Original subtitles

As you may have noticed, nearly all of the artists we've been talking about so far are

French or came to work in France, and a few French-speaking Belgians for good measure.

And almost all of those came to Paris to study and live in the epicenter of these exciting

developments in art.

But, of course, the excitement of the post-Impressionist era couldn't be contained to France, and

its influence spread quickly throughout Europe and the Americas.

Science, technology, religion, politics, and culture were rapidly transforming in these

places, too.

But each country has its own artistic traditions and historical influences.

So while they were excited and interested in what French artists were up to, inevitably

they interpreted these ideas in their own way, and their art reflected the issues facing

their own societies.

So, in these last few lectures, before we finish, I want to profile some of the more

interesting post-Impressionists beyond the French-speaking world.

Let's start in London.

Only a day or two's travel from Paris at the time, although culturally, philosophically,

and aesthetically, there was a huge divide between England and the rest of Europe.

But power and rebellion are universal.

Just like in France, the British Royal Academy of Arts had a conservative stranglehold on the

art world in England.

And taking notes from their French colleagues, the art scene began spawning a number of experimental

factions.

One of these was the Camden Town Group, around 1908.

They were closely watching post-Impressionism in France.

Camille Bissarro's son, Lucien, was even in the group, so he would have had an intimate

knowledge of French art growing up with these artists and paintings.

The most interesting painter of the group is probably Walter Sickert.

He's a major artist, perhaps the most important English artist in the transition between Impressionism

and modern art.

Walter had moved to England from Germany as a boy, and his dad was a prominent painter himself.

Young Walter's first career, though, was not as a painter like his father.

They all had to rebel.

Sickert was drawn instead to the stage, and his first major creative outlet was acting.

He was cast in many small parts, and then in a Turing production of Henry V.

But Walter craved novelty and variety.

He got bored playing the same role over and over again.

He was never landing any of the big roles and only getting bit parts.

Looking elsewhere for fulfillment, he found himself drawn naturally to painting.

You could paint something totally different with every new painting.

You could choose any role you wanted.

So Walter paints what he's familiar with—the theater, actors, the stage.

This was his world.

Of course, he has a flair for the dramatic.

Look at this Oscar-winning pose in a painting of a theater manager.

It's a beautifully painted scene, very subtle shifts in color and value, from the dress

to the back of the couch, to the background, which almost seems to be a combination of the

dress and couch color.

A strong highlight divides the composition into thirds and is reflected in the strategically

placed mirror, which divides the composition in thirds in the other direction, horizontally.

A very well-crafted and attractive painting sickerts a natural talent.

Walter will also travel to Paris during this time, where he meets Edgar Degas and encounters

Impressionism.

Degas has some important advice.

He encourages Walter to paint in the studio from sketches and imagination so he can avoid

the tyranny of nature.

Impressionism's influence on Sickert is slow and subtle, as he takes years to gradually

begin to loosen up and be more playful and experimental.

He begins to develop his own sense of light and color and methods of abstraction that don't

quite look like what was happening in Paris.

His use of color becomes bolder and more experimental, like in this painting, Minnie Cunningham at the

Old Bedford.

The very muted, greenish background is quite interesting, but is completely overwhelmed

by the intense red glow from her dress.

The color and the value contrast make it look like she's hiding LEDs under her dress.

His interest in the theater will continue throughout his painting career, and it's a subject he returns

too frequently.

Sickert's work gets more interesting, I think, when he begins to abandon local color, or traditional

light techniques.

It seemed to take a few decades for Walter to find his groove.

He experimented with various aspects of his technique as he simplifies his shapes and colors the

way other post-impressionists are doing.

He starts coming up with these bizarre palettes that have their own sense of time and space.

The color in this man's face, for example, is composed of bright red-orange, minty-green,

and various lighter-orange tones.

The brushwork is sparse and economical.

He's only painting as much as he needs to.

Look at the hand, for example.

In a different context, that could be a cartoon tiger.

They're great!

Lacking any definitive details, the blurring and simplification of the background draws a sharp

contrast to the facial features, which, although still not clear, there's a sharpness to the

line and the color that hint at the detail that must be there, so our brain fills in the gaps.

His gaze and the highest contrast lead us to the spoon, which points to the bowl of what

looks to me like blueberries.

Simplified nearly to black and white, it seems as though the older Walter got the less and

less color he used.

