Original subtitles

Your expert is Ricky Allman, a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

He is an award-winning painter whose work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, and many international cities.

His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times and Harper's Magazine.

On December 1, 1884, the doors of the Pavilion Polychrome were flung open, and a curious public poured into the massive hall to see what all the fuss was about.

The first exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants was opening with a young group of rebellious artists.

They were sick and tired of the establishment rejecting their works for display at the Salon, Paris' biggest and most prestigious art show.

So, after years of complaining, they decided to set up their own salon.

Their stated goal was to allow the artists to present their work to public judgment with complete freedom.

Parisians, like most people, loved a spectacle.

And Paris in the 1880s was full of spectacles.

This was the Belle Epoche, after all, a time of incredible change.

New technologies, new products, and new ideas were everywhere.

And now the newspapers and posters were advertising a new type of art to experience.

One of the biggest and most radical paintings in the show was the Bathers at Asnier.

Nearly 10 feet wide and 7 feet tall, it was the first major painting of Georges Seurat, just 25 years old,

and he'd been working on it for nearly two years.

From a distance, one might have mistaken it as another Impressionist painting.

Impressionism had been causing a stir for nearly 20 years now.

Artists like Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, and August Renoir had been the young rebels of the 1860s and 1870s,

daring to challenge painterly conventions with their visible brush strokes, saturated colors,

and focus on feeling and light, rather than classical realism.

But there was a lot more going on in this painting than meets the eye.

Essentially, it's a big science experiment.

Seurat has carefully constructed his picture with highly disciplined brush strokes

that from a distance fool our eyes into seeing colors and tones that aren't actually there on the canvas.

And he's using recent discoveries in color theory to select contrasting colors to influence one another.

And his choice of subjects, and the way he depicts them, was daring.

A painting of this size would have traditionally been reserved for a great battle or historical event,

or perhaps a biblical scene, if it was to hang in a church.

Yet, Seurat depicts bathers, working-class bathers.

His title states the scene is set in Asnières, a dirty industrial suburb of Paris.

You can see the factories in the background.

These aren't pitiable street urchins, though.

These are regular, relatable people just taking a break.

And yet, his subjects are totally anonymous.

He's not replacing actors' faces with royalty like academia did.

We can't even see most of the faces.

So, this painting, huge in scale and so meticulously constructed,

is a tribute to ordinary, unknown people living in the suburbs.

The critics didn't quite know what to make of it.

As one said,

it is painted with so much conviction that it appears almost touching.

And I don't quite dare poke fun at it.

Of course, plenty did poke fun and moved on quickly.

Little did they know that they were looking at the seeds of the next global revolution in art,

post-impressionism.

I'm Ricky Allman.

I'm a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

I'm also an artist.

I discovered post-impressionism while in art school in Boston,

and was profoundly influenced by these artists, especially Cézanne.

Growing up in the Rocky Mountains,

my mind was constantly imagining different shapes and patterns emerging

and moving in the rocks, cliffs, and boulders.

When I found out that's exactly what Cézanne was doing with Mont Saint-Victoire,

I felt a strange sort of validation and excitement about my childhood fantasies.

It gave me courage and inspiration to begin painting abstract mountains,

which I've been doing for over 20 years now.

Over the next 24 lessons,

I want to take you up close into the world of the post-impressionists.

I want to show you how they experienced the incredible change happening all around them.

Science, technology, politics, religion, society, and philosophy

were all being completely reimagined.

This is exactly what the post-impressionists would do with painting.

I want to talk about what caused these artists to think and feel the way they did,

how it affected their artwork,

and of course, we'll dig deep into the content of their paintings

to see how they altered the trajectory of art forever.

Modern life is complicated, confusing, and difficult to understand.

One reason we value art in our lives is because artists act kind of like a sieve or a filter,

sucking in inspiration from all around them,

and then channeling that into a unique vision and interpretation of the times,

right there for us to see on the canvas or the screen.

It helps us make sense of the world around us.

Art has a unique way to make us see our world, our times, and ourselves in a different way.

The post-impressionists wanted to do all that,

and they didn't care what rules they broke while they did it.

