© Copyright 2005 Paul van Rensburg.
IMPRESSIONISM:
BIOGRAPHIES:
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM:
Signac contributed annually to the Salon des Independants. He was the first non-Belgian member of the avant-garde Brussels Société des XX, with which he showed for some years. In Brussels in 1889, he supported Toulouse-Lautrec in his quarrel with a minor Belgian painter who had insulted Vincent van Gogh. With Seurat and van Gogh, Signac exhibited in Paris in 1887 at Le Théatre Libre.
After the death of Georges Seurat in 1891, Signac helped to list and classify his work and he actually headed the Neo-Impressionists. In 1892 he married Berthe Roblès, a relative of Pissarro and in 1893 they bought a house at Saint-Tropez, which was to become a resort and favourite of modern artists.
In 1892 he took part in a Neo-Impressionist group show. Among many exhibitions that he helped to organize were memorial shows for van Gogh and Seurat, in 1891 and 1892 respectively. In 1908 he became the president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants.
Signac himself experimented with various media. As well as oil paintings and watercolours he made etchings, lithographs, and many pen-and-ink sketches composed of small, laborious dots.
Watercolours form an important part of Signac's oeuvre and he produced a large quantity during his numerous visits to Collioure, Port-en-Bressin, La Rochelle, Marseille, Venice and Istanbul. The fluid medium allowed for more freedom than is found in his rather rigid oil paintings which are sometimes encumbered by the demands of theory. Colour being an important aspect of the artist's work, monochrome wash drawings such as Scène de marché are more rare. His methods in general were more precise and scientific than Seurat's, his paintings richer in colour and more luminous.
The neo-impressionists influenced the next generation; Signac inspired Henri Matisse and André Derian in particular, thus playing a decisive role in the evolution of Fauvism. As president of the annual Salon des Independants from 1908 until his death, Signac encouraged younger artists (he was the first to buy a painting by Matisse) by exhibiting the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists.
After 1900 Signac moved away from pointillism, opting instead for small squares of colour to create a mosaic-like effect, as in View of the Port of Marseilles, 1905, or The blessing of the tuna fleet at Groix, 1923. When he died in Paris in 1935, however, the style to which he dedicated himself had long ceased to be revolutionary.
Signac was untiring in his research and in his desire to expound his theories, and was extremely important as a writer on art. His book, From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism (1899), a summary of the ideas and theories of the movement, is a standard text on the subject. He wrote an excellent study of Jongkind, a fine article on "The Subject in Painting" for a French encyclopedia, and other important articles and catalogue introductions.
By political views he was an Anarchist, as were many of his friends, including Félix Fénéon and Camille Pissarro.
IMPRESSIONISM:
BIOGRAPHIES:
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM:
Paul Signac 1863-1935
Paul Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863, into the family of an affluent master harness-maker. Both his father and grandfather had prospered in the luxury saddlery business and could boast of having the emperor Napoleon III as a client.
The neighbourhood in which Paul Signac grew up proved to be conducive to nurturing a vocation in the arts, and as an only child he enjoyed the support of his liberal parents. As an adolescent, Signac was attracted by Impressionist paintings in gallery windows and went to the exhibitions held by the painters, then considered revolutionaries. In 1880, at the age of sixteen, he was thrown out of the fifth Impressionist exhibition by Gauguin for making a sketch after a picture by Degas and was informed unsympathetically that "one does not copy here, Sir."
During the same year Signac suffered a great loss when his doting father, Jules Signac, died of tuberculosis in Menton. His mother, Heloise Signac, and his grandfather sold the business and moved to Asnieres, a new residential suburb of Paris. Although a good student, Paul Signac left school and rented a room in Montmartre, after which he divided his time between the city and Asnieres.
The windows of the Signac house in Asnieres looked out on a garden, the Seine, and the smokestacks of the factories in Clichy. The banks of the Seine were to inspire many paintings, drawings, and watercolours by the young painter, but his earliest joy there was boating, his first boat being a canoe that he christened Manet Zola Wagner. He originally planned to study architecture, but upon studying the works of Claude Monet and others, he taught himself to paint and decided to become an artist. Given financial independence by his prosperous shopkeeping family, he began to paint in 1880 in Paris with his friend Armand Guillaumin, an artist on the fringe of Impressionism.
In 1883 the young artist attended the free studio of Siegfried Bing (1838-1905). Being an energetic and sociable person, Signac actively participated in founding the Société des Artistes Indépendants, a juryless exhibiting society, in 1884. Here he met Monet and Georges Seurat as well as Maximilien Luce, Henri-Edmond Cross and Theo van Rysselberghe, who set forth the aesthetic and technical creed of Neo-Impressionism (also called Pointillism or Divisionism). He was immediately struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and his theory of colours and became Seurat's faithful supporter. Under his influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of impressionism to experiment with scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure color, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the defining feature of pointillism.
The first canvasses painted by Signac in a new manner date to this time. Signac was tireless in his attempts to convert others to Seurat's methods. In 1885 he met Camille Pissarro, whom he introduced to Seurat. Finding in Seurat's technique the answer to his craving to a rational style, Pissarro adopted it with enthusiasm. Against the wishes of the Impressionists, he invited the Pointillist to participate in their eighth and last group show in 1886. On this occasion Signac exhibited mostly scenes of the Breton port of Saint-Briac and of the Paris suburbs. A big canvas, Two Milliners, 1885, was the first example of the application of the Divisionist technique to an indoor subject.
Because he remained an enthusiastic sailor all his life, many of Signac's paintings are of the French coast. He began to travel in 1892, sailing a small boat to almost all the ports of France, to Holland, and around the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople, basing his boat at St. Tropez, which he "discovered." He left the capital each summer, to stay in the south of France in the village of Collioure or at St. Tropez, where he bought a house and invited his friends. In March, 1889, he visited Vincent van Gogh at Arles. The next year he made a short trip to Italy, seeing Genoa, Florence, and Naples.
From his various ports of call, Signac brought back vibrant, colourful watercolors, sketched rapidly from nature. From these sketches, he painted large studio canvasses that are carefully worked out in small, mosaic-like squares of colour, quite different from the tiny, variegated dots previously used by Seurat.
His friends included the journalist Felix Fénéon and the scientist and mathematician Charles Henry, both of whom were interested in Neo-Impressionism and published their views on colour theory. In 1890 Fénéon devoted an issue of "Les Hommes d'Aujourd'hui" to the work of Signac. In the same year the artist painted a picture entitled Portrait of Felix Fénéon Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angels, Tones and Colours. The abstract patterning of the background had some part in the development of Symbolism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/signac/
http://www.renoirinc.com/biography/artists/signac.htm
http://www.abcgallery.com/S/signac/signacbio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Signac
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/S/signac.html
http://www.paulsignac.com/biography.shtml
http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/Biographies/
MainBiographies/S/Signac/Signac.htm
http://www.abcgallery.com/S/signac/signac1.html