Badge Jonathan Jones on Art Blog

Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin: meet art's angry young men

The post-impressionists blazed through 19th-century art to create an unforgettable vision of the world. But you wouldn't want them living next door
Paul Gauguin's Aha oe Feii (And Why Are You Jealous?)
Revolutionising colour ... Paul Gauguin's Aha oe Feii (And Why Are You Jealous?). Photograph: Alexander Burkatovski/Corbis

They were rebels against their society, who were shunned, abused and even (on one occasion) run out of town by a mob. They were changing art and remaking the very nature of perception: revolutionising the way we saw the world. Even today, to engage with their art is to have your senses reopened and your contact with reality renewed.

I am talking about the late 19th-century post-impressionists. I prefer to call them "the artists of the Night Cafe", because I think the nocturnal menace of Van Gogh's painting of a hellishly red, sleazy cafe interior captures the edge and danger of their paintings.

Art in late 19th-century France was slashing and burning its way to a profound new vision of the world. The myth of linear progress in art – that it ascends towards an ever-better future – has given them, in the textbooks, an intermediate role between Manet and Picasso, as if they were steps on the road to modernism. But this distracts from the depth and shock of their work. Is there a better abstract painting than Starry Night? A more intellectual deconstruction of seeing than The Card Players? Was what came afterwards necessarily more radical?

Impressionism itself was a subversive reinvention of art, and what came in its immediate wake was a battery of weapons in the war against bourgeois common sense. A handful of artists freed themselves from the direct imitation of appearances and instead sought deeper truths. Gauguin and Van Gogh liberated colour and exploited its power to suggest feeling – this is as true of Gauguin's Nevermore as it is of the great Van Goghs that can be seen in the new exhibition at the Royal Academy. Meanwhile, Cézanne looked into the very crystalline structures of rock to paint images of surpassing strangeness and intelligence.

None of these artists was the boy next door. Van Gogh was hounded out of Arles by terrified neighbours, while Cézanne was just as difficult but had an inheritance to keep him going. Gauguin raged and rebelled his way to a darkly heroic death in Oceania. They left their paintings and literary works (including Gauguin's Noa Noa), as well as Van Gogh's incredible letters – and a vision of lives whose power will never fade.

Today's best video