What is Neo-Impressionism?

Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists introduces us to the extraordinary personalities who contributed to the birth and development of Neo-Impressionism in France and Belgium from the 1880s through to the outbreak of the First World War.

A backlash against certain aspects of Impressionism, as well as an extension of others, Neo-Impressionism grew from the creative spark ignited by two young artists who became friends in 1884, the classically trained Georges Seurat and the self-taught Paul Signac.

Exhibition Overview by Marina Ferretti Bocquillon

Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists, the first Australian exhibition dedicated to Neo-Impressionism, will introduce visitors to the National Gallery of Victoria to the birth and development of Neo-Impressionism in France and Belgium.

The story of Neo-Impressionism begins in 1884, when Georges Seurat (1859-1891) first met Paul Signac (1863-1935). Radically different in terms of their background and temperament, the two young artists met at the inaugural group exhibition of the Artistes Indépendants, which had been formed in protest against the restrictive selection criteria of the annual Paris Salon jury. Seurat was 24 and looking for sound rules by which to regulate beauty since, he argued, ‘art is harmony’. A graduate of the école des Beaux-Arts, in 1884 he showed at the Artistes Indépendants his first large figure composition, Bathers at Asnières (London, National Gallery), a work rejected by the Salon jury, in which he gave a scene from modern daily life — working-class men bathing in the Seine in an industrial suburb on the outskirts of central Paris — the dimensions of a history painting. The works of the young Seurat are distinguished by an insistent geometry; and, from 1882-83 in his studies painted directly before the motif, a systematic arrangement of touches of colour can be discerned, bringing a uniformity to the surfaces of his compositions that stamps them with a singular unity.

The Seine at Courbevoie, a work painted by Seurat during his study trips to the Island of La Grande Jatte, close by Asnières, is one of Neo-Impressionism’s first achievements. Here for the first time Seurat put into practice his fundamental principle of the division of tones, whereby the painter places individual touches of pure colour side by side on the canvas, allowing the viewer’s retina to complete the work, at a distance, of combining these tones together. This idea, applied with varying degrees of rigour, and which was to be dubbed Neo-Impressionism by the critic Félix Fénéon in 1886, proliferated until Seurat’s death in 1891. Over the subsequent twenty years, from 1891 to 1910, the Neo-Impressionist technique was gradually liberated through the impetus of Signac, evolving towards more vibrant colouristic effects.

In 1884 the 20-year-old Paul Signac was a largely self-taught painter. A visit to an exhibition of Monet’s work in June 1880 had led to his decision to become a painter himself, and he very quickly assimilated the Impressionist technique. His sensibility was perfectly attuned to the freedom afforded by Impressionism’s principle of working outdoors to capture light and striking colours. This did not prevent him, like Seurat, from preferring frontal and organised compositions, with a limited use of perspective that emphasised the surface treatment of his paintings. Enamoured of colour, Signac was as extraverted as Seurat was self-absorbed in his approach. He was soon dubbed the Saint Paul of Neo-Impressionism, since it was Signac who disseminated the theory of the division of tones to wider audiences.

In spite of their differences, the two artists shared in common a taste for compositional rigour, a love of modernity, and the ambition to be innovators. Their friendship linked by a fascination with optical treatises and the study of colour perception, Seurat and Signac worked together to perfect a new aesthetic language, seeking to objectively describe the modern world with the new visual expression that was best suited to it.

Like most large European cities, Paris spread outwards during the second half of the nineteenth century. On its outskirts, new residential districts rubbed shoulders with industrial zones. This new landscape attracted leisure-seeking Parisians, and the banks of the Seine became a favourite destination for a rapidly expanding population. Signac, a devotee of sailing whose mother lived at Asnières, found here the simultaneous pleasures of boating and painting in the open air. Signac’s The front of The Tub, Opus 176 looks upstream from Asnières towards the Island of La Grande Jatte. A popular spot for strollers, La Grande Jatte was the site chosen by Seurat as the setting for the painting that was to become the icon of Neo-Impressionism, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-86, Chicago, The Art Institute).

During the winter of 1885-86, Seurat reworked this painting completely using his new system of divided colour tones. His method was immediately adopted by Signac, who painted in March to April 1886 Gasometers at Clichy (National Gallery of Victoria), his first landscape to strictly adhere to Neo-Impressionist principles. In May 1886 Seurat and Signac, along with Camille and Lucien Pissarro, showed their first ‘divisionist’ works – arranged around Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the eighth and final group Impressionist exhibition. Neo-Impressionist emulators soon appeared in France and Belgium, attracted as much by the movement’s novel technique as by its scientific grounding.