Four color paintings were narrowed to three or two colors, and he would never shy away

from a monochrome painting.

This painting, called Variation on Peggy, almost looks like a digital video still to me, which

is curious, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

Perhaps there are certain fundamental variations and alterations of human perception that are

embedded in our vision that exists regardless of the medium, and Sickert intuited that in

an impossibly prescient way, maybe.

But whatever his motivation, it's clear how much he liked to experiment, just like his

French colleagues changing techniques and approaches throughout his career, pushing the boundaries

of color, light, and space.

In recent years, though, Sickert has become famous for a totally different reason.

The English Post-Impressionist Collective is called the Camden Town Group because of a 1907

series of paintings Sickert did after the so-called Camden Town murder, where a sex worker had

been brutally murdered by an artist.

Sickert's paintings were unusually emotional and sympathetic to the victim.

This one, entitled What Shall We Do for the Rent, humanizes this woman as a provider for

her family, as Sickert wanted to counterbalance all the sensationalist reporting in the papers

on the story.

And, because of the sinister subject, naturally a lot of people are curious about the paintings,

and they help get Sickert and his movement into the public eye.

Sickert's just really into crime generally, though.

He loves all the grisly details.

He even stayed for a while in what he believed was Jack the Ripper's apartment and painted it.

He would have loved the 21st century with all the true crime podcasts we have.

Because of the sensational subject, these crime paintings make him a household name in the

early 1900s.

But in the 1970s, some researchers started throwing around the idea that Sickert was

connected to the Jack the Ripper murder somehow.

Then, in 2002, Patricia Cornwell, the crime writer, releases a book claiming Sickert was

Jack the Ripper.

It was hugely controversial, and many people were convinced.

Even though the evidence is thin, and pretty much all the experts have dismissed the theory,

Sickert's in an eclectic group of accused.

Queen Victoria's son, Prince Albert Victor.

Queen Victoria's doctor, Sir John Williams.

And the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, have had books accusing

them of being the Ripper.

Sickert is really the only artist of the Camden Town group who gets much attention, partly because

their group was already behind the times.

We don't start seeing their mature post-impressionist works until around 1910.

By then, European art has moved on.

Cubism, Fauvism, and more radical styles are taking over.

So even though they were cutting edge in Britain, modern life was accelerating throughout Europe.

You had to be quick to keep up.

It's actually a pretty common story.

Many of the post-impressionist movements beyond France start peaking well after Paris has moved

on.

Grace Causington Smith started exhibiting some of Australia's first post-impressionist paintings

only in the 1920s, and was still getting rejected by Australia's art establishment into the 1930s.

Yet by then, post-impressionism was practically old-fashioned in Paris.

Before the internet, physical distance could create decades of time lag.

The Camden Town group wasn't the only art collective scandalizing the UK, though.

Now, it's true that Aubrey Beardsley is more clearly identified as an Art Nouveau artist,

but because there are no clear dividing lines and all boundaries are permeable, we have to look at this fascinating guy.

When Beardsley was 20, he went to Paris to begin working on a commission and discovered Toulouse-Lautrec's

posters around the city and was taken by their beauty and simplicity.

And, like so many post-impressionists, Beardsley was equally taken by the Japanese woodblock prints

that were taking the city by storm.

He borrowed heavily from their conventions, including flat graphics, strong contrast, strong contour lines, dense patterning,

and dynamic cropping.

But Beardsley took these inspirations in an entirely different direction than Van Gogh or the Nabi boys did.

He made stark, black-and-white images from pen and ink.

These were often filled with illusion and drama.

He was also a symbolist at heart, so he took these post-impressionist impulses and created his own unique vision.

Like Toulouse-Lautrec, he gets into the burgeoning market for mass-produced prints.

One of his early famous illustrations, The Peacock Skirt, from 1893, from a series he did for Oscar Wilde's salacious new play, Salome.

These were bold and fresh.

They made a huge splash, and suddenly he's in high demand.

Printing presses were getting more sophisticated in the late 19th century,

and books looked a little like graphic novels today, with elaborate covers and illustrations throughout.

Having your art in a popular book or on a big poster exposed you to a huge new audience,

far more than would ever go to a gallery.

But what really made Beardsley so fascinating, and an international celebrity, are his racier drawings,

like these illustrations he did for Lysistrata by Aristophanes.

