[Preliminary Entry] Post-impressionism was a term coined by the English art critic Roger Fry in 1910 as a collective term for a disparate group of initiatives in painting which followed the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Fry recognised that Impressionism had constituted a radical break with the past by signalling the need, in a constantly developing world, for visual representation constantly to adapt itself to new circumstances and in its awareness that art in the modern world was destined to be self-consciously “modern” and self-aware. An implication of this recognition is that the harking-back to supposedly permanent truths exemplified by the classical Greco-Roman heritage—a tendency of literary and artistic theory since the late-seventeenth century—was bound to be…
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Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "PostImpressionism, Post-Impressionism". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 October 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=887, accessed 22 November 2024.]