City Lights & The Birth of the Suburbs

Since the Second Empire (1852-1870), Paris had been a vast building site. Having seen their urban fabric remodelled by the civic planner Baron Haussmann, Parisians next witnessed the completion of Baltard’s renovation of the Les Halles markets and the construction of the Eiffel Tower. For many artists, however, the epicentre of Paris remained the studio, where models posed and they elaborated ever more ambitious compositions. Neo-Impressionist painters had an approach to their art that was radically different from their Impressionist predecessors. They were committed to working progressively, utilising drawings, painted studies and preliminary sketches in a methodical manner that realigned them with classical painting traditions.

The city also became the backdrop for new exhibitions. Refusing now to even to submit their works to the jury of the official Salon, young painters exhibited instead with the new Salon des Artistes Indépendants in Paris, which had become an annual event following the first showing of the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in 1884; or with the Cercle des XX (Circle of the 20), an exhibiting body established by progressive artists in Brussels. Seurat sent seven paintings to the 1887 Les XX exhibition, including The Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp, thereby inspiring a number of Belgian artists (Willy Finch, Georges Lemmen, Théo Van Rysselberghe) to begin painting in the Neo-Impressionist manner.

Paris was also a place of entertainment and encounter for the Neo-Impressionist artists, who regularly met in cafés and attended newly fashionable venues like the circus and the cabaret. Louis Hayet was especially drawn to these venues, his In the café 1888 capturing well the comforting fug of a Parisian watering-hole. By night, gas lighting illuminated another face of the capital. The nocturnal poetry of the city’s street lamps especially seduced Maximilien Luce, resulting in seductive paintings like The Louvre and the Pont du Carrousel, night effect 1890.

Landscape, Marines, Social Engagement & Portraiture

The young Neo-Impressionist painters had inherited from their Impressionist elders a pronounced love of analysing and interpreting the light found in the Ile-de-France region. Often devoid of human presence, the landscapes of Albert Dubois-Pillet and Henri-Edmond Cross, the Belgian painters Willy Finch, Henry Van de Velde or Théo Van Rysselberghe, as well as the Dutchman Johannes Toorop, were ordered according to a simple geometry where the study of light became the true subject of the painting. Their works express a detached, almost abstract poetry, summarising with nuanced harmony the individual temperament of each artist. Certain artists were also preoccupied with social justice, George Morren in Belgium and Maximilien Luce in France in particular becoming eulogists for the world’s workers.

Thanks to the development of the railways, Parisians discovered the charms of Normandy’s and Brittany’s beaches. Like Monet, Seurat and Signac regularly summered at the seaside where they painted marine views – the grand compositions that Seurat called his ‘battle paintings’ being reserved for winters spent working in the studio in Paris.

These marine scapes, often reductive studies of pure line and colour, are a pinnacle of Neo-Impressionism. Painters here gave free rein to their love for analysing light and developing refined chromatic harmonies in which the lightest touch vibrates the surface of the canvas. The formal purity of these canvases gives them an almost musical poetry; in fact, not content with assigning these paintings an Opus number, Signac frequently endowed them with secondary titles evoking the rhythm of a musical score.

After Seurat’s death in 1891, Signac took Neo-Impressionism’s destiny firmly in hand. In the same year Henri-Edmond Cross moved to the Midi region in the south of France, where he led a hermit-like existence in Cabasson. Signac in turn discovered Saint-Tropez in 1892. Thereafter he spent part of every year here, and he also encouraged friends to discover this region. Maximilien Luce visited him here in 1893, painting his luminous The port of Saint-Tropez; and Théo Van Rysselberghe would also be drawn to live on the shores of the Mediterranean. In 1895 Signac’s technique developed a sudden new freedom – his brushstrokes became broader, bringing a stronger force to his use of colour. His works now took on the lustre of mosaics, gaining a raw new power that compensated for any loss of refinement and complexity.

The human figure is the major subject throughout the history of western painting, and the Neo-Impressionists did not neglect this subject, addressing it in major compositions, as well as in the numerous portrait studies they have left us. The Belgian artists Théo Van Rysselberghe and Georges Lemmen are considered to be the movement’s principal portraitists. Girl in a straw hat (Portrait of Elisabeth van Rysselberghe) 1901, a summertime study of the artist’s eleven-year-old daughter, is a fine example.