He was commissioned to make eight drawings for an accompanying publication to this play.

These are outrageous and hilarious.

He took erotic drawing to a whole new level, but did it with such care and sophistication,

his genius couldn't be denied.

Even while being shocking, hilarious, and provocative,

they're still undeniably extremely well-done drawings, as all his drawings were.

Of course, this graphic and erotic work was controversial, and this is also why he worked with Oscar Wilde.

It's a natural fit.

Just as Beardsley was becoming the next big thing, in a surprise twist,

he suddenly converts to Catholicism and renounces his work and tries to stop them being published.

And then a year later, he dies tragically early of tuberculosis, only 25 years old.

Like Toulouse-Lautrec, he also died young, but modern printing had made them both iconic artists

in just a fraction of the time.

It took most of the painters to get that level of recognition.

When it comes to Post-Impressionism across the Atlantic, there wasn't a huge demand for it.

American tastes in art tended to be very conservative in the 19th century.

The rich wanted to emulate the old money of Europe, and commission stately portraits and grand scenes to reflect that.

And around the time the Post-Impressionist movement hits is when we start seeing the American artists forming their own avant-garde movements anyway.

There were, however, a couple of American artists who did get into Post-Impressionism.

I'd like to spend a little bit of time with the work of two brothers, Maurice and Charles Prendergast.

Maurice was born in 1858 and grew up in Boston, where I got my BFA in painting.

He apprenticed as a commercial artist when he was young, which meant a lot of sign painting,

flat, bright colors, outlines, and many of the attributes that artists in France were developing after looking at Japanese prints.

Maurice was very skilled, but he was too creative and couldn't be contained by commercial painting.

Prendergast had a naturally much looser and more energetic style than the typical flat and graphic sign painting and lettering would allow.

So, when he was introduced to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, he found his style that would resonate for decades.

Maurice is one of the few Post-Impressionists whose primary medium of choice was watercolor.

He was clearly very adept with it, and it's not one that every painter could connect with.

It's a very different approach to painting than with oils.

As soon as that paint hits the paper, you're committed to your mark.

Making changes, blending, and adjusting is far more difficult with watercolor.

Rather than using white paint, you use the white of the paper to show through to various degrees to control brightness.

This is a much different way of thinking rather than adding more white paint to the surface.

Prendergast's watercolors had a beautiful jewel-like quality, with lots of tiny little bits of bright, colorful moments.

His compositions were usually picked from a specific vantage point, where he could be zoomed out from a crowd to see all the intermingling colors and shapes.

Many of his paintings are quite dense, with a horror vacui feel to them, a fear of open space.

Almost every little area filled up and sparkling with tiny, colorful details.

He was less interested in atmospheric perspective and conveying deep space.

It's not that he didn't use it, but it doesn't seem to be a focus.

Even shapes in the far distance still have a rather up-close feel, as the whole surface of the painting appears to be vying for our attention,

like we can see here in this lovely golden painting of the terrace in New York's Central Park.

It's cool to see him use his very precise and tight graphic painting skills he got from his commercial days,

in certain areas like the architecture and the umbrellas here.

Especially because using a loose and fluid medium, like watercolor, that's much harder to control.

Under the architecture, which gives structure to the composition,

the umbrellas create the movement as we follow them down and the color stream empties out onto the bottom of the canvas.

The shapes and colors dissipate into very impressionist loose brush strokes.

He was not strictly a watercolor painter, though.

He painted with oils, too, particularly later in his career.

He did many scenes like these beach scenes in oil paint.

Here we see him employing more layering with a dark background under the blue sky,

providing a depth and richness to the surface that's more dense than the light and airy layers of watercolor.

It also seems like smaller details are more difficult for him with oil paints, as his strokes are bigger and looser.

The people reduce to a few gestures.

There are no faces, but he still can't resist getting into the details of the patterns on the dresses.

As I mentioned, Maurice's younger brother Charles was also an artist,

and he incorporates many of the intriguing elements of his older brother's work into his own.

The playfulness, the bright colors, the density of the compositions.

The horror vacui, where stuff is happening everywhere, all over the canvas.

It's clear Maurice was a big influence on him.

However, Charles was more interested in experimenting with media and developing his own techniques.

Charles didn't start making art until his 50s.

Before then, he was a woodworker and made elaborate custom frames for artists like John Singer Sargent.

