it was still based in observation.

It's fun to trace Kandinsky's departure into full-blown abstraction.

Kandinsky was not just a painter, he was a theorist, a professor, and he had many ideas about painting.

If you think post-impressionism was philosophical and political, you haven't seen anything yet.

Kandinsky writes two books on the theoretical backgrounds to his work.

Kandinsky was a huge influence on art throughout all of Europe, not just through his paintings,

but through all his other work within the arts as well.

Of course, Kandinsky is most famous for his quest to visualize music, sound, spirituality, and emotion,

unencumbered by representations of the physical world that can weigh us down with all their associations.

This piece is called Improvisation 27, Garden of Love 2.

Unnamed forms, shapes, and colors appear and disappear.

A wandering line connects the different passages, like the timeline of a song leads us to different events,

and back to familiar choruses, and into a new verse.

Circles, hash marks, and lines mark the time and the movement.

Kandinsky eventually feels he has no need to reference our world, and turns purely abstract,

favoring the emotion of the mark and the gesture, the speed, the rhythm, the color.

After all, we experience music as pure tones free from visual meaning,

but they still speak directly to our emotions.

Music has the ability to override our prefrontal cortex,

where it doesn't need analyzing or filtering to go straight to our emotional core,

even without vocals or lyrics.

Kandinsky sought to empower the line, the shape, the color, the gesture,

and elevate them to the emotional power of musical notes.

Did he succeed? What do you think?

Now to our final artist.

Do you have one of those friends when you're joking around with them,

they keep going and take the joke just way too far?

I know I do. It was me.

And that's what Kazimir Melewicz reminds me of.

Born in Kiev, yet ethnically Polish,

he's the guy who took a look around at the art of his day and said,

OK, I can see where this is heading.

Why should I bother gradually simplifying my shapes over the next few decades?

I'm going to skip ahead and reduce forms to just flat color blocks on a white background.

As we can see here in Suprematist composition, airplane flying,

is the red line the propeller? The horizon? I'm not sure. Which squares are the wings?

He figured if he could refine his shapes all the way,

then perhaps he could find what he called the supremacy of pure feeling.

And the movement he started would be called Suprematism as a result.

It's impossible to get much more abstract than Suprematism.

He's really breaking down art to its most fundamental and basic components.

In 1915, Melewicz was commissioned for a theater piece,

and he decided he was going to go all the way.

A single black square on a white background.

Of this piece, he said,

Black square is meant to evote the experience of pure non-objectivity

in the white emptiness of a liberated nothing.

In some ways, this could be considered the ground zero of painting,

perhaps a black hole or a tombstone or a better metaphor.

Is this where painting died?

Were thousands and thousands of years of painting

being reduced down to a single black square?

Of course, all of us who've been alive after 1915

know that painting certainly did not die with the black square.

Thinking about what Malevich said,

a white emptiness of liberated nothing.

Perhaps painting was now fully liberated from all previous notions and traditions.

Instead of a black hole,

does this point zero represent the moment painting was made free?

What's incredible is just how quickly all this has happened.

Remember, this is barely ten years after Matisse and Picasso had started to make waves.

Many of the younger post-impressionists like Signac, Bonnard, and Seroussier

are all still alive and still painting.

It must have been strange for them to remember how radical and rebellious they had been just a few decades before,

and now to look so old-fashioned just 20 years later.

As late as the 1890s, the Paris Salon was still rejecting paintings like Cezanne's

because they were too edgy and not academic or realistic enough.

The Salon jury probably had a heart attack when they saw Malevich for the first time a couple decades later.

Pissarro, Cezanne, Rousseau—all incredibly talented painters who made beautiful artworks

that we can still enjoy and admire in galleries around the world.

Van Gogh is probably one of the most beloved artists of all time,

if the long lines at those traveling Van Gogh experiences are any indicator.

And I hope you've enjoyed getting to know them better in this course.

But I think the big takeaway is that post-impressionists were incredible experimenters

and rebels who pushed the boundaries of art.

As we've seen, there was no single style or movement of the post-impressionist period.

In just a few decades in Paris, there's symbolists, divisionists, neo-impressionists, cloisonists,

lay-na-bi, and total nonconformists like Odilon Radon, who just do their own thing.

It was an exciting, revolutionary period where so much changed so quickly.

Isaac Newton said he saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants.

And that's the incredible legacy of the post-impressionists.

They were the giants who climbed new conceptual heights

and took the first steps towards liberating art from centuries of tradition.

They are the giants on whose shoulders modern artists stand.

They saw the future on the horizon and they painted it.