A quarter of a century was enough to secure for the initiators and leaders of post-impressionism a position among the beacon lights of European art. Cezanne, van Gogh and Gauguin are now referred to as "the glorious triumvirate" and "the old masters of post-impressionism." Their once despised, numerous, and by no means invariably successful paintings are in most of the galleries of modern art, and thousands of pounds are willingly paid for canvases for which the artists, during their lifetime would willingly have accepted a few hundred francs.
Cezanne, who at the beginning of his career threw in his lot with the Impressionists, upon whose technique he formed his own, was among the first to realize the limitations imposed by the Impressionists' scientifically truthful rendering of colour and atmosphere. His dissatisfaction with what he considered the superficiality of impressionist productions led him to express, more basically and with greater structural firmness, the essential character of the countryside which forever offered him new vistas, new wonders for his interpretation. His endeavour, in portraiture and still life, as well as in landscape painting, was to accentuate volume and weight—to make the third dimension more clearly and immediately perceptible to the beholder's eye than it is in actual nature, where we are left to guess by experience and by memory of touch. To him is due the dictum that all forms in nature can be reduced to the cube, the cylinder and the pyramid.
Like Cezanne, van Gogh derived his technique from the impressionists; and like Cezanne, he was anything but a facile worker, his heavy hand being but an inadequate instru ment for conveying his passionate aesthetic reaction to the thing seen. Of him it may truly be said that he did not paint, but rather battled with colour and essential line with a frenzy that took no count of finished execution. His pictures are executed in furiously energetic cross-hatchings of pure Prussian blue, emerald green, orange and yellow, with a daring justified only by the brilliant harmonies evolved from a palette on which he found no room for neutral tints. His brushwork can only be likened to vigorous hatchet-strokes, corresponding to the elemental force of his emo tions. There was something uncanny in his power to perceive and to express the essential nature of any object or scene or person by which his aesthetic impulse was stirred. Inanimate things became
somehow invested with a soul and with a life of their own—a sun flower, a wicker-chair, a cypress tree, or whatever it happened to be. He was a visionary who found a deep meaning in the humblest objects which his art invested with his own tortured spirit, and which he made eloquent of his own emotions. Van Gogh was the precursor of expressionism.
The third member of the great triumvirate, Paul Gauguin, was a close friend of van Gogh, but of a less impulsive and more reflective turn of mind. Where van Gogh would shout and even shriek, Gauguin was content to talk, and his words carried more weight, for they were more considered. If Cezanne devoted his life to the search for volume, and van Gogh for material and spiritual significance, Gauguin's revolt against im pressionism took the form of a return to decorative pattern, to two-dimensional design as practised by the artists of the Far East. He based his effects on abstract form and colour, not on repre sentational truth or on over-accentuation of some particular truth. Ignoring the colour of nature, and relying, for the expression of his ideas upon his memory more than upon models, he produced first in Brittany, then in Tahiti, those splendours of harmonious decoration against which no arguments founded on convention can ever prevail. It was his belief that, before the spirit of a place could be interpreted, it needed study in all its parts during what he called a "period of incubation." Some proof of the peace Gauguin found in his retreat can be seen in the restful nature of his paintings.
Of the second generation of post-impressionists, Henri Matisse went farther even than Gauguin in reconciling Western art with the Chinese. He aims "at convincing us of the reality of his forms by the continuity and flow of his rhythmic line, by the logic of his space relations, and, above all by an entirely new use of colour." His is an art of extreme synthetic simplification, reducing objects almost to symbols, and disdaining any approach to make-believe of reality. It depends entirely on arabesque and is not concerned with the third dimension.