Content area
Full text
The Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 started a new era in English art and literature. The Grafton Galleries invited Roger Fry, a trusted art connoisseur, to assemble a fall exhibition, which he ultimately called "Manet and the Post-Impressionists." It featured Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Gauguin among others. Fry coined the term Post-Impressionism because he disapproved of Impressionism as '"Content that stopped with impressions'. . . . Impressionist vision required Post-Impressionist 'design,' Paul Gauguin's geometry" (Banfield 473). The exhibitions' catalogues contained Fry's essays introducing the new school of painters,1 but it took a few years and several more essays by Fry as well as Clive Bell's Art (1914) for the British public to stop being overly antagonistic to the new school (Maginnis 193).2
In her biography of Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, Frances Spalding notes that what distinguishes "the Post-Impressionists from their predecessors was that they were no longer content to record the shifting pattern of appearance but instead wanted to make the image more durable, either by emphasizing an underlying structure, as in the work of Cezanne, or by emphasizing an expressive response to the scene, and therefore selecting and to some extent rearranging the visual facts to create the desired effect" (91). The "selecting" and "rearranging [of] the visual facts" for "desired effect" tended towards what in 1914 Clive Bell would call "significant form" - "relations and combinations of lines and colors, . . . aesthetically moving forms" that arouse "the aesthetic emotion" (1987: 17-18).3 Bell believes that a true artist perceives objects "as pure forms in certain relations to each other and feels emotion for them as such" (see Quick 564). The connection of form and emotion was perhaps the single most groundbreaking insight of the Post-Impressionist revolution. Writing about the French avant-garde painters, Roger Fry proclaims that rather than striving to recreate appearances, the new painters aim at achieving a "new," deeper reality through a peculiar attention to form:
These artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for...