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Why did Paul Gauguin criticize Impressionism’s focus on effects of light?

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Self-portrait painting by Paul Gauguin showing the artist with a mustache, yellow halo, and stylized plants against a vivid orange background with green and red fruit. — Paul Gauguin Self-portrait by Paul Gauguin, oil on wood, 1889; in the Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 79.2 × 51.3 cm.

Paul Gauguin criticized the Impressionist focus on the effects of light because he believed it was a confining and superficial approach to art.1

While Gauguin initially participated in Impressionist exhibitions, he eventually felt that the movement’s preoccupation with the direct observation of light in nature neglected the importance of thought, emotion, and ideas. He argued that artists should rely more on memory and feeling than on the direct replication of a scene.21

To move beyond what he viewed as the limitations of Impressionism, Gauguin developed Synthetism, a method that synthesized formal elements—such as broad planes of pure color and clear outlines—with the artist's inner ideas or spiritual states. By abandoning the Impressionist focus on light effects and traditional perspectival space, Gauguin sought to create a more decorative and expressive art capable of inducing specific feelings in the viewer.21