Joining the dots

Aged 15, the budding artist Paul Signac headed with eagerness to see the fourth Impressionist exhibition at 28 Avenue de l’Opéra, in Paris. It was the spring of 1879. Once inside, he began sketching from a work by Degas that impressed him. It wasn’t long, however, before he was tapped forcefully on the shoulder by Paul Gauguin and unceremoniously ejected from the building. “One does not copy here, monsieur,” Gauguin said.   

Thankfully, Signac wasn’t put off art for life. In fact, as the leader – alongside Georges Seurat – of the movement known as Neo-Impressionism, he went on to become one of the most important artists around the turn of the 20th century. Not just because of his paintings, highly impressive though many of them are, but because of his role as a theorist (who counted Henri Matisse among his disciples) and a trendsetter (who co-founded the Salon des Indépendants). More on all of which shortly. 

Signac was born in Paris in 1863 into a family who ran a successful chain of saddler’s shops – they counted Emperor Napoleon III among their clientele. His parents wanted him to become an architect, but Signac was intent on art. He trained briefly – and, in his view, unsatisfactorily – in the atelier of Émile Bin, a painter renowned for his mythological scenes. Signac took an early liking to the Impressionists and was struck by what he called the “revolutionary nature” of a Monet exhibition he saw in 1880. Several months later, he felt compelled to write the senior artist a letter saying, “My only models have been your works. I’ve been following the wonderful path you broke for us.” 

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Monet did eventually reply, but not until May 1884, by which time Signac was in the thick of launching the Salon des Indépendants. The aim was to create an annual exhibition that broke free from the constraints of the government-sponsored official Salon, whose jury rejected any submission deemed in the slightest bit progressive. One of the founding members alongside Signac was Seurat, and the pair would become friends and close collaborators in the years ahead.   

They had very different personalities – Signac ebullient, Seurat taciturn. However, they aligned artistically. Inspired by recent theories on optics and colour perception by the likes of the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, they sought to take painting forward by imposing rational order on the Impressionists’ ostensibly haphazard impressions of colour and light.

This meant fastidiously building up canvases through the application of dots of unmixed colour in a stippling effect. The result was a dazzling yet carefully planned play of complementary and contrasting hues. The colours would blend together in the viewer’s eye from a distance rather than on the painter’s palette – and be all the purer and more intense for that.

The Salon des Indépendants provided a perfect platform for Seurat and Signac’s work. In 1886, the art critic Félix Fénéon coined the term ‘Neo-Impressionism’ to describe their paintings – the most famous example of which being Seurat’s masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. (The duo’s technique has often been referred to as ‘pointillist’, but Signac never liked that label.)

Neo-Impressionism was soon the art movement du jour. Camille Pissarro, the erstwhile Impressionist, proved a high-profile convert. Numerous others followed, including Théo van Rysselberghe and a large circle of Belgian artists known as Les XX. Vincent van Gogh, though lacking the rigour to embrace Neo-Impressionism himself, heaped praise on its “fresh revelation of colour”.        

In 1887, while the Dutchman was living in Paris, he and Signac became friends, and took regular painting trips together on the banks of the Seine. They stayed in touch when van Gogh moved south to Arles, and Signac visited his pal in hospital in 1889 after he had severed his ear. (The following year, the Frenchman also came close to having a duel with the Symbolist painter Henry de Groux, when the latter called Van Gogh’s work “abominable” and refused to show in a group exhibition with him.)

Van Gogh died in July 1890, and Signac suffered an even greater blow eight months later when Seurat passed away suddenly, aged 31. As Pissarro observed in a letter to his son after attending the funeral, “I saw Signac most upset by this misfortune. I think… pointillism is finished”.

Seeking a change of scene, Signac set sail from Brittany on a boat he owned, bound for the south of France. By chance, he discovered the tiny fishing port of St Tropez on the Côte d’Azur, then anything but the chic tourist hotspot it has since become. The place was a revelation to him. “I am awash with joy,” Signac wrote to his mother shortly after arriving. “Before the golden shores of the bay, blue waves finish their course on a small beach… I have everything I need to work with for my whole life.”   

Signac also revelled in the brilliant Mediterranean light. Not yet 30, he was to spend his remaining decades living between St Tropez and Paris. Typically, he would spend summers in the former, based in a villa he bought there called La Hune. So taken was Signac by the Côte d’Azur that he even came to see it as the ideal location for a utopian society of the future. He made this explicit in a huge painting called In the Time of Harmony: the Golden Age has not Passed, It is Still to Come (1893-5), which depicts a sunlit arcadia by the Mediterranean coast, where people find a harmonious balance between work and leisure. Some pick figs, others dance or play boules, with not a hint of the industrialisation that marked 19th-century life and landscapes in northern France.

Signac was never an explicitly political artist, though. In the main, his pictorial responses to St Tropez and the surrounding area were seascapes and landscapes. In November 1902, he took a five-day cycling trip inland, creating watercolours at eye-catching spots. Among them was the ancient town of Sisteron, situated in a narrow gorge on the River Durance. Signac painted a large canvas of it back in the studio, based on one of his watercolours, and in December this work is being offered in the sale dedicated to The Alan and Simone Hartman Collection at Bonhams New York.

Sisteron portrays two cliffs connected by a bridge, under which the river flows. The town is located at bridge level on the cliff on the left, overlooked by a citadel some 500 metres up.  

The rocky landscape is bathed in autumnal light at the approach of sunset. Signac shows his mastery of the harmonious gradation of colours, from warm ones to cool ones and back again, depending on the amount of sunshine hitting a given area. The picture is similar to the Neo-Impressionist paintings from earlier in his career. However, it reveals too the fondness that Signac developed through the 1890s for slightly looser, larger brushstrokes. These resemble irregular blocks more than methodical dots, and the result was a modest move towards abstraction – or “compositional simplification”, as he called it.  

Such a move allowed the artist to heighten the effects of his colours, whose decorative qualities he increasingly privileged over their descriptive ones. Sisteron gives ample proof that Pissarro was wrong: far from dying with Seurat, Neo-Impressionism took on new life in Signac’s sole hands after he had encountered the Côte d’Azur.

The artist set out a manifesto for the movement in his 1899 book, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme, which explained it as a stage in the natural evolution of French painting onwards from the early 19th century artist Eugène Delacroix. Three keen readers were Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, all of whom went to stay with Signac in St Tropez in the summer of 1904. Absorbing his lessons about the application of pure colour, this trio would before long spearhead the Fauvist movement. Matisse actually painted his proto-Fauve masterpiece Luxe, calme et volupté at La Hune.

Signac was its first owner. To a certain extent, Signac – who died in 1935, aged 71, shortly after participating in an anti-fascist rally that called for a boycott of all German products – isn’t as celebrated today as he should be. Partly that’s because of the influence of the contemporary critic Thadée Natanson, who unfairly dubbed him the “St Paul of Neo-Impressionism”: that is, a mere apostle, where Seurat had been the messiah. (Artists who die young always tend to be the most fashionable.)

Perhaps Signac’s promotion of other painters’ work throughout his career came at his own expense as well. In 1905 alone, he organised retrospectives for both of his late friends, Seurat and Van Gogh. Three years later, he was named president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants (which ran the Salon des Indépendants), staying in the post for 25 years and consistently supporting up-and-coming artists – such as the Cubists, who had their first major showing anywhere in 1911’s exhibition. 

Signac was at the centre of a network of painters who transformed Western art in the late 19th and early 20th century. Look at his biography, and this becomes a simple matter of joining the dots

Alastair Smart is currently working on a book about Raphael.