Neo-Impressionism in the 20th Century

In 1899, Signac published D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism), a treatise that explained the tenets of divisionist painting, examining it within an historical perspective. Translated into German and often reprinted, this study was read by a new generation of artists who were obsessed with both colour and aesthetic theory – notably, Kandinsky. Matisse stayed at Saint-Tropez in 1904 and for a brief period worked with the division of colour tones. Around this time, Mondrian worked alongside Toorop at Domburg in Holland. In Paris, Balla and Severini also experimented with the application of small blocks of pure colour. While after Cross’s death in 1910 Signac remained the sole exponent of Neo-Impressionism’s original form, the legacy of his and Seurat’s experiments with colour division in the 1880’s now bore fruit with the emergence of Fauvism and Abstraction, two new movements in modern art that were clearly indebted to Neo-Impressionism.

Marina Ferretti Bocquillon
Directeur scientifique
Musée des impressionismes, Giverny
Guest Curator: Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists

As a child Paul Signac grew up in a comfortable middle class home in the hilly Montmartre district of Paris. Numerous artists lived in this neighbourhood, and the young Signac could also see here contemporary paintings displayed in the windows of dealers. This milieu may have contributed to his desire to become a painter himself.

When Signac was sixteen, his father died of tuberculosis. His mother, Héloïse Signac, now moved her family to a more affordable residence in Asnìeres, a residential district to the west of central Paris on the banks of the river Seine. While the Asnières side of the Seine was quite pleasant, with elegant houses and spacious gardens, on the opposite side of the river, at a stone’s throw from the Signac home, were to be found the large gas storage tanks, factories, cranes and chimney stacks of the city’s industrial quarter, Clichy. The contrast between the two neighbourhoods can be seen in an aerial photograph taken from a hot-air balloon in 1885, at the precise time that Signac was working here. A cluster of seven large gas storage tanks can be seen on the Clichy side of the Seine (one of them appearing unfinished); slightly downriver, rows of large chimneys spill forth swirls of smoke. Signac could apparently see these chimneys from the windows of his family home in Asnières.

Just upriver from Asnières and Clichy lay the island of La Grande Jatte, where Georges Seurat set his first Neo-Impressionist masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago), an enormous painting that depicted working and middle class Parisians at weekend leisure.

Encouraged by the example set by Seurat in preparing the final version of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte for exhibition in 1886, Signac’s first foray into Divisionist painting was Gasometers at Clichy, painted in March and April of that year. In this work he sought to embrace Seurat’s scientific theory of colour division, abandoning the wet-on-wet application of harmonious tones favoured by Impressionism in favour of placing strong, opposing blocks of colour side by side. Signac’s first experiments with divided tones can be seen clearly in the middle section of Gasometers at Clichy.

In Gasometers at Clichy Signac challenged conventional notions of the picturesque by focusing on his own somewhat humble neighbourhood, and by extracting beauty from a prosaic view of a red-roofed worker’s domicile framed by three of the enormous gas tanks that dominated the Clichy side of the Seine. A companion painting, Passage du Puits-Bertin, Clichy, now lost but known from a related drawing, approached this unprepossessing site from the opposite side. Here a neighbourhood wall is marked with the graffiti Mort aux vaches (Death to the cops), a gritty touch that might reflect Signac’s left-wing and anarchist sympathies. These in turn perhaps explain his willingness, in his initial years as a Neo-Impressionist painter, to embrace the freedom from conventional beauty provided by local industrial subjects.

Gasometers at Clichy and Passage du Puits-Bertin, Clichy were first exhibited at 1 rue Laffitte, Paris, an elegantly appointed suite of five rooms above the chic Maison Dorée restaurant, in the eighth and last group showing of the Impressionists. It was Paul Signac’s friendship with Camille Pissarro, whom he had met in 1885, that led to his inclusion in this prestigious event. Pissarro, one of the show’s principal organisers, was keen to add new blood to the original Impressionist group, in the form of younger artists who were building upon the founding principles of Impressionism. The Neo-Impressionist or Divisionist painting of the young Georges Seurat and Paul Signac met with some resistance from the older Impressionists, however. As a result the works of Signac, Seurat, Camille Pissarro (who had himself adopted the Divisionist manner of painting in 1886) and his son Lucien Pissarro were displayed together in a separate room of the exhibition.