They pushed the boundaries of art in every direction,

and some of them, like Van Gogh, Seurat, and Cézanne,

have become some of the most recognizable and significant artists in Western art.

It's important to realize, though, that post-impressionism wasn't a clear-cut movement

with a distinctive style.

If you know a little about your art history, you can usually pick a Rococo painting from a Renaissance one,

or a Cubist painting from pop art.

Post-impressionism, though, was much more fluid,

and it can be hard to define the boundaries of the movement.

In fact, the term post-impressionism didn't even really get first used until 1910,

several years after what some consider to be the end of the movement in 1905.

Art historians are always trying to put artists into little boxes and categories,

and it was very useful to have this new term to describe all this change

that had gone on over the past three decades.

But it's not a term that the artists themselves ever used.

Some considered themselves part of much smaller movements,

like the Symbolists, Nabi Group, or the Neo-Impressionists.

Others had ideas that were so different they didn't really fit with anyone else.

Most artists probably didn't worry about it too much,

and were happy to leave such questions to the academics.

But, despite the huge variety, there are several main themes connecting them.

The first is color—vivid, unnatural colors,

many of them only recently possible through the wonders of modern chemistry.

The post-impressionists love color in all its forms,

and many use new scientific discoveries in color theory to guide their work.

So, science and technology helped the post-impressionists open up their palates.

The second is abstraction.

The post-impressionists rejected classical realism

and looked for new, less literal ways to depict the world or to convey emotions and feelings.

Some, like Cezanne, played around with angles, optical science, and perspective

to represent the world in a totally different way,

and opened the door to the later cubists as he did so.

Others used symbols, bold lines, blocks of color, patterns,

or even the physical qualities of paint itself to represent their subjects.

Some, like Toulouse-Lautrec, use these new simplified forms to become early graphic designers,

creating artistic posters for the mass market.

And the third is their interest in non-Western art.

Keep in mind that African art, Asian art, and Indigenous art from all over the world

were far more developed than Europe in terms of abstraction, patterning, color theory, symbolism.

Western art in the 19th century was really just discovering

what had been going on elsewhere for centuries.

But in the late 19th century, increased international communication and the start of globalization

was exposing many to the art of other places for the first time.

Many of the post-impressionists couldn't get enough of it.

Japanese art particularly was a huge influence on many.

But art from Africa, South Asia, and even South America was starting to filter in

and inspire European artists to incorporate elements into their own work.

And finally, experimentation.

The post-impressionists did everything they told you not to in art school.

Many post-impressionists were self-taught with fresh eyes and new perspectives and approaches.

Seurat and the pointillists used tiny dots and intricate brushwork to construct their images.

Van Gogh painted with brushstrokes so thick and heavy that the paint nearly fell off the canvas,

creating incredible textures and effects.

Everyone's technique was a bit different, but they were all trying to achieve the same end.

Forget about the rules and find new ways to express their own personal vision.

In fact, it's their individualism and unique approaches that makes post-impressionism so interesting to study,

and such a pivotal movement.

Because they were pioneering artists who started kicking down the doors of centuries of convention and setting art free.

They helped make art about individual expression rather than realistic depiction.

And as we'll see, they really did lay the foundations for modern art.

We're going to cover a lot of ground in this course, and I'll be talking about both the artists and movements of the period,

and also the big changes in the world that influenced their worldview.

But for the rest of this first lecture, we need to start with impressionism,

which all the post-impressionists were either inspired by or reacted against.

The impressionists rocked the boat, and the post-impressionists broke the boat into a hundred pieces,

grabbed their own boards, and surfed off into the sunset.

Most people now are familiar with the big names of Impressionism.

Monet, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Renoir.

Perhaps you have reproductions of these artists printed on your coffee mug or calendar on the wall.

How did these once controversial rejects become beloved icons?

It's funny now to think how something as sweet and docile as a Monet painting of haystacks could piss off so many people.

But they did.

We have seen these beautiful, serene images all of our lives, packaged and presented as safe and wholesome, even quaint.

But before these became household images, these were radical. These were wild.

These paintings made people uncomfortable. They made people angry.

Because for centuries, what art should be was pretty strictly defined by a small cluster of official institutions.

