Don’t Diss The Dots!
1886 proved something of a pivotal year for Modernism, witnessing the final Impressionist exhibition and the first showing of the Neo-Impressionists. Who they brought with them a whole new look, thanks to their originator Georges Seurat.
Impressionism had taken up the then-novel practice of mixing paint ‘wet’ on canvas, giving it an immediate and ‘unfinished’ look. While Seurat precisely painted adjacent dots of contrary colours, which would mix together in the eye, creating a shimmering effect. You can see shows enlargements which demonstrate the workings here. This came to be called Pointilism by critics, though he used Divisionism. (He also suggested Chromoluminarism. For some reason that didn’t catch on.) See for example his ’Port-En-Bessin, a Sunday’ (1888, below.)
And Divisionism proved divisive, in more than name. If it was pilloried by contemporary critics, those were much the some fools who’d done the same to Impressionism. Perhaps more significantly Monet and Renoir refused to exhibit with Seurat. (Though Pissarro not only took up the new look, he helped organise that 1886 show.)
And modern critics who of course now fawn over Impressionism, seem similarly keen to diss the dots. They slagged the show, criticising not just the participants but the style itself. Perhaps best summed up by the Telegraph headline ’The National Gallery Succumbs to the Plague of Pointilism’.
With crowds un-following in their wake, attendance significantly under either the Impressionist shows held here or the National’s recent Van Gogh blockbuster, apparently their most successful show ever. Despite both being part of the same continuum.
Let’s take each group in turn.
Contemporary critics called it “the death of painting”. And, in fairness, you can see what they’re saying. The effect is entirely different to Impressionism. Compositions are not casual-seeming but harmonious, forms more not impressionistic but clear-cut, bold in outline even as they flicker in-between those lines. Impressionism made everything seem in constant motion. Here, even things which are in motion no longer look it. Look again at the fluttering flags above. They’re not caught in flight but frozen in place, like a sculpture of a flag. Seurat’s even added a painted frame around the edge of the work, doubling down on the formalism.
Further, some see the artist’s touch as the basis of art, studying his line the way a graphologist would handwriting. Against which Divisionism can seem a near-mechanical process. The works look clean, smoothed over and ‘posterised’. (It’s also hard for us not to think of dot-matrix printing, though that came decades later.) And on the back of this ‘artist’s hand’ fixation comes the snobbery about poster design and reproductive art.
It should be said that Seurat is not represented here by any of his major works. (’Bathers at Asieres’ is in the permanent collection, but wasn’t moved for this show.) His ’Le Chahut’ (1889/90, above) is clearly intended as a centrepiece, given a room almost to itself. And this was part-inspired by concert posters.
Here the integrity of pictorial space is already starting to break down, everything becoming design elements rather than objects in themselves, to a degree that’s almost collage-like. The dancers are reduced to a mechanical line, echoed by the stem of the double bass. Things are compressed together, if this was actual pictorial space those dancers would be kicking the orchestra half the time. The audience seem to be seated behind everyone, but then who’s that leering hatted figure bottom right? Are those flower motifs attached to a wall, or floating in the air? These are all things you’d barely stop to question in a poster image.
We are of course going to ask what’s wrong with that. Colour litho posters were at this point a relatively recent phenomenon, so must have seemed fresh and exciting. Seurat’s contemporary Toulouse-Lautrec regularly moved between paintings and posters. But we should add that to ‘go poster’ to this degree is unusual for Seurat. In fact its quite possibly the only work in the whole show to do this.
Modern critics, shrewdly noticing this did not in fact turn out to be the end of painting, took another tack. Some separated Seurat from his followers, as if it was a one-man movement plus some also-rans. The main selling point for this is his early death, in 1891, at just 31. Modernism borrowed from Romanticism the lustre of the genius-artist who died young. Though if you’re thinking of taking that seriously, know its chief proponent was Jonathan Jones.
But more commonly Divisionism was portrayed as but a waystation in art history, these dot painting actually just a dash, a line linking art’s great nodes of Impressionism and Fauvism. Seen this way, its stillness is an uncanny valley which had to be descended into, in order to climb back out of and reach the next peak.
Vincent Van Gogh might seem to epitomise this. He briefly followed Divisionism, but by the time of ’The Sower’ (1886, above), those sharp dots have grown, become visible, extended into dashes and swirls. Which leads to pretty much the opposite effect. Rather than evoke stillness the work seems to deny it’s existence, pulsing throughout with life.
Monet’s guru, as much as he had one, was Eugène Boudin, who introduced him to painting en plein air. While Seurat read the scientific writings of Michel Eugene Chevreul. Monet painted quickly, trying to capture changing light conditions. Seurat made over a hundred preparatory drawings for the famous ’La Grande Jette’ (also not in show). Notably, the first thing we’re shown here is not a painting but a colour wheel. (The Wikipedia article linked to above contains a simplified version of it.) Divisionism was based not on observation of life but a theory of colour, one not especially found in the wild.
So if Monet was (in the well-known quote) “just an eye”, was Seurat just a brain?
