Post-Impressionism to Modernism
- Explain how Post-Impressionists pushed color, structure, and symbolism beyond observed appearance
- Describe the radical formal experiments of Cubism, Expressionism, and abstraction
- Analyze how modern architecture and postwar movements redefined form and meaning
Post-Impressionism: beyond the fleeting glance
Post-Impressionists kept Impressionism’s bright color but sought deeper structure, emotion, and meaning. Van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889, oil) turns a night sky into swirling, thickly loaded (impasto) currents of feeling, color used to express an inner state rather than record fact. Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902–1904, oil) builds the landscape from patches of color that read as solid, faceted planes — an analysis of form that would open the door to Cubism. Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–1898, oil) uses flat, symbolic color and Tahitian imagery to pose existential questions, rejecting naturalism for meaning.
Cubism, Expressionism, and abstraction
The early 20th century shattered the single viewpoint. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, oil) fractures five figures into angular planes and grafts on mask-like faces inspired by African and Iberian sculpture, breaking with centuries of unified perspective. Braque’s The Portuguese (1911, oil) develops Analytic Cubism into a shimmering grid of overlapping facets and stenciled letters. Kandinsky’s Improvisation 28 (1912, oil) pushes toward pure abstraction, treating color and line like music, freed from depicting objects. Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915, oil) uses jarring color and distortion — hallmarks of German Expressionism — to voice psychological trauma.
Modern architecture and the postwar turn
Modernism remade buildings and, after 1945, meaning itself. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1929, steel and reinforced concrete) realizes his machine-age principles — pilotis (columns) lifting the house, an open plan, ribbon windows, a roof garden — a "machine for living." Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (1935–1938) cantilevers concrete terraces over a waterfall, fusing house and nature. Postwar, Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940–1941, casein tempera) narrates the Great Migration in flat, rhythmic panels, while Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962, silkscreen) turns celebrity and mass media into repeated, mechanically printed images — the birth of Pop art.
An early-20th-century painting shows a seated woman broken into flat, angular, overlapping planes seen from several viewpoints at once, with a nearly monochrome palette of browns and grays and a few stenciled letters. Attribute the movement and explain the visual evidence.
- 1.Note the fractured form: a single subject splintered into geometric facets, denying one fixed viewpoint. This is the core device of Cubism.
- 2.Note the palette: muted browns and grays that subordinate color to the analysis of structure identify the Analytic phase of Cubism.
- 3.Note the stenciled letters: fragments of text pulled from modern life were introduced in Analytic and Synthetic Cubism (e.g., Braque’s The Portuguese).
- 4.Attribute: multiple simultaneous viewpoints + faceted planes + monochrome + lettering = Analytic Cubism, Picasso/Braque, c. 1910–1912.
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon fractures its figures into sharp planes and gives two of them mask-like faces. These faces reflect Picasso’s study of:
Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye is a checklist you can recite: his Five Points of Architecture — pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon windows, and roof garden — made possible by reinforced concrete. If a modern building question appears, tie each visible feature to the structural material that enables it.
Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych repeats the same publicity photograph of the actress dozens of times using silkscreen printing, with color fading and slipping across the grid. This work is central to which movement, and what is its main concern?
Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.
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