Cloisonnism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Cloisonnism" is a style of post-Impressionist painting with bold forms separated by dark contours. The term was coined by critic Edouard Dujardin. Artists Émile Bernard, Paul Gauguin, and others started painting in this style in the late 19th century. The name evokes the technique of cloisonné, where wires (cloisons or "compartments") are soldered to the body of the piece, filled with powdered glass, and then fired.
In Yellow Christ (1889), often cited as a quintessential cloisonnist work, Gauguin reduced the image to areas of single colours separated by heavy black outlines. In such works he paid little attention to classical perspective and boldly eliminated subtle gradations of colour — two of the most characteristic principles of post-Renaissance painting.
The cloisonnist separation of colors reflects an appreciation for discontinuity that is characteristic of Modernism (Everdell, 1997).
