Signac, 1863-1935

by Paul Signac (Painter), Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, Grand Palais Paris

This book, the catalogue of the first retrospective of the work of the French Neoimpressionist artist Paul Signac to be held in nearly forty years, accompanies the 2001 exhibition organised by the Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Musee d'Orsay, Paris, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This long overdue tribute to Signac's power of expression and artistic influence features some two hundred paintings, drawings, watercolours, and prints from public and private collections worldwide. Fully illustrated in colour and discussed in individual entries, these works offer an unprecedented overview of Signac's fifty-year career. Signac's artistic development began with the luminous plein air paintings he made in the early 1880s which reveal the lessons he absorbed from Monet, Guillaumin, and other leading Impressionists. From 1884 until 1891 Signac's close association with Georges Seurat encouraged his explorations of colour harmony, contrasts, and Neoimpressionist technique. In the scintillating works of his maturity the rigours of Pointillism gave way to richly patterned, decorative colour surfaces. In a series of essays the exhibition's curators discuss Signac's richly interesting career from a variety of perspectives. John Leighton, Director of the Van Gogh Museum, provides an introductory essay that chronicles Signac's triumphs as a painter. The well-known Signac scholar Marina Ferretti Bocquillon focuses on Signac's achievements as a draftsman and watercolourist, and Sjraar van Heugten, Chief Curator of the Van Gogh Museum, summarises Signac's activity as a printmaker. Anne Distel, Chief Curator of the Musee d'Orsay, examines Signac's role as a promoter of his own works and those of his colleagues and describes a host of other activities - beyond painting - that engaged Signac's interest. The final essays in this volume shed new light on Signac's appreciation of the works of his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers - as evidenced in his artworks, in his published and unpublished writings, and in his private collection. Susan Alyson Stein, Associate Curator of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, examines the ways Signac understood the genius of such painters as Delacroix, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Bonnard, and Matisse. Marina Ferretti Bocquillon explores the Signac's role as a collector, providing a wealth of new information about the works he owned by fellow artists. Contributor Kathryn Calley Galitz is Research Associate in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Lavishly illustrated with comparative and documentary photographs, the volume includes an annotated chronology and a map that pinpoints the sites depicted in Signac's works.

Genres: Art

336 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2001

Reviews

[Servabo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The late works of Signac are the culmination of many years of reflection, theorizing and practice. In some ways it could be said that his art had come full circle, regaining through the medium of color something of the simplicity, the directness and the vitality that had initially attracted him to painting. The modern viewer will perhaps prefer the severity and restraint of the Neo-Impressionist works of the 1880s and early 1890s to the later pictures. Certainly the contradictions and tensions that gave an edge to his earlier pictures are largely dissipated in his production of the first decades of the 20th century. The urge toward a politically committed art is absorbed into an ideal of artistic harmony.

The conflicting demands of art and nature, decoration and realism, are resolved into a sometimes self-indulgent style in which the rudiments of color theory provide the support for amazing pyrotechnics of color. Nevertheless, in the best of his later works Signac combined the sensual legacy of his first pictures with the cool rationality of Neo-Impressionism to create an art of extraordinary chromatic richness and feeling. The intensity that he brought to all aspects of his craft remained consistent. And however much his talent for the manipulation of color was nurtured by the theories and by the art of others, it was a talent that retained its own distinctive character.

1) The Garden of the Artist's House, Saint-Tropez

[Emily Morrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the only comprehensive books I could find on his paintings. Gorgeous

[Trisha Keiman]

inspiring