An evolution of Impressionism that pushed color, form, and emotion further. The label was coined retroactively by the British critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe a loose group of artists — Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec — who had absorbed Impressionism's lessons about light and modern subject matter but found its surface too passive, too rooted in mere observation. Each went a different direction: Cezanne toward underlying geometry, Seurat toward scientific Pointillism, Van Gogh toward expressive distortion of color, Gauguin toward symbolic flat planes inspired by folk and non-Western art. They had no shared manifesto and never exhibited together as a group, but together they cracked the door open for nearly every major movement of the early 20th century: Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, and pure abstraction.
