Neo-Impressionism
Neo-Impressionism is a term coined by French art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to describe an art movement founded by Georges Seurat. Seurat's most renowned masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, marked the beginning of this movement when it first made its appearance at an exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris. Around this time, the peak of France's modern era emerged and many painters were in search of new methods. Followers of Neo-Impressionism, in particular, were drawn to modern urban scenes as well as landscapes and seashores. Science-based interpretation of lines and colors influenced Neo-Impressionists' characterization of their own contemporary art. The Pointillist and Divisionist techniques are often mentioned in this context, because they were the dominant techniques in the beginning of the Neo-Impressionist movement.
Some argue that Neo-Impressionism became the first true avant-garde movement in painting. The Neo-Impressionists were able to create a movement very quickly in the 19th century, partially due to its strong connection to anarchism, which set a pace for later artistic manifestations. The movement and the style were an attempt to derive "harmonious" vision from modern science, anarchist theory, and late 19th-century debate around the value of academic art. The artists of the movement "promised to employ optical and psycho-biological theories in pursuit of a grand synthesis of the ideal and the real, the fugitive and the essential, science and temperament."
Overview
Principles of aesthetic: light, color, and form
Seurat and his followers tried to give their painting a scientific basis, by painting tiny dabs of primary colors close to each other to intensify the viewer's perception of colors by a process of optical mixing. This created greater apparent luminosity because the optical mixing of colors tends towards white, unlike mixing of paints on the palette which tends towards black and reduces intensity. Neo-impressionists also used more precise and geometric shapes to simplify and reveal the relationships between forms. Seurat's disciple Paul Signac later used what he felt to be a more poetic spontaneous use of divisionist technique.The development of color theory by Michel Eugène Chevreul and others by the late 19th century played a pivotal role in shaping the Neo-Impressionist style. Ogden Rood's book, Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry, acknowledged the different behaviors exhibited by colored light and colored pigment. While the mixture of the former created a white or gray color, that of the latter produced a dark, murky color. As painters, Neo-Impressionists had to deal with colored pigments, so to avoid the dullness, they devised a system of pure-color juxtaposition. Mixing of colors was not necessary. The effective utilization of pointillism facilitated in eliciting a distinct luminous effect, and from a distance, the dots came together as a whole displaying maximum brilliance and conformity to actual light conditions.
Origins of the term
There are a number of alternatives to the term "Neo-Impressionism" and each has its own nuance:Chromoluminarism was a term preferred by Georges Seurat. It emphasized the studies of color and light which were central to his artistic style. This term is rarely used today.
Divisionism, which is more commonly used, describes an early mode of Neo-Impressionist painting. It refers to the method of applying individual strokes of complementary and contrasting colors.
Unlike other designations of this era, the term 'Neo-Impressionism' was not given as a criticism. Instead, it embraces Seurat's and his followers' ideals in their approach to art.
Note: Pointillism merely describes a later technique based on divisionism in which dots of color instead of blocks of color are applied; Signac rejected this term's use as synonymous for divisionism.
The group of Neo-Impressionist painters
Neo-Impressionism was first presented to the public in 1886 at the Salon des Indépendants. The Indépendants remained their main exhibition space for decades with Signac acting as president of the association. But with the success of Neo-Impressionism, its fame spread quickly. In 1886, Seurat and Signac were invited to exhibit in the 8th and final Impressionist exhibition, later with Les XX and La Libre Esthétique in Brussels.In 1892, a group of Neo-Impressionist painters united to show their works in Paris, in the Salons of the Hôtel Brébant, 32, boulevard Poissonnière. The following year they exhibited at 20, rue Laffitte. The exhibitions were accompanied by catalogues, the first with reference to the printer: Imp. Vve Monnom, Brussels; the second refers to M. Moline, secretary. Pissarro and Seurat met at Durand-Ruel's in the fall of 1885 and began to experiment with a technique using tiny dots of juxtaposing colors. This technique was developed from readings of popular art history and aesthetics, and manuals for the industrial and decorative arts, science of optics and perception. At this time Pissarro began to be involved with the coterie that helped found the Société des Artistes Independants in 1884. Some members of the group attended gatherings for naturalist and symbolist authors at the home of Robert Caze who was an ex-communard and radical Republican journalist. It was here that the painters got to know each other, and many showed their work at independents' shows for all their lives. Pissarro asked Seurat and Signac to participate in the eighth impressionist exhibit in May 1886. This is where A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was shown. They had a separate room at the show. The Republicans' liberalization of press laws in 1881 also aided this avant-garde movement. It made it easier for people to begin their own newspapers, thus allowing more art critics to get published.
