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Updated: June 19, 2025
Whether Post-Impressionism will peter out as Impressionism has done, or whether it is the first flowering of a new artistic vitality with centuries of development before it, is, I have admitted, a matter of conjecture.
Something sufficiently interesting, at any rate, to give pause even to a critic in a hurry. His name must not go by unmarked. Flandrin was amongst the first to rebel against Impressionism against that impressionism, I mean, which remained implicit in post-impressionism. Resolutely he set his face against the prevailing habit of expressing an aspect of things, and tried hard to make a picture.
It may be said with some justice that Post-Impressionism is peculiarly anarchical because it insists so emphatically on fundamentals and challenges so violently the conventional tradition of art and, by implication, I suppose, the conventional view of life. By setting art so high, it sets industrial civilisation very low.
Formerly because both felt bound to strike a compromise between art and what the public had been taught to expect, the work of one was grievously disfigured, that of the other ruined. Tradition ordered the painter to be photographer, acrobat, archaeologist and littérateur: Post-Impressionism invites him to become an artist.
The silliest things said about Post-Impressionist pictures are said by people who regard Post-Impressionism as an isolated movement, whereas, in fact, it takes its place as part of one of those huge slopes into which we can divide the history of art and the spiritual history of mankind.
Post-Impressionism is no specific against human folly and incompetence. All it can do for painters is to bring before them the claims of art. To the man of genius and to the student of talent it can say: "Don't waste your time and energy on things that don't matter: concentrate on what does: concentrate on the creation of significant form." Only thus can either give the best that is in him.
For this happened years before anybody had begun to buy Van Gogh years before anybody had begun to hear of Van Gogh years before Post-Impressionism had been invented and had launched its crop of Cubists and Futurists and Vorticists as direct descendants of Van Gogh and Cézanne who would assuredly have been the first to repudiate them.
The survey will give me occasion for stating some of the things that Post-Impressionism is and some that it is not. I shall have to raise points that will be dealt with at greater length elsewhere. Here I shall have a chance of raising them, and at least suggesting a solution.
He says, "My claim for them is that while laboured and struggling in execution, they represent a study of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Japanese art, two most orthodox origins for art, and have no relation whatever to cubism, post-impressionism, or futurism.... I have been very fond of Swinburne all my life, and I should say my drawing is nearer to his ornate mood than any of my writing has been.
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