Teenager Monogrammed A T

A post-impressionist oil on canvas measuring 46X38 cm representing a teenager signed lower right AT work circa 1900.

Post-impressionism or post-impressionism characterizes a period in the history of modern art and painting in particular, between the end of the 1880s and, by convention, the year 1910. It is not a current but the observation, sensed by critics from the 1880s, that Impressionism has reached its limits, giving way to a number of new styles and movements (pointillism, synthetism, symbolism, nabis, etc.) — so many groups resulting from friendships or battles between painters, and their exchanges with critics, gallery owners, patrons, in a climate of creative energy new. Post-Impressionism preceded the arrival of the artistic avant-gardes of the early 20th century. The break in the Impressionist momentum, which was itself a break, as had been the realism of Gustave Courbet, was effective in 1886: in the words of the art critic Félix Fénéon, in his decisive essay Les Impressionistes in 1886, "with this exhibition, Impressionism is definitively dead", and is replaced by a new movement, a new form of art, which he calls "Neo-Impressionism or Post-Impressionism". Over the next twenty years, the term began to be used to refer to the passage between the first phase of Impressionism (1870-1884) and the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century. This term is particularly revalued from 1906 by the art critic and British painter, Roger Fry: on the international level, however, the term only took root during the exhibition organized from November 1910 to January 1911 by Fry , at the Grafton Galleries in London, Manet and the Post-Impressionists: this exhibition enabled American buyers, who were becoming preponderant at the time, to finally identify this period of intense research, and to accept the end of Impressionism—when hundreds of American painters, precisely during the years 1900-1910, came to Europe to “do Impressionism,” go to Giverny, and so on. Post-Impressionism was not a conscious and unitary movement, but it was a widespread state of mind in Europe in the last two decades of the 19th century. This is why it cannot be reduced to only French painters or painters living in France: all European countries are more or less crossed during this period by aesthetic upheavals, formal research, risk-taking. The term post-impressionism is therefore a necessarily vague and plural appellation, which encompasses dozens of currents and styles, a term that critics will apply, with hindsight, first to Paul Cézanne – considered as the first representative of this new rupture – then Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Georges Seurat, as far as French painters are concerned.