Study Of Modern Change Of Post-Impressionism

Starting from the Impressionism, till the Post-Impressionism paintings, Modern Transformation of Western painting had completed the process from the pre-modern to modern painting. Following the last simulating painting, the Impressionism, post-impressionism painting had changed many paradigms in the past hundreds of years and had established its own rules of modern painting, as a pioneer of modern art. Post-Impressionism painting was a boundary, which had the classic painting and modern painting fully separated. Front side was classic painting with a unified standard, the other side was modern painting with no uniform standard and completely new methods.Different from the discussions of modern Western painting in the past, which focused on painting techniques, composition, colors, materials and other substances elements, the fundamental change of modern Western painting was neither painting technique of expression, reproduction or performance, nor realistic style or romantic style, because there were expressive paintings in the classical period, but rather the concept changing of the artists’, which effected by social, historical, aesthetic impact of late 19th and early 20th century. The crucial point of modern painting, which made a distinction between the modern painting and the ancient, was the artistic concept of modernity. The Post-Impressionism pictures were showing people visual experience that they had never experienced, which made the Post-Impressionism seem to be strange, but the physical image is only a surface of emotional expression of artists.Beginning from Post-Impressionism, modern western painting split completely, losing a unified criteria, resulting in different painting styles and genres. Various Post-Impressionism schools had their conscious, complete modern aesthetic concepts as its theoretical basis, no matter they supported these styles directly or indirectly. Post-Impressionism paintings showed themselves in the style of a few typical, Seurat’s fragmented doctrine, called Pointillism, was the result of human visual and scientific development; Van Gogh’s tragic heroic expressive painting expressed the will of Nietzsche’s aesthetic; object reconstruction and reform, color combination showed the direct influence of Cezanne’s aesthetic of formalism; Gauguin’s mystical symbolism and comprehensive doctrine were some kind of emotional intimation. Each unique Post-Impressionism painting style was just the surface of its artistic concept, which is a direct expression of emotion on the art concept.The particularity of different Post-Impressionism painting styles implied the universality of modern painting, which were the significant symbols of modern Western painting. There were 3 commons in various Post-Impressionism schools: First, beauty exist in contemporary, not in the past; Second, Post-Impressionist painting expression is conscious. Consciously performance and reconstruction; Third, beauty had no more relation to morality or scientific judgment. Beauty was the image itself. Since the Post-Impressionism, had Modern paintings become a complete, self-contained, independent, pure-visual art.