a conventional designation for the principal movements of French painting in the late 19th century and the early years of the 20th century.
As early as the mid-1880’s the postimpressionists, most of whom had formerly been part of the impressionist movement, sought new figurative means that were, in their opinion, more in harmony with the times. They attempted to overcome empirical artistic thinking and to abandon representations of life’s fleeting moments in favor of its lasting spiritual and material states. Reflected in postimpressionism were almost all the decadent features of Western European culture of that time—its complicated changes and the agonizing and contradictory experimentation by artists of stable intellectual and moral values. The postimpressionist period is characterized by the mutual influences of artistic movements and the distinctive work of individual artists.
Although a number of postimpressionist tendencies, such as neo-impressionism, symbolism, and the nabis (a French art nouveau movement), are qualitatively confined within the temporal limits referred to above, the work of their leading masters, owing to the problems which they raised, is the basis of 20th-century figurative art. The foremost postimpressionist artists included Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Toulouse Lautrec.