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PAUL
SIGNAC
The Dining Room/La Salle a manger (1886-1887)
Oil on white primed canvas
89cm X 115cm/35in X 45 1/4 in
'"" -"*., Signac was based in Paris through-out the height
of the Neo-Impres-
^^^ sionist movement, leaving only in
1892 to settle on the Mediterran-ean coast at St. Tropez. Virtually self-taught,
he based his early techniques on Impressionist painting, until he saw
Seurat's Bathing,
Asnieres at the Independents' exhibition in
1884. Signac had been one of the founders of the Groupe des Artistes Independants,
which in
1884 established exhibitions free of awards or juries as an alternative
venue to the official
Salon exhibitions. In addition to showing their work at the eighth Impressionist
exhibition in
1886, the Neo-Impressionists showed regularly with the Independents, and
with the Belgian independent artists at their Les XX shows also founded
in 1884. Although the Belgians had already established links with French
art, invit-ing the Impressionists - like Monet and Renoir in 1886 - to
show with them, their closest ties were with the Neo-Impressionists. A
number of Belgian artists, like Theo van Rysselberghe
(1862-1926) and Henri van de Velde