File:Henri-Edmond Cross - The Evening Air - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|250px|Henri-Edmond Cross, The Evening Air, c. 1893, oil on canvas, 116 × 164 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
The idea of the "modern primitive" drew this group and began with Signac. After Seurat displayed La Grande Jatte, the critic Fénéon coined the term Neo-Impressionism. Pissarro, his son Lucien, and Signac also showed work at the same time. Soon other artists began to join the movement including Charles Angrand, Henri-Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Léo Gausson, Louis Hayet, and Maximilien Luce. The allure of the scientific and new techniques captivated the young artists of this movement. The movement then spread abroad when Seurat and Pissarro were invited to Les Vingt, an avant-garde society in Brussels. This style became the dominant form in Belgium by 1889 and even artists like Van Gogh tried their hand at this style.
Seurat's mission as an artist was to celebrate the power of pure color, the expressive power of line, color and value, the reform of Impressionism and of the Beaux-Arts tradition. Seurat "wanted to be perceived as a technician of art, and so he borrowed from science some of the signs of its authority, including the regularity and clarity of pattern." This can be compared to how Signac "saw and emphasized a connection between anarchism, the Neo-Impressionist technique, the Mediterranean location, and the classical tradition in painting". Signac also viewed the Mediterranean as the place for anarchist avant-garde art. The Mediterranean was rarely depicted by avant-garde painters partially because of the association between the south of France and academic classicism as well as cultural and political conservatism. By setting his pastorals in the south, Signac followed the literary examples of Stendhal and Guy de Maupassant, who linked the region with liberty. Stendhal "described the south as a place of freedom where the worst faults of capitalist society were less entrenched than in the north." Stendhal also saw the South as a connection to other "Latin" countries who are "outside the civilized societies' concern for money."
Evolution
This movement's peak years lasted about five years, but did not end with Georges Seurat's death in 1891. Impressionism continued to evolve and expand over the next decade with even more distinctive characteristics. Incorporation of political and social ideas, especially anarchism, started showing prominence. After Seurat's death by diphtheria and his friend Albert Dubois-Pillet's by smallpox in the previous year, the Neo-impressionists began to change and strengthen their image through social and political alliances. They forged links to the anarcho-communists movement and through this, many more young artists were attracted to this "blend of social and artistic theory". In the later 1890s Signac went back to his earlier belief in the visual harmony of the Neo-impressionist style, and the belief that it signified his ideals. He also emphasized that Neo-Impressionists were not seeking realism. They did not want to imitate, but instead have "the will to create the beautiful.... We are false, false like Corot, like Carrière, false, false! But we also have our ideal—to which it is necessary to sacrifice everything". This return to an earlier style was alienating and caused fissures and tensions within the previously tight-knit community of neo-impressionists.Criticism
At the start of the movement, Neo-Impressionism was not welcomed by the art world and the general public. In 1886, Seurat's first exhibition of his now most famous work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, inspired torrents of negative criticism. The commotion evoked by this artwork could only be described with words like "bedlam" and "scandal".Neo-Impressionists' use of small segments of color to compose a whole picture was considered even more controversial than its preceding movement; Impressionism had been notorious for its spontaneous representation of fleeting moments and roughness in brushwork. Neo-Impressionism provoked similar responses for opposite reasons. The meticulously calculated regularity of brush strokes was deemed to be too mechanical and antithetical to the commonly accepted notions of creative processes set for the 19th century.
According to modern sources, much of the critique of the Neo-Impressionists at the time is just out of focus. In December 1894, the independent socialist daily La Petite République featured a front-page column by critic Adolphe Tabarant. He remarked on the new Neo-Impressionist cooperative gallery in the Rue Laffitte, focusing on Luce and Signac, also known as the young masters: "The art has, perhaps, a tendency toward an ill-tempered synthesis, toward a scientific observation that is too dry. But how it vibrates, and how it rings with truth! What an expenditure of coloring, what a profusion of agitated notions, in which one senses the noble and sincere passions of those young men who, after lamented Seurat, strive to capture all the secrets of light from the sun!"
The Neo-Impressionists were supported from the beginning in 1884 by the Journal des Artistes. Other papers also discussed the future Neo-Impressionists together, thus showing that they had formed as a group through tier creation of a democratic exhibit space, not their movement or artistic style.
After the turn of the century, the critic Félix Fénéon critiqued Signac’s idealism in his later work. He compared Signac to Claude and Poussin by saying that Claude Lorrain knew all the details of the real world, and that he was able to express the world contained it by his beautiful spirit. He relates Signac to an "inheritor of landscape tradition that envisioned the realm of harmony".