In France, the various official art committees tended to be grouped together and known as the Academy.

And they ran the important juries that judged artworks and sat on the panels that approved artists to get government or church commissions.

They also ran Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the premier art school that taught classes, held exhibitions, and lectures.

It was the hub of painting and sculpture in France.

And in one of the most influential art centers in Europe.

Hundreds of years of training, knowledge, skills, and philosophies channeled through centuries of master and apprentice books, manuals, classes, and workshops.

By the early 19th century, they had their students so disciplined, all their work starts to look the same, and they're all painting the same things.

Everyone was taught the immutable rules of perspective, color and form, and how to do the perfect breaststroke, how to paint the sky, people, buildings.

There was a formula for everything.

You would spend weeks and weeks painting models from life, trying to get every muscle right, every skin tone perfect, every hair in place.

You would train and train and train until you could create nearly perfect reality on the canvas.

It was stifling, but there weren't many other options if you wanted to become a painter in 1800.

There were no art stores where you could just buy paints and brushes off the shelf.

There were no pre-stretched canvases to buy.

There were no YouTube tutorials.

No Wikipedia pages.

No great courses that could teach you how to paint.

Hint.

Art was also a pretty exclusive and expensive profession.

Nearly all the art was commissioned by the state, the church, or the rich.

So naturally, the result was that most of these academy-trained artists just made art for the rich and powerful, as displays of wealth, power, God, or the state.

Kings, emperors, bishops, and the wealthy wanted portraits of themselves and their families, or Greek myths or religious stories.

Or they wanted grand narrative historical paintings.

They wanted smooth, glossy, dramatic illusions of what their life was and meant to them.

Art was only for the 1%, or maybe the .001%.

So you see lots of paintings of queens, lords, ladies, princesses, popes, bishops, castles, cathedrals, Zeus, Athena, angels, demons, prophets, and prophets depicted in the academy.

We see themes of good triumph over evil.

We see the framing of what is good and evil.

And we see a lot of painting that tells the same stories over and over.

Academic art was constantly looking backwards, especially to the Romans and Greeks.

Artists who were steeped in the academic tradition would set up costumes on mannequins and would often be painting a scene of a large group of people,

but they would do it one person at a time, lighting each one perfectly and intricately, having an apprentice spending a month painting a fancy lace collar.

In this way, they were like theater directors as they constructed a new reality, a carefully orchestrated, fictitious reality.

Perhaps a mythical figure would show up in the composition as a way to deem eternal significance on the important people represented in the painting.

The details would be incredible, a 10- or 20-foot canvas with every inch painstakingly and carefully painted and blended, not a brushstroke in sight.

They used century-old techniques of building up layer upon layer of glazing over a grisaille background.

They had perfected the fundamentals of art like perspective and light that began in the Renaissance.

And in doing so, they've made art more like engineering than any kind of personal expression.

But in the 1800s, things are changing.

The first industrial revolution had started a fundamental transformation of society that would continue across the whole of the 19th century.

Paris was attracting people, moving in from all around to work in these new industries.

A new wealthy consumer class was being born from the prosperity of all this new industry and trade.

As well as the exploitation of the colonial world by the European powers.

A new class that's interested in new types of art and has the money to start paying for it.

Or a class that can afford to send their kids to art school and set them up as artists.

And the cost of making art is going down.

New industries and manufacturing techniques are also making art supplies available en masse for the first time.

Stores were popping up where you could buy all kinds of supplies.

Pallets, brushes, pre-stretched and prepared canvas, easels.

You didn't have to make everything yourself or have an apprentice do it.

Advancements in the chemical industry meant they were mixing up new, more vibrant colors in the lab and putting them in paints.

New pastels on the market help keep color bright and vibrant as well.

The industrial revolution is bringing thousands into cities to work.

The population of Paris explodes.

More and more artists are moving there too.

And all these new people are mingling and talking.

The café was becoming a new social space for people to hang out, talk, and get caffeinated.

Artists could meet, share ideas, techniques, and materials.

Painting knowledge wasn't so guarded anymore.

Before, the only way you could really learn is to apprentice with a master for years and years.

Now, artists could easily visit each other's studios and the art supply store.

