The Evolution of Art: From Post-Impressionism to Cubism

Post-Impressionism: origin of the name and main themes

The term Post-Impressionism was coined for the first exhibition organized in London in 1911, by the critic and painter Roger Fry (1860-1934) with the title "Monet and the Post-Impressionists". It included several artistic movements, such "fauvism" ,"cubism", "expressionism"(a term usually reserved for the German movement),"vorticism".
According to the new vision of art, the artist was free to distort the form of nature, trying to reach the essentially or inner significance of his/her subject. Roger Fry fostered the artistic search for the spiritual inner meaning of a material subject, for instance, as he said, the "terseness of a tree".
In 1905 the French painter Henri Matisse (1969-1954), the leader of a new group of artists, exhibited their works in Paris at the "salon des independents". These works had such brilliant colors that third authors were called "Les Fauves"("wild beasts"). They found sources of inspiration in African masks, Persian and Indian paintings, Japanese prints, Chinese materials, such as textiles and porcelain, etc. Among the British "fauvists" are numbered Duncan Grant, and Matthew Smith, with his vigorous, almost wild colors.
Generally speaking, painters of that time did not focus on city life anymore but they decided to give a renovated importance at elements such as: still-lives, portraits and landscapes.
As a matter of fact it was believed that the essence of nature could have been caught by using basic geometrical forms.
For example Seurat’s paintings were connotated by the presence of drown close monochromatic dots and signs that were perceived united in the brain of the observer.

Detailed analysis of Cubism

Cubism is a development of Post-impressionism. Cubism consists in the search for the geometrical understructure of natural forms.
This mode of painting began with the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque.
The name originally was used by Matisse in 1908 to denigrate some Braque’s works defining them made by little cubes. In 1909 the critic Louis Vauxcelles named them Cubist whimsy.

Characteristic of Cubism was the device know as "simultaneity", that is the simultaneous vision of a figure from different points of view, having nothing to do with apparent reality and practical appearances, while, since the Renaissance, painters had always used a centralized technique. As a consequence prospective and the distinction between the artistic subject and the background is abolished.
It was a revolutionary act because for the first time the aim of art wanted to represent the entirety of reality going beyond the superficiality of Impressionist artists which used only their retina and not their brain.
That means that reality is not painted as it is but it is interpreted and it is considered a gnoseological instrument for the human being.
It is interesting to notice that, in the same time, Einstein was thinking about his Relativity theory and, even though the two phenomena are not related, it can be underlined that the need to outdo the Empiricism was strong.
The Cubism was divided in two faces: the analytical Cubism (1908-1912), monochromatic, dark and deeply fragmentated, and the synthetic Cubism (1912-1914) with a little bit more color and structure.