Therefore, he approached his paintings much in the same way he would a picture frame.

Starting with a gessoed panel, he would carve his composition out of the wood,

as if he were making an etching or woodblock print.

But this was not meant to be a print.

The carved line was part of the process.

He would then add things like gold leaf, silver leaf, graphite, and tempera paint.

These are more of a colorful explosion of design, creativity and playfulness, and explorations,

rather than observations of reality.

And, of course, we have seen this type of look in our earlier exploration of the cloison,

which Charles is perhaps channeling in his own work, but with a much greater emphasis on craftsmanship.

Post-Impressionism traveled far and wide.

The world was getting smaller, and so the influence of Paris could be felt in very distant places.

And like their French counterparts, artists around the world were interested in how modernity was shaping their countries, too,

and how art could challenge the establishment and change with the times.

For example, there was a small but notable Argentinian Post-Impressionist movement.

Pio Colivadino adopted these careful, precise brushwork of Seurat to create often political paintings

that showed the clash between old and new Buenos Aires.

While his colleague Fernando Feder nostalgically looked back to Argentina's rural past,

and you can see the hand of Pizarro in both the subjects and style of his work.

Even in China, there were Post-Impressionist rebels.

Classical Chinese art was even more strictly regulated and pro-establishment under the Qing dynasty.

But Xu Bei Hong, after training in Paris, became one of the first artists to truly break away

from traditional Chinese painting using oil paint and Post-Impressionist concepts.

He also paints the rapid modernization of his community and country.

But let's head back to Europe now, specifically Sweden.

Eugene Janssen is an artist I was not familiar with before I began my research.

But I'm glad I found him.

This is an artist who deserves way more attention than he's received.

The quality of his work is on par with Van Gogh, Cezanne, and many of the other Post-Impressionists.

And he deserves wider recognition.

Not only is his work beautiful and moving, his life story and struggle to survive and fit in society is just as important.

Eugene was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1862.

He came from a working-class family who loved art and music.

When he was 14, he came down with scarlet fever, which ended up giving him lifelong complications,

including damage to his eyesight, hearing, and sense of smell.

He took private painting lessons from a well-known local painter and eventually began studying at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts.

Obviously, he was very talented with strong observational skills.

As you can see here, his early work was nearly photographic.

Eventually, all of his classmates began moving to Paris, as any young and serious painter living in Europe was doing.

However, Eugene's family couldn't afford to send him.

It's impossible to say how his work would have evolved if he had gone.

But one thing is for sure, that by staying in Stockholm, his art was strongly shaped by the darker, more evocative lightscapes that pervade in Scandinavia.

It gave him a unique style that sets him apart from all the other artists who went to Paris and learned from one another there.

Another big difference is that he also painted much larger than most of his colleagues.

While Pissarro and Cezanne would paint on small canvases that they could carry with them out into the world and set up on a little easel,

Eugene could not be contained by that size.

This painting, called Sunset, is nearly nine feet long.

That's not a size you can toss in your rucksack and throw on a portable easel.

It's also not a size you can finish in an afternoon.

This bigger size is a much bigger commitment in time, patience, materials, transportation.

Everything is harder when your canvases get that big.

I can vouch for that firsthand.

Jansen became famous for his moody nighttime paintings.

Almost all his paintings were very dark, very blue, with just subtle glimmers of light and reflection.

People often refer to him as the blue painter.

I love this painting, called Ritterfjärd in Stockholm.

He has a unique mark-making approach.

Look at the way he's painted the clouds with those long, sweeping, and crossing lines.

The lights at the bottom are swirling and swimming, similar to Van Gogh's.

Jansen had a way of combining a unique perspective with an intriguing, yet limited light source,

combined with very active and loose brush marks.

All the while maintaining an accurate sense of perspective, both linear and atmospheric.

Juggling these is not easy, but of course, Jansen makes it look that way.

This incredibly evocative and moody stairway tips the tightrope between abstraction and realism,

but bringing us right into the scene.

Despite the success and notoriety of his beautiful nighttime paintings, Eugene would eventually collapse.

Physically and emotionally, he could not go on.

He got to a point where he said he felt completely exhausted.

He felt sick.

He felt like he had nothing left to give, and he stayed out of the exhibition circuit for several years.

Fortunately, Eugene bounced back.

