There is a conflict over what to call the movement of painting after impressionism. Expressionism was taken, so “post-impressionism” was chosen . And while expressionism was considered “an ugly world” (Shiff 157) it was less ugly than post-impressionism. Why the chasm and need for separation from impressionists to post-impressionists? In Fry’s “Essay in Aesthetics” he makes the claim that “one only comes to know emotion only through expression”. How was emotion not “known” in the impressionist’s works, or rather how was it not expressive? I don’t claim that the post-impressionists, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin’s work is not different from Manet and the impressionists; I simply do not see the distinction based on Fry’s premises.
In the post-impressionist catalog essay, it is stated “…there comes a point when the accumulation of an increasing skill in mere representation begin to destroy the expressiveness of the design.” This can be considered a critique on the impressionists for creating more “representations” in comparison to the increasingly "expressive" designs of the post-impressionists. I find this point difficult to see, in fact, post-impressionists seems a step further that the impressionists from the coveted “emotion” quality they strive for in that impressionists attempted to capture the primal feeling itself in their paintings -their natural, unborn, unprocessed emotions in response to a subject. As I understand it, the post-impressionists in doing more on the canvas, are utilizing more acquired skill, and make the end forms less emotionally expressive, as it where.
The post-impressionist argument to this call is that they not only express the artist’s personal associations in art, but the artists themsleves attempt to capture the feelings that subject itself evokes, separate from the artist. They, in effect, “make” the subject into an emotional source as opposed to simply reflecting on an object and transmitting any emotion.
I believe the distinction here is that while impressionists tackle the problem of transmitting a subject and allowing its emotion to form or not form in the viewers mind, the post-impressionists relay intentionality, meaning there is a prescribed emotional quality they seek, produce, and express. In this, I believe that the “knowing emotion” of Fry’s original premise becomes an elusive moldable abstraction, in that it is up to the artists subjective to fashion emotion as they please and diverts further from a known, truthful, emotion. I imagine the ideas of truth in art will be covered later, but these arguments led me to discuss them here.