Impressionism had freed painting from the conventions of tonal chiaroscuro, giving new emphasis to colour, pure bright luminous spectral colour. It had offered new approaches to space and to composition, which liberated art from the window-on-the-world illusionism dominant since the Renaissance. It had freed brushwork from its purely illusionistic or descriptive role, pointing the way both to greater emphasis on abstract, formal qualities in painting, and to a greater expressive potential in touch.
The Impressionists had fused line and colour, drawing and painting, resolving the centuries-long dichotomy between these two elements of art. They had found new, more appropriate techniques with which to exploit the full potential of modern materials. Yet, still faithful to the nineteenth century natural philosophy, they all remained more or less committed to a depiction of the natural world.
It was in his transformation of their ideas that Seurat. in his late paintings, suggested a new. more stylized and non-naturalistic art-form, which Gauguin, in his entirely different way. pursued in his Symbolist Tahitian paintings. With the Fauves. and Matisse in particular, the final legacy of Impressionist naturalism was overthrown, as colour was freed from its imitative function, paving the way for the twentieth century abstraction already implicit in the avant-garde art of the 1860s and 1870s. Thus, until 1907 and the advent of Cubism, the radical approach and techniques of Impression¬ism remained a powerful force with which successive generations had to come to terms.