Nobert Lynton said of him: “every aspect of his paintings was severely controlled, proclaiming their basis in thought and knowledge.” He said of himself: “Some say they see Poetry in my paintings; I see only science.” So was the whole thing dry and cerebral, a technical exercise? The Modernist movement which lived up to its formalist stereotype?
Helene Kroller-Muller, wondering where she comes into this? She had enough taste to be the only art collector to buy a Van Gogh during his life. But from there she went on to collect not Fauvism but Neo-Impressionism. And she countered that Seurat "sees the view of the harbour with its boats as the emotion of a religious-poetic disposition.”
And, kids, maybe you’re both right! A poetic disposition is not incompatible with science. In fact Impressionism had its own associations with science, including new investigations into the workings of sight, if not to the same degree.
Impressionism was a brilliant, often literally brilliant, way of doing something necessary. It had begun art again at a time someone needed to, and had done it by going back to the most basic questions - what do we actually see?, how can that be captured on a canvas? Yet imitation of life, it was a good starting-point but too slender a place to settle. Neo-Impressionism needed to move past those questions.
And everything about Impressionism as an art style stemmed from that central purpose - it evoked verisimilitude, immediacy. We should ask a similar question about Neo-Impressionism, not why wasn’t it Impressionism but what was it? Or more accurately, what was it for? Even if it wasn’t made with a purpose in mind it has to find one, or be just a style, a suit of clothes with no wearer.
The show suggests three answers to this. Let’s take each in turn.
How Radical Met Harmony
After a first room in which human figures are either absent or ancillary to the landscapes, suddenly they’re everywhere. And that’s a clue to what’s coming - in fact a pretty hefty one.
Because the show’s first answer might not have been on your Bingo card - its Anarchist Communism. Particularly bamboozling if your default notion of politically charged art is Dadaism.
We’re told “their style went hand-in-hand with radical political ideas… depicting the struggles faced by the working class, in reaction against the industrial age.” Paul Signac is quoted: “justice in society, harmony in art: same thing.” They effectively titled the show in its honour, and it dominated much of the discussion.
Georges Lemmen’s ’Factories On the Thames’ (c. 1892, above) isn’t of beaches or haystacks but… well, the title gives it away. And the change of subject matter includes a change in style. Unlike the precision of Seurat, the smoke leads the eye but also the buildings fade from view in the haze. It looks, in mood if not style, more Whistler. And this mood undermines the argument being made for it. This etherial, it may well be of factories but they’re seen as shining spires, a dreamscape not a workplace.
.jpeg)
Jan Toorop’s ’After the Strike’ (c.1888/90, above) is more clearly political. But while Lemmen looks across to Whistler, this looks back to the Realism of Jean-Francois Millet. (The subject of a small show elsewhere in the National, which overlapped with this one.) And truth to tell those heavy-load-bearing bodies vie with the lightness of Divisionism, it would have worked better in Millet’s style.
So we have a work that’s good but not at all political, followed by one that was political but not terribly good. More happily, Maximilian Luce’s ’The Iron Foundry’ (1899, above) manages both. But again it looks elsewhere, only this time forwards - the muscularised, heroic workmen of Socialist Realism. The light of the foundry back-lights them into semi-silhouettes, foregrounded but de-individualised. Significantly, this isn’t still but dramatic The workers form shapes which frame and harness the explosive burst of the foundry, creating diagonals to left and right before central pillars. It’s a strong, affecting work. But to make its point its composition must overrule its style, its Divisionist in a formal sense only.
The show also concedes not everyone signed up for the radicalism. Luce was even arrested in 1894, in a round-up after the French President was assassinated. Toorop and Signac were definite card-carriers, but Anna Boch not. (It doesn’t mention Lemmen.) While Seurat, the great founder, had Socialist sympathies but there’s no reason to think him an Anarchist Communist. We’re told Van Rysselberghe was a key figure in spreading the new art to the Netherlands. But the show makes no mention of him having any particular political convictions, not could I find any on-line. Making the Anarchist Communism seem a little optional.
So why the stress on it? Curators always pounce on connections between art and radical politics, not because it seems so relevant but precisely because it doesn’t. With no modern mass Anarchist Communist movement to contend with, it seems equally enticing and quaint. But here, it may also be in order to counter those notions about this art being dry, clinical and soul-less. Actually, they respond, I think you’ll find it was a call to arms!
These times certainly were politically tumultuous. For example, May Day was founded in 1890, commemorating Chicago workers murdered by the State in ’86. In France, 1892 to ’94 was known as The Era Of Attacks.
Naturally enough, people thought that the radical new art and radical new politics must go together. In fact, they didn’t. Even if some tried to straddle the two. Despite what Signac says, radical and harmony didn’t go together like a horse and carriage. The times pressed them up against one another, a shotgun marriage. Divisionism’s true calling lay elsewhere.
