Word: seurat
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...that terrible emerald-green sea ... what an inspired conception!" He had read about Impressionism, too, but imagined it to be simply the use of lighter tones. In Paris he discovered such older painters as Monet and Pissarro, and met the young avant-garde of the day: Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Signac, Gauguin, Bernard. His old palette went out the window ("Last year I painted almost nothing but flowers," he wrote in 1887, "so I could get used to colors other than gray.") He experimented with Impressionist brushstrokes and pointillist "stippling" - one superb gallery here pairs off Monet's Boats...
...sensitive to color and gifted in the organization of forms. Sometimes his pictures are a little pedantic: he goes at his shapes with the stolid determination of a silkworm chewing its way across a mulberry leaf. But the best of them are filled with a joy in life that Seurat, a curiously melancholy artist some of the time, couldn't top. Signac makes you feel--really feel, not just think--what it can be like to be in a world ruled by the pleasure of color and by the calm reflection that is, so to speak, its postcoital afterglow...
Signac never achieved a masterpiece of the order of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, but how many painters have? In the late 1880s and early 1890s, though, he brought off a sequence of ravishingly beautiful landscapes that stand with the best of late 19th century art, along with some remarkable figure paintings...
Both Signac and Seurat strove to give a noble, architectural permanence to fleeting effects by analyzing shape and light in terms of dots of color. They wanted rigor and system, not Impressionist spontaneity. Each man influenced the other; Seurat was the greater artist, but it was a real partnership. Thus it was Signac who persuaded Seurat, and not the other way round, to purify his color by banishing earth pigments from his palette. Later Signac would give up on the dot, using larger spots in a sort of mosaic. Under the influence of Turner, whose luminous watercolors and oils...
Luck--and a yachtsman's robust health--granted Signac some 40 years more than Seurat got. But he never painted better than he did in the late 1880s and early 1890s. His best pictures of the Cote d'Azur--of Cassis, of St.-Tropez--possess a wonderful rigor, density and subtlety of color. The danger inherent in pointillism was that all those microdots, if their tonal relations were not perfectly controlled, could look like a bad case of measles. In his middle years Signac almost always avoided this. The seascapes become what they are meant to be: a vibration...