Gasometers at Clichy and Passage du Puits-Bertin, Clichy were also shown together at the second Salon des Indépendants exhibition in Paris in August 1886. Signac’s efforts received a mixed reception overall in the Parisian press of the day. The contradiction inherent in Signac’s luminous depiction of a decidedly grubby subject was remarked upon by Félix Fénéon, a firm supporter of the artist’s work, in an influential review in La Vogue: ‘Paul Signac is drawn to suburban landscapes, which he interprets in an individual and penetrating manner. The works that date from this very year are painted according to divisions of tone; they achieve a frenetic intensity of light: Gasometers at Clichy with its work pants and jackets drying on fence palings, its desolate peeling walls, its burned-brown grass and incandescent roofs beneath a blinding sky, gains momentum as the eye rises, and loses itself in an abyss of blinding blue’.

Maurice Hermel was not so taken with Signac’s first Neo-Impressionist city views, however, complaining in the journal La France libre that the artist’s ‘raw colouration tires and angers the eye, while his violent tones exasperate it’.

The history of Neo-Impressionism begins in Paris in May 1884 with the meeting of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac at the first exhibition of a group of independent artists (Indépendants) who opposed the official Salon and rejected the principle of an admission panel. There soon developed the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which became the public forum for the new Neo-Impressionist movement.

Despite profound differences in temperament and training, Seurat and Signac shared a taste for modernity and the ambition to innovate along with an intellectual rigour that led them to envisage a scientific approach to their art. Both were fascinated by the study of colour perception and the division of colours on the canvas in order to create new ‘optical mixes’ in the viewer’s eye. Between 1884 and 1886 Seurat gradually adopted the method of optical mixing and began juxtaposing small strokes of pure colour on the canvas. He dazzled the art world in May 1886 at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition with the unveiling of his monumental canvas, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (Chicago, Art Institute), which elicited admiration and controversy in equal measure, and led the critic Félix Fénéon to dub his new manner of painting Neo-Impressionism. In 1887 Seurat sent seven paintings to the Cercle des XX (Circle of the 20), an exhibiting body established by progressive artists in Brussels, thereby inspiring a number of Belgian artists (Willy Finch, George Lemmen, Théo Van Rysselberghe) to begin painting in the Neo-Impressionist manner.

The Paris that the Neo-Impressionists inhabited was a city undergoing great physical change, economic upheavals and political stress. Part of the childhood or teenage years of most of the movement’s French artists fell within the disastrous period of the Franco-Prussian War (July 1870 to May 1871), when the French capital was occupied first by German troops, then by left-wing supporters of the Paris Commune, and finally by returning French government forces (with the attendant massacre of tens of thousands of Paris’s citizens). These years saw the fall of the Second French Empire, the establishment of the Third French Republic and the ceding of the French province of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany. The threat of a post-war restoration of the monarchy was followed in the early 1880s by severe economic depression and the social uncertainty provoked by new mechanisation of industry. All these events led to considerable distrust of government rule, fuelling the popularity of anarchist leaders who preached the cause of individual liberty and freedom from government control for all.

Eschewing Impressionism’s emphasis on the direct observation of nature outdoors at a specific moment, Neo-Impressionist paintings were mostly painted indoors in the artists’ city studios, the products of long study and synthesis. Not surprisingly, then, the new movement’s adherents, most of whom grew up in Paris, imaged aspects of the French capital in their work.

In 1891, Henri-Edmond Cross, a founding member of the Indépendants who had also embraced Neo-Impressionism, relocated permanently from Paris to the south of France, to the Alpes-Maritimes above the Mediterranean coast. It was a decisive move both for Cross and Neo-Impressionism: this light-filled landscape between the sea and the lower slopes of the Alpes was both subject and inspiration for his own art and a lure for his fellow artists and friends, Paul Signac, Maximilien Luce and Théo Van Rysselberghe. It was these Neo-Impressionists who were to make the Mediterranean, with its saturated light and serene expanses of sea and coast, a compelling motif for generations to follow.

The calm spaces and unspoiled, often untamed landscape of the hinterland behind the coast of what was to become the Riviera provided a readymade idyllic world away from the harsh life of an increasingly industrialized northern France, arguably embodying the anarchist ideal of natural order and harmony. Saint-Tropez itself was little more than a fishing village when the passionate sailor Signac found safe harbour there for his boats and he and Luce began to paint its gentle contours and radiant light. Seurat’s sublime seascapes were inspirational for Neo-Impressionism. Both sea and coast presented clear compositional devices that served the movement’s concerns with the role of line in establishing the ’emotion’ within a painting – yet, beyond all else, the radiant light of the Côte d’Azur was clearly a Neo-Impressionist dream and the ultimate motif with which to accommodate the science of optical and prismatic colour.