They didn't need a security clearance to enter the castle.

There was also a lot more artists now.

Hundreds, maybe thousands working in Paris.

An explosion of artists which only attracted more artists.

All these conditions are swirling together, creating the perfect atmosphere for a groundbreaking new art movement.

And by the 1860s, a young new group of artists are starting to make waves.

They want to break free of the rules of the academy.

They don't want to paint mythological scenes or history.

They want to just go out into the open air and paint the world around them, here and now.

They want to use all the new colors they can buy and capture the beauty of nature and the light around them.

They can't breathe inside the academy. They want to break free.

These up-and-comers will become known as the impressionists.

You can just imagine what the academy thought of this kind of art.

Low-brow, pedestrian, lacking the majesty and power of more traditional subjects.

They considered this new painting some kind of class warfare.

The artists were obviously extremely talented, so it was impossible to ignore these genre paintings they thought were beneath them.

Maybe more suitable for the poor commoner, not for the museum.

In 1863, the rebel artists bitterly complained to Napoleon III, Emperor of France,

about how they can't get a chance with the jury officials at the Paris Salon.

And, as a result, they get an interesting break.

The emperor agrees to exhibit the rejects from the official Salon, and they will get a gallery for their work as well.

Known as the Salon des Refuses, it might be the first state-sponsored artistic counterculture movement.

Seems a bit of an oxymoron.

Now, this wasn't so much a validation for the avant-garde.

This is more like when they show the painful first rounds of American Idol.

And we love to laugh at those who dare to put themselves out there.

The critics and the public had a field day at the Refus Salon.

They got a thousand visitors a day.

But some of the biggest names in art history were in that show.

Edward Manet, Camille Pissarro, James McNeil Whistler, just to name a few.

And while a lot of people hated the art, Plenty legitimately loved these new paintings.

And the Impressionists, as they would eventually come to be known, began to band together and start exhibiting on their own, outside of the Salon, challenging the popularity and the dominance of academic art.

Free to pursue their own vision, the rebels soon start getting bolder with their work, and keep pushing the envelope.

And by the 1870s, a distinctive new style is really starting to emerge.

In 1872, Claude Monet paints Impression, Sunrise, which becomes the namesake and unofficial mascot of the new movement.

Let's take a closer look at this painting.

Rumored to be finished in a single night from a hotel balcony, he only titled it when someone asked.

To him, it was just an impression of the sunrise, not the actual or full picture realistically depicted.

Critic Louis Leroy used this term against him.

Impressionism was meant as derogatory, but the term caught on as tends to happen.

Compared to academic art, this impression must have looked like a child's painting.

You can hear them saying, my kid could paint that.

It's scribbly, rough, simple, no details.

Nearly all of the brush strokes are visible.

There's not even a celebrity or a member of the royal family in sight.

But there is something compelling about it.

The sun is using complementary color and contrast to shine and glow.

If you compare them in black and white, the sun in his painting has the same brightness value as the sky.

He didn't lighten it or darken the sky around it.

The effect is created purely by color contrast.

The brushwork is loose and rough, but he uses layering to create subtle and clever effects in the background,

to create what really does feel like haze and fog in the sky.

The Impressionists were inspired by the weather and atmospheric effects that gave them permission to create a strong improvisational feel.

The Impressionists would often have to return to the same spot as the fleeting light only lasts minutes at sunset.

While these paintings were made relatively quickly, they still needed many hours to complete.

Impressionists started painting things not as they are, but as they appear to be.

You don't have to construct a whole tree with trunk and branches when you can just smear the right shade of green and capture its appearance at a distance in the atmosphere.

The Academy taught you to investigate every millimeter of the surface and paint every stitch of cloth and whisker on the face.

But this is not how things look to us.

We don't all have perfect, clear vision.

And besides that, we can only focus on a single spot at a time.

The Impressionists were taking an impression, a snapshot, a glance.

Saying in effect, this is how this scene looked to me when I saw it, and it was beautiful.

And that was it.

No cardinal looking over your back telling you who to put in the painting.

No patrons.

No giant studio production.

No assistants.

Just an artist with a paintbrush, admiring the beauty that surrounds them and feeling the desire to share that with others.

