How Post-Impressionism got its name and what gave rise to it?

How Post-Impressionist art got its name?

Post-Impressionism is a lame name (Could you perhaps find a better one?). But before we blame the British art critic and historian, Roger Fry, who coined it in 1910, we have to understand the challenge he faced. He needed a name for his London exhibition through which he was to introduce to the public a new group of very distinct artists (Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin) among original Impressionist artists (e.g. Manet). He settled on “Manet and the Post-Impressionists.” The diversity of their styles and techniques made it hard to give them but a generic term that categorises them as those who arrived after the Impressionist generation.

What gave rise to Post-Impressionism? and where?

Ironically the Impressionist movement that opened the gates to modern art was too limited to a certain group of painters. They were frustrated with its lack of form or clear structure. Most of them were French, like Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin. Even the notable exception, Vincent van Gogh who was Dutch lived (and died) in France.

Although they shared a dissatisfaction with Impressionism, especially with its formlessness, they never agreed on the way forward. If you compare paintings by Cézanne, Seurat and Van Gogh, you’ll notice that they all look different in style. Their reaction to Impressionism seemed to agree on an immediate return to form that was lost in Impressionism, but little else. Cézanne brought back black outlines, Seurat painted in tiny dots of colour, while Van Gogh’s paintings used thick swabs of paint. As such, Post-Impressionism was never to become a unified movement.

Pointillism

Post-Impressionist painters developed styles that varied not only in technique but also level of difficulty. Pointillism, for example, was extremely laborious, where a painting was composed of a ridiculously large number of dots. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is made up of millions of perfectly placed dots, taking two years of work by Georges Seurat. The same theories of optics and colour that inspired Impressionist artists before, also played a role in the development of the Pointillist branch of Post-Impressionism. The mosaic-like brush marks rely on colours blending in the eyes of the viewers as long as they’re not too close to the canvas. This technique and its innate understanding of how the human eye operated was much ahead of its time: Your computer screen and its pixels work on the same premise found in Seurat’s paintings composed of millions of dots.

Note that in some contexts, Divisionism refers to the overall style and theory where paintings are composed of either fine dots or swabs of paint (view examples here). In that context Pointillism is just a name for the technique that uses dots.