He began exercising and going to the bathhouse, where he found new inspiration, health, and vitality.

The vitalism movement was all the rage in Europe, and this was all coming together.

And seeing how homosexuality was illegal in Sweden until 1944, this is as public of a coming out as you could have.

This is a remarkable transformation.

In this huge painting, Eugene is life-size, full-length, dressed in glorious white, flanked by dozens of bronze naked men.

From here on out, the nude male form would be the only focus of his work.

He was done doing what was expected of him, and he was going to paint what he wanted.

These massive canvases were no longer horizontal landscapes.

They were now vertical, life-size paintings.

They combined his unique, energetic brush marks with precision, accuracy, and detail.

They celebrated the male nude without shying away.

They were incredibly bold and demanded attention and respect.

Tragically, Eugene Janssen died in 1915 at the age of 53 of a brain hemorrhage.

Just as he was hitting his prime, he had been in the best physical condition of his life,

and he was coming into his own sexuality and finding a home in a supportive community.

Eugene's brother, who was also gay but fearing legal consequences, burned all the letters between him and Eugene

to avoid any potential scandal or denigration of his brother's legacy.

I want to end this world tour of Post-Impressionism with the artist Arkeep Kuinji, who was born in Maripolsky Uyez in 1841, present-day Maripol, Ukraine.

Arkeep was born to a poor family of Pontic Greek descent.

His parents died when he was only six years old.

He spent his childhood working odd jobs at the church and getting a meager education from a family friend.

As a teenager, he began working around artists and artist studios, mixing paint and touching up photographs.

This kind of work gave his brilliant mind references to study, and he developed an incredibly keen eye for light, shadow, and realism.

He tried to open his own photography studio but without much success, so he decided to become a painter instead.

And it's clear in his work how much of that photography background influenced his work.

Of all the artists we've looked at who revealed the fascinating colorful world of light and shadow and the effect it has on our emotions,

I don't think any are able to convey the illusion of illumination the way Kuinji did.

He was an undeniable master of observing and conveying the subtleties of light.

It's much easier to see than describe.

Many of his paintings look like photographs from afar.

Up close, the brush strokes are clear, but the precise details are astonishing.

For example, in this painting, Moonlit Night on the Dnieper, we have a canvas that is 90% dark black night.

Besides the moon and its reflection in the river, there's very little detail.

What I love the most is his use of subtle color shifts in the highlights in the river,

from the bright white to the subtle greenish-blue, and then it warms up on the edges with an orange hue.

Like I said, it's very subtle, but it's one of those things that help create an uncanny sense of reality.

He's just as talented with sunlight.

Look at this magnificent sunset bursting with reds and oranges.

Kuinji was an interesting mix of artistic influences,

and again shows how hard it is to sometimes squeeze them into boxes.

By the 1870s, he was part of a rebel artist group in the Russian Empire known as the Wanderers,

who resisted the dominance of academic painting in the Imperial Academy of Arts.

But Kuinji was almost like a rebel within the rebels, while nearly all his colleagues painted in a realist style

and often focused on subjects that highlighted the social and political problems of Russia.

But Kuinji is all about paintings like this, Elbrus Moonlit Night,

and its high-contrast, illuminated moments in an otherwise dark landscape.

Always experimenting, he's looking at light, color, optical effects,

and how they exploit our emotional connection to nature.

We can't classify him definitively as a post-impressionist in a narrow sense,

but he's definitely thinking more like one of them than many of his colleagues.

Each year, he got better and better, and his paintings reveal an even more refined skill set,

and he's able to convey nearly any kind of light or atmosphere and make you feel like you're actually there.

Kuinji is also interested in the fantastic worlds we see from the symbolist painters,

in which beautifully illuminated landscapes begin to transcend reality.

Like in this fantastical painting of a birch grove, I want to go there.

The Kuinji Art Museum was destroyed by invading Russian troops early in 2022.

His paintings are rumored to have been moved from the museum before destruction.

We can only hope that's true.

These are national treasures that should be protected.

As far as I'm concerned, they're some of the finest examples of light painting in the history of painting.

So even though art historians tend to pin down post-impressionism just in France,

you can see these ideas traveled far and wide as incredible artists across the world took the styles,

concepts, and spirit of the post-impressionists and made it their own.

Getting to know its outliers and outsiders help us better understand the heart of post-impressionism.

Thank you.