Painting The Spaces Between
In something of a dimensional leap, we jump from factory floors to interiors of bourgeois life. Figures which are, in the show’s words, “presented as isolated, occupying a world in which geometry and lines of force govern their movements.” Signac’s ’The Dining Room’ (1886/7, above) not only creates an impasse-like space between the two main figures, but adds a servant as a barrier between them.
While their poses might be stiff, this effect comes mostly from the style. They’re as fixed as the furnishings, in a world that looks lifeless. Not conveyed in this thumbnail, but the effect’s compounded by the size of the work, a much greater scale than would normally be granted for such an intimate subject. There’s enough space to get lost in. It’s like the old joke that money gives you misery in comfort.
Van Rysselberghe’s ’In July, before Noon’ (1890, above) conversely is an outdoor scene under dappled sunlight. Monet painted many such scenes. Yet here there’s an unease to it. All faces are turned away, both form us and from each other, despite their being five figures. A device we’ve seen used by Walter Sickert, slightly later. There’s a large area of empty space just beyond them, framed in such a way the eye is pulled towards it.
All this may be making a virtue out of a necessity - if you painted in this way nothing could be made to move, so you evoked the stillness like you’d meant to. But two things - first, Signac’s work was painted only two years after he had embraced the new style. If it was a fix he arrived at it remarkably quickly. Besides, a virtue is a virtue.
More pertinently, this was art going with a social trend, only this time one the art was well-suited to convey. This was the Fin de Siele era, and as Wikipedia puts it “cultural hallmarks that were recognized as prominent in the 1880s and 1890s includ[ed] ennui, cynicism, pessimism, and a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence.”
As we’ve seen, this was a time of anarchists battling authoritarians, with the body count to show it. But it was simultaneously an era of disturbed spirits, of psychic unease, of people no longer knowing each other or even themselves. Eras do not have just one nature, any more than people do.
All Went White
Neo-Impressionism, as we’ve seen, was moving beyond the task of capturing external reality. Emile Verhaeren shrewdly said Seurat’s work was composed of “tones and lines for which reality serves only as a pretext.” And this led to works where, again using the show’s words, the “world of appearances” is only a means to access the ineffable, to convey “absence within an image”. Those dots become like ellipses, what they lead to is space. There’s a kind of serene sublime.
For example Van Rysselberghe’s ’Coastal Scene’ (c.1892) is a way of framing that central area of white. The vertical sticks in the water are something of a compositional master-stroke, offsetting the whiteness without over-balancing it. We know that if we went towards it, it would retreat. It’s insubstantial, ungraspable. And this sense, of it being beyond physical space, is the point.
Johan Thorn Prikker’s ’Basse Hermale, Sun at Noon’ (1904) is not a painting but composed of undulating strokes of chalk. It’s not just minimal, there’s denser marks behind the haystacks than used for them. As with Van Rysselberge, the central area is of space.
And this is where Dualism inherently led. By minimising fidelity to the real world it banished its clutter, its messiness, its jagged corners - to create something harmonious.
It’s bizarre to think that those Van Rysselberge’s were painted two years apart. This seascape serenity is something else entirely to all that to bourgeois ennui. One sees space positively, a clearing-out which rids us of quotidian baggage, the other negatively, as separation, the gulf that widens between us.
But what lends itself to serenity as easily offers melancholy. Henry Van de Velde’s ’Twilight’ (1889, above) has a “profound melancholy”. You feel this liminal space cannot be dawn but must be dusk. Those three thick bands of colour, running the width of the painting, suggest a barrier more than an invitation. The thin trees play the same offsetting role as Van Rysselberghe’s sticks.
And melancholy may not be so far from serenity. In both, the self is being left behind. And Seurat’s ‘Suburb’ (1882/3, not in show) could be read either way up, depending on the viewer’s disposition. Dualism proved dualistic, go figure!
But What Comes After New?
Signac, there’s no doubt, strongly influence Matisse and Derain’s Fauvism, even if they ditched his dots. But the show looks further, claiming by “untethering the picture form its dependence on subject matter” it paved the way for Abstraction. Signac gave his pictures Opus numbers, suggesting an equivalence to musical composition, a practice which was later taken up by Kandinsky. This was especially true of the seascapes, of which there’s no shortage. Toorop’s are particularly semi-abstract, a series of horizontal bands of colour, such as ’Shell Gatherers On the Beach’ (1891, below).
We could, if we wished, see abstraction as the sea, a field of formless colour. We’ve got close to it here, but are still stuck on the shore, looking out. We just need to make that final leap.
But here the show’s essentially repeating a version of its own critics argument, making Neo-Impressionism into a way-station. Yeah, it was fresh for a while, then this other thing showed up which was fresher. If you reduce Modernism to an evolution line, the significant thing about each ism becomes that it led neatly to the next, like a product upgrade. And the whole system becomes hermetic, talking only to itself.
We should ask instead - what was significant about the movement in and of itself? What does a painting of the 1890s tell us about the 1890s? And how do we relate it it from here?
Which, we might hope, we’ve begun to…
Kroller-Muller’s collection is based in a museum which can be seen on-line here.
(NB This is unlikely to mean a return to regular blogging.)
