For seventy years now it has been accepted practice to refer to the two decades of avant garde artistic experimention in France at the end of the last century by the term Post Impressionism. The irony of this state of affairs is that most of the artists designated by the term did not think of themselves as being 'Post-Impressionists' first and foremost, and probably would not even have recognized themselves under that heading. George Seurat, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne, to take the four artists who create the most significant paintings during the period, were dead long before 1910 when the term was first coined. Post Impressionism was not one of those smear-words such as Impressionism or Fauvism, invented by witty French journalists on first seeing the works of the artists concerned, words which caught the public imagination and were subsequently accepted and used by the artists themselves. On the contrary, it was the invention of an academic, cultured, but exasperated English critic, Roger Fry, faced with the difficulty of presenting a haphazard exhibition of recent continental art to an inexperienced English audience. It was faute de mieux that Fry hit in 1910 upon the title 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists.
As used by Fry, Post-Impressionisms encompassed a broad and cosmopolitan range of modern art; it grouped Cezanne and Gauguin with Picasso and Matisse, Denis and Vuillard with Gilman and Lewis. For the sake of coherence and manageability I have confined the present study to the immediate aftermath of Impressionism in France and to the rough chronological limits 1880 to 1900, but this is not to suggest that responses and reactions to Impressionism were so confined or that they came to an abrupt end as the twentieth century dawned.
Although the term Post-Impressionism has been and continues to be found useful in many respects, it is problematic and unwieldy as a style label. On the surface it does no more than date the art it covers as 'coming after' Impressionism. Its drawback is that it suggests a firm and purposeful avant-garde movement, caused and unified by relationship to the fixed style called Impressionism. In the light of contemporary thinking about the period, it is becoming clear that even in France such a movement never existed. Of course there were links, both at a personal and a stylistic level, between the original Impressionists and the progressive artists who succeeded them in the Paris of the 1880 and 1890s. The example of the Impressionists eight group shows, held between 1874 and 1886, may well have been the spur to the various subsequent attempts to form close-knit avant-gardes and to find a space and market for modern art. Certainly many of the freedoms the Impressionists had fought for in the 1806 and 1870s in terms of paint application, colour, choice of subject and working procedure became part of the artist's stock in trade in the 1880. But it is misleading to see the artists of this period as drawn together before all else by their awareness of Impressionism. Other equally important factors were at work. Impressionism itself was far less of a stable entity, that could be accepted or rejected, than is usually allowed. By the 1880s its chief exponents were themselves evolving new working procedures and responding, in some degree, to the same intellectual and stylistic influences as the younger generation. They were no more immune than their successors to change in social, economic and political circumstances.
What we find, then, in Paris-based art of the late nineteenth century, is a wealth of talent, ambition, and drive to succeed, a great variety of technical and stylistic innovation, and a surfeit of theory. There were complicated personal relationship, bitter rivalries, arguments, feuds, and self-imposed exile, groupings, regroupings and secessions. Few periods offer the art historian such fascinating documentation as the inexhaustible correspondence of Pissarro, Gauguin, and Van Gogh or the perspicacious art criticism of Felix Feneon and Maurice Denis. The initial impression is a shifting and perplexing one, and in an effort not to gloss this over I have tended to make sparing and cautious use of the term Post-Impressionism. But at the same time there are dominant issues and prevailing currents beneath the chaos of events, images, and styles; and in an attempt to clarify these I have found it necessary to abandom the straightforward chronological narrative and to adopt a more flexible, thematic approach.