From a modern perspective, the word anarchy implies subversion, lawlessness, chaos and violence. Neo-Impressionism’s artists embraced anarchy, however, from the opposite perspective – as an ideology that stood for individual liberty, collective sustainability and the idyllic union of labour and industry with nature. The two leading theorists of anarchy whose writings influenced the Neo-Impressionists, Pyotr Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, were both geographers who wrote of the close links between correct cultivation of the land and ideal anarchist (i.e. liberated) communal living, free from the restraints of centralised government.

Recognising that their cause needed visual representation, anarchist publishers such as Jean Grave, editor of La Révolte and Les Temps nouveaux (New Times), regularly asked Maximilien Luce and others to contribute illustrations to his journals gratis. In 1891 Paul Signac published the essay ‘Impressionnistes et révolutionnaires’ in La Révolte, in which he argued that the Neo-Impressionists’ unique vision of the world supported anarchy by struggling against convention and challenging the prevailing social order. Unsurprisingly, then, visual synergies with anarchism’s aspirations are not hard to find in Neo-Impressionist landscape paintings; echoing, as Neo-Impressionist scholar Robyn Roslak has shown, ‘Kropotkin’s emphasis upon the fecundity of properly managed land and the wealth of agricultural production resulting from it’. Working in the balmy south of France from 1891-92, Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross created quite different Arcadian landscapes that explored a vision of world peace from an anarchist perspective.

As much as in any other school of painting, portraiture formed a major part of Neo-Impressionist art practice. Portraits of friends, family, patrons and cultural cognoscenti were shown regularly in Neo-Impressionist group exhibitions (although the first two categories were not always clearly identified as such). Neo-Impressionist portraits also featured in broader, ‘mixed’ exhibitions in which their vibrant Divisionism singled them out. Reviewing the Portraits du Prochain Siècle (Portraits for the Next Century) exhibition held at the Galerie Le Barc de Boutteville in late 1893, Jules Christophe extolled ‘this exquisite zone of freedom, this wonderful whiff of anarchy! What seemingly fraternal individualism. The followers of Ingres rub shoulders with the friends of Georges Seurat’.

The Belgian artists Théo Van Rysselberghe and Georges Lemmen are considered to be the movement’s principal portraitists. Van Rysselberghe’s first Neo-Impressionist portrait, painted in 1888, a full-length study of Alice Sèthe, the daughter of a leading Brussels industrialist, was hailed by a critic as ‘the most satisfying work on display’ when it was shown at the Les XX exhibition in Brussels in 1889. Other portraits met with less success – the provincial painter Achille Laugé, who worked in the south of France near Carcassonne, saw his Neo-Impressionist portraits regularly rejected by exhibition juries in Paris. Van Rysselberghe was also to complain about clients who sought to entice him back towards more traditional methods of portraiture, lamenting: ‘Nothing annoys me more than when fools tell me: I just adore what you do, but want you to do something else’.

Following the death of Georges Seurat in 1891 and the subsequent relocation of Henri-Edmond Cross and Paul Signac to Mediterranean France, much of the movement’s homogeneity dissolved. While many of the original Neo-Impressionists went on to do other things and abandoned Divisionism, there was a strong regrouping of new talent around Signac, Neo-Impressionism’s unofficial new voice. Exploration of the aesthetic possibilities offered by Divisionism continued, the light and atmosphere of the Provençal coast in the south of France now imposing its own pictorial properties.

In the work of Signac, Cross and Luce, colour palettes intensified in response to the light and local colour. Importantly, they began to compose their paintings from larger ‘touches’ of paint, loosening the geometric constraints of the Divisionist ‘dots’ which the earlier technique had imposed, in favour of a more expressive touch. In 1897 Signac wrote in his diary: ‘I attach more and more importance to the purity of touch … and its maximum intensity; it is this love of beautiful colour which makes us paint like this and not a liking for the point (dot)’. Brushstrokes increasingly took on the appearance of tessera (the small wedges of glass or stone from which mosaics are created), so that their paintings shimmered like mosaics. The more insistent presence of brushstrokes reduced the effect of both perspective and illusionism, so that the paintings became more abstract, influencing the trajectory of twentieth century art, and shaping artists such as Matisse (who worked alongside Signac in 1904) and Italian Futurists like Ballà.