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Paul Gauguin, a one-time stockbroker, left his middle class life, wife and family to establish a

personal reality through art. At one point, he exhibited with the Impressionists then broke with

them to work in artistic isolation. Gauguin believed that painting should be a synthesis of

remembered places rather than be the results of direct observation.His paintings illustrate the

world as he imagines it rather than as others see it.

Gauguin's work can be split into two phases: an early period spent painting around the rustic town

of Port Aven in Brittany; and a later period (post 1891) in search of the primitive lifestyle in Tahiti

and the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. He fused his symbolic use of colour with images of

both environments to create a highly personal and expressive vision that pushed art towards the

exhilarating style ofFauvism.

Gauguin turned away from impressionism and adapted a less naturalistic style, which he called

synthetism.

He found his inspiration in the art of indigenous peoples, in medieval stained glass, and in

Japanese prints; he was introduced to Japanese prints by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh when

they spent two months together in Arles, in the south of France, in 1888. Gauguin's new style was

characterized by the use of large flat areas of nonnaturalistic color, as in Yellow Christ

Cloisonnism, Synthetism and Symbolism were some of the terms associated with the Post

Impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin in order to distinguish them from Impressionism

The term Cloisonnism was coined by the critic Edouard Dujardin and refers to the jewellery

technique of inlaying metal surfaces with 'cloisonn' enamel colors (the word 'cloison' in French

means a 'border'). The decorative effect of this process resembled the bold outlines and flat color of

Gauguin's art.

Gauguin situated the well-known scene with three women under the cross in a landscape typical for

Brittany. Many of his predecessors did the same, and that also goes for the contemporary dress of

the women.

But the technique Gauguin used is innovative. The painting seems to exist out of compartments with

a single colour, heavily outlined. The technique is called cloissonism, after a French word for

compartments.

Primitivism is a Western art movement that borrows visual forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, such as Paul Gauguin's inclusion of Tahitian motifs

in paintings and ceramics. Borrowings from primitive art has been important to thedevelopment of modern art,

Gauguin also believed he was celebrating Tahitian society and defending the

Tahitians against European colonialism.

In Synthetism, the artist's aim was to 'synthetize' his feelings with the elements of his painting by

simplifying its shapes and amplifying its color to increase its emotional and expressive power. The

result was seen as a symbol of the artist's thoughts and feelings and consequently Gauguin's style of

painting was also referred to as 'Symbolism'.

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The yellow of Christ's flesh and the blue outlining of his body create a decorative pattern somewhat

evocative of a stained glass window in a medieval church. In this painting, the layered or striated

background works against perceiving depth or distance. Gauguin's painting fuses Gothic imagery,

unnatural coloring, an almost medieval sense of space, and references to contemporary life and art.

It is innovative in this fusion of artistic worlds, a fusion which might be understood as a metaphor for

a fusion of different planes of reality. In this case, planes of artistic reality signify planes of spiritual

and secular reality.An excellent example of Synthetism.

George Seurat: Painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose

technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became

known as Pointillism. Using this techique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached

strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making

his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Une Baignade (1883-84) and Un

dimanche aprs-midi l'Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86).

A French painter who was a leader in the neo-impressionist movement of the late 19th century,

Georges Seurat is the ultimate example of the artist as scientist. He spent his life studying color

theories and the effects of different linear structures. His 500 drawings alone establish Seurat as a

great master, but he will be remembered for his technique called pointillism, or divisionism, which

uses small dots or strokes of contrasting color to create subtle changes in form.

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born on Dec. 2, 1859, in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in

1878 and 1879. His teacher was a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Young Seurat was

strongly influenced by Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya.

In his best-known and largest painting, Georges Seurat depicted people relaxing in a suburban park on an island

in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte. The artist worked on the painting in several campaigns, beginning in

1884 with a layer of small horizontal brushstrokes of complementary colors. He later added small dots, also in

complementary colors, that appear as solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance.

Seurat's use of this highly systematic and "scientific" technique, subsequently called Pointillism, distinguished his

art from the more intuitive approach to painting used by the Impressionists. Although Seurat embraced thesubject matter of modern life preferred by artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he went

beyond their concern for capturing the accidental and instantaneous qualities of light in nature. Seurat sought to

evoke permanence by recalling the art of the past, especially Egyptian and Greek sculpture and even Italian

Renaissance frescoes. As he explained to the French poet Gustave Kahn, "The Panathenaeans of Phidias

formed a procession. I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those

friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color." Some contemporary critics, however,

found his figures to be less a nod to earlier art history than a commentary on the posturing and artificiality of

modern Parisian society.

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Seurat made the final changes to La Grande Jatte in 1889. He restretched the canvas in order to add a painted

border of red, orange, and blue dots that provides a visual transition between the interior of the painting and his

specially designed white frame.

Pointillism refers to the technique of using dots of pure color in such a way that, seen at the

appropriate distance, they achieve maximum luminosity. However, a pointillist painting is no more

luminous than anything else that is printed with small dots, such as a magazine photograph. You

can see the dots above

Divisionism is a broader term meaning that it is possible to obtain brighter hues of color such as

green, orange and purple, by a series of dots (or blobs) of both primary colors so that they are

optically intermingled in the spectators eye (rather than being pre-mixed). The artists prefer the

term Neo-Impressionism (again, coined by a critic this time Felix Feneon) as a description of their

work.

The following example, SeuratsThe Circus, is an excellent example of Divisionism.