Paul Signac (1863–1935) Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the
Netherlands www.kmm.nl/“To think that the neoimpressionists are painters who cover canvases with little
multicolored spots is a rather widespread mistake,” wrote Paul Signac in his
manifesto of their movement. “This mediocre dot method has nothing to do with the
aesthetic of the painters we are defending here, nor with the technique of divisionism
they use.” Signac was referring to, among others, Georges Seurat, who in trying
to systematize the optical discoveries of the impressionists, had taken a scientific
approach to painting, one based on color theory. His goal, he once said, was to make
“modern people, in their essential traits, move about as if on friezes, and place
them on canvases organized by harmonies of color, by directions of the tones in harmony
with the lines, and by the directions of the lines.”Signac wholeheartedly adopted Seurat’s invention, pointillism or divisionism,
though he considered it simply a means of expression, a way to apply paint to the
canvas. “The dot is nothing more than a brushstroke, a technique. And like all
techniques, it does not matter much.” The idea was to render the surface of a
painting more vibrant, to maximize the brilliance of color. But the methodical
scientific technique alone did not “guarantee luminosity or the intensity of
colors or harmony. This is due to the fact that complementary colors are favorable to
and intensify each other when they are blended, even optically. A red surface and a
green surface, when adjacent, stimulate one another. Red dots blended into green dots
produce a gray and colorless whole.”“My family wanted me to become an architect, but I preferred drawing on the banks
of the Seine rather than in a workshop of the École des Beaux-Arts,” wrote
Signac. A visit to an exhibition of Claude Monet in 1880 was a life-changing experience.
After a brief stint at the Collège Rollin, he set out to become a painter, which
he did, a stellar one and self-taught. His earliest work was filled with energy.
“It consisted in pasting reds, greens, blues, and yellows, without much care but
with enthusiasm.” When he lost his father to tuberculosis, his financially stable
and supportive family saw to it he did not have to make ends meet. The same year, at age
17, he bought a painting by Paul Cézanne. His own first painting was dated a year
later.Signac spent most of his life in and around Paris where he was born. He was interested in
science, literature, and politics. He was a writer, whose poetic sensitivity found its
way into landscape painting. He was an avid traveler. His Olympia, a
boat named after Édouard Manet’s famed nude, took him to Italy, Holland,
and Constantinople. He often stopped to paint Mediterranean ports and scenery,
immortalizing the French coast in watercolors painted en plein air.
Although he experimented with oils, pen and ink, etchings, and lithographs, watercolor,
“a playful game,” was the mainstay of his life’s work.“I have seen Signac, and it has done me quite a lot of good,” wrote Vincent
van Gogh to his brother Theo. “He was so good and straightforward and simple
…. I found Signac very quiet though he is said to be violent; he gave me the
impression of someone who has balance and poise.” Signac’s irrepressible
vitality and exuberance, his love of action and the outdoors, and a native combativeness
were at times misunderstood, but not by his many friends, an array of artists and
anarchists. Unassuming and ragged in his sailor’s garb, he was often at sea or at
his home in St. Tropez, a meeting place for the exchange and promotion of artistic
ideas. Signac equated social revolution with artistic freedom. “The anarchist
painter is not the one who will create anarchist pictures, but he who, without desire
for recompense, will fight with all his individuality against official bourgeois
conventions by means of a personal contribution.” At age 21, Signac became, along
with Georges Seurat and others, cofounder of the Société des Artistes
Indépendants, a group intended to provide opportunities for exhibiting
avant-garde works away from the rigid cultural politics of the Paris Salon. President of
the society from 1908 until his death, Signac encouraged young artists by exhibiting
controversial works. Meanwhile, with Seurat, he set off to articulate the theories of
neoimpressionism. After the untimely death of Seurat from respiratory infection at age
31, Signac became the sole advocate and leader of the movement.Signac took Seurat’s theories to a new level. Armed with watercolor sketches from
nature, he moved the studio indoors and used mosaic-like squares of pure color to
compose large scenes that would influence the works of van Gogh and Gauguin, inspire
Matisse, and affect the evolution of future art movements, from fauvism to cubism.
Signac was tireless in explaining divisionism. “In order to listen to a symphony,
you don’t sit in the middle of the orchestra but in the position where the sounds
from the various instruments mingle, creating the harmony desired by the composer.
Similarly, faced by a ‘divided’ painting, it is best to first stand at a
sufficient distance in order to absorb the whole, before moving closer to study the
chromatic effects up close.” For the first 20 years of his career, he received
little recognition and neoimpressionism received negative criticism, even by those who
initially supported it. He died of septicemia in Paris at 72.La salle à manger, Breakfast, on this
month’s cover, is from a series of views inside contemporary interiors with
figures usually posed in stiff profile. Signac valiantly sought art solutions in the
scientific process, the precise observation of color tones in close proximity. And,
moving away from the subjectivity of impressionism and the passing moment, he searched
the small particles of color for truth.Always interested in human psychology and social justice, he looked for them in home
interiors, as he curiously observed the urban middle-class. In
Breakfast, he spied on them from outside the room, inviting the
viewer to do the same. With scant interest in perspective, he placed the human figures
on a grid, same as all other objects. Frozen in space and time, these figures were not
persons but social types: the retired bourgeois, the maid, the housewife. Uninterested
in each other, they played roles, their performance an indictment of society and
marriage, which inhibits the development of individual personality.“By exclusive use of … pure colors, by methodical division and by observing
the scientific theory of colors, [the neoimpressionist] guarantees maximal luminosity,
color, and harmony to an unprecedented degree,” Signac wrote. The
painter’s vision applies neatly to today’s rapid advancement of genome
technologies that, by providing tiny bits of data on disease-causing microbes, promise
to improve the canvas of clinical and public health laboratory investigations and lower
the costs.The latest genome DNA sequencers generate detailed and robust information for clinical
and public health laboratories and could spawn a global system of linked databases of
pathogen genomes to ensure more efficient detection, prevention, and control of endemic
and emerging diseases and all manner of outbreaks. Even as these new genomic tools
enhance diagnosis, they decrease the use of culture and molecular methods that produce
data currently critical for epidemiologic investigation. Careful application of current
epidemiologic techniques teases apart the dynamic interaction of infectious diseases
that drive total illness and death rates up or down, even in outbreaks with universal
exposure. New genome-backed epidemiologic approaches will be needed as sequencers
replace culture and molecular techniques so this ability is not lost.“To ensure optical mixture, the neoimpressionists were forced to use brushwork of
a small scale so that, when standing back sufficiently, different elements could
reconstitute the desired tint and not be perceived in isolation.” In genomics
approaches, likewise, field epidemiologists must use alternative data sources or
original techniques to capture the unique characteristics that tie together the
epidemiologically related whole. Without these, the bits provided by the precise genomic
tools would only create “industrial art,” a canvas without valuable
content, aesthetics achieved, in Signac’s words, by “empirical formulae
and dishonest or silly advice.”