And sure, they may have been exaggerating the colors.

How could you resist with these new, vibrant pastels and paint tubes?

Omitting blacks and ochres from their color palette, artists were distancing themselves from the drab, academic painting

and looking for color even in the darkest of shadows.

There's something kind of hopeful and poetic about that.

Besides, that's how the color feels when you're in the moment, when it's quiet, and you're just taken over by the experience.

A completely secular and private moment that could be shared on a more intimate, smaller canvas.

Perhaps in a new café or an artist-run gallery.

No special access needed.

It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, though.

Another hallmark of modernism was fear, entrapment, and ennui.

People looking tired and weary, beaten down by the fast pace of modern life.

Yes, all the change was exciting, but it was also scary and awful for the working class, working longer hours in more dangerous environments.

Forbidden drinks like absinthe, which proved to be a popular antidote to the pain of modern life, shows up in paintings like Degas in a café.

Another revolutionary aspect to this movement, women.

Burt Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalez, Marie Brockmond, Cecilia Beaux, Lilla Cabot Perry, to name a few.

Women had been excluded and shut out of the traditional art world.

But now, there were a few less barriers for a woman, if they had money, of course.

Women began making paintings depicting women in women's lives and the lives of children.

Burt Morisot is a highly underrated painter who was in seven of the Impressionist exhibitions.

She brought a unique and much-needed perspective to Impressionism.

With a bold and innovative criss-cross painting style, she was a master with white paint, depicting light and movement.

She painted details from her life, she painted domestic life, and the beauty she observed on a daily basis.

These were themes and subjects you rarely saw when you went to the museum or to the salon.

You mostly saw paintings of men by men doing manly things.

Artists, like anyone, want to be represented.

Artists want to see themselves and identify with the art they're looking at.

And the woman's perspective was almost completely absent in European art-making for centuries.

Another thing that the Academy didn't like is all these new subjects artists were painting.

Trains, railroads, cafes, regular people hanging out and having a good time.

This was just regular drab life.

If they wanted to see this, they would walk down the street.

Perhaps similar to the way reality television is discussed now, if that can be considered reality.

Pissarro's Momartre paintings are a good example of Impressionism showing modern life.

Bustling streets, streetlights, traffic, all kinds of people walking around, interacting.

He painted it on sunny days, cloudy days, in winter, summer, at night.

Rain was always a bonus.

You can get some weather in there for more reflections.

But no details, no faces, no window panes, just dabs of paint.

One dab of paint for a window is maybe all we get.

But he gets it at just the right size, just the right value and color, and it works.

It's like magic.

That's all we need.

We're getting an impression of this impressively modern vista.

Aside from being innovative and groundbreaking, Impressionism benefited from the fact that it

was the first art movement in the age of the popular press.

And it had a specific name that people knew it by.

Love it or hate it, people were talking about Impressionism.

And these paintings were relatively cheap and accessible to the new middle classes.

These paintings weren't intellectually demanding with complex themes and hierarchies.

They weren't about grand narratives.

They were beautiful landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and sunsets.

Once they got over the shock of their roughness and unfinished appearance,

it became easy on the eyes, an optical delight even.

The Impressionists as a group only had a total of eight exhibitions, not very many.

Some students have that many by the time they finish art school.

And 1886 would prove to be their last exhibition together.

Because the Impressionists really opened the floodgates.

A whole new generation of artists also looking to break free of the academy had appeared on the art scene.

And once again, the Impressionists began questioning the rules.

Some of them never stopped.

A few Impressionists, like Pissarro, wanted to keep changing and experimenting with their style.

Others, like Renoir, were happy where they were.

The Impressionists began to split apart into all different directions,

to explore the possibilities being opened up.

And if you ask me, this is when things get really exciting.

Because now that the Impressionists have unlocked the door,

the Post-Impressionists are going to blow it off its hinges.

One review of the first Impressionists exhibition in 1874

perfectly summed up the uncertainty of the time with a poignant quote,

Is the absence of all rules a good thing?

Only the future will enlighten us.

And that's just what the Post-Impressionists are about to do.

Let's listen.

For now...

The Post-Impressionists

Brick