Post-Impressionism

This name, meaning after Impressionism, was actually coined after the fact. In 1910, the critic Roger Fry used it for the first time at a London exhibition that introduced Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin together. The three were not painting the same style: Van Gogh moved toward emotion, Cézanne toward structure, Gauguin toward symbol. Three rivers from one spring, and most of twentieth-century art traces back to this point. Van Gogh's oil copy of Hiroshige's print, Bridge in the Rain (1887), shows how far the current of Japonisme had reached into this circle. Of the three rivers, the one that ran furthest was probably Cézanne's apples. Still life sat at the very bottom of the academic ranking: no gods, no heroes, just fruit. Cézanne painted that lowest of subjects over and over for the rest of his life, working out how to hold an apple as an assembly of planes seen from somewhere. Out of that accumulation, young painters who saw the 1907 Cézanne retrospective started Cubism. The twentieth century begins at the bottom of the list. One more note about the name: Post-Impressionism was coined in London in 1910, so all three of them died without ever knowing they were Post-Impressionists — Cézanne in 1906, van Gogh in 1890, Gauguin in 1903.