In the last two decades of the 19th century a number of artists who had been inspired by the impressionists’ style and technique reacted strongly against the impressionist example. These artists, who were eventually called postimpressionists, established a number of alternate approaches to painting, each of which was to have remarkable repercussions for 20th-century art. Paul Gauguin, for instance, rejected the impressionist technique of applying touches of color in separate, small brushstrokes in favor of using large areas comprised of a single color bound by heavy contour lines. This innovation had an impact on Matisse and scores of later artists who used color as an expressive device rather than as a means for copying nature. In 1891 Gauguin decided to settle on the Pacific island of Tahiti, motivated by a desire to leave Western civilization and embrace a simpler form of existence. His work there contributed to the modern fascination with non-Western art.

Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, a friend of Gauguin, used both color and brushwork to translate his emotional state into visual form. In addition, he infused his paintings with religious or allegorical meanings (black crows as symbols of death, for example), countering the impressionists’ emphasis on direct observation.

The work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was based on the assumption that painting could sacrifice truth to nature for expressive purposes.  Munch used harsh combinations of colors, distorted forms, and exaggerated perspectives to give visual form to the alienation of the individual in modern, industrial society. The works of Gauguin, van Gogh, and Munch laid the groundwork for the later development of expressionism in 20th-century art.

Other postimpressionist artists reacted against impressionism in a different way. French artist Georges Seurat sought to raise art to the level of science by incorporating the latest theories about light and color into his work. He divided color into its constituents (purple into blue and red, or green into blue and yellow, for example) and applied these colors to his canvas dot by dot. His method, called pointillism, was meant to eliminate all intuition and impulse from the activity of painting.

Another postimpressionist, Paul Cézanne, sought to introduce greater structure into what he saw as the unsystematic practice of impressionism. Objects appear more solid and tangible in his paintings than in the works of his impressionist colleagues. But despite this increased solidity, Cézanne did more than any previous artist to destabilize the integrity of form through subtle distortions and seeming inaccuracies in his many still-life paintings. Objects do not rest comfortably on their bases, vases seen from the front have rims seen from above, and the horizontal edges of tables, when projecting from either side of a tablecloth, sometimes do not match up. It is almost as if Cézanne was dismantling the very solidity he meant to reintroduce to the depiction of objects.

Cézanne also introduced a radical innovation in works such as his Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-1904, Philadelphia Museum of Art): The edge of the mountain opens up to allow areas of sky to penetrate the otherwise solid mountain. With this simple device, Cézanne decisively changed the course of art history. Two physical entities—earth and sky—believed to be distinct and separable were now made interchangeable. The world as it is seen and experienced, Cézanne seemed to say, is not as important as the laws of picture making. After Cézanne’s example, the world of reality and the world of art began to drift apart. The fragmentation initiated by Cézanne’s work spearheaded Picasso’s later experimentation with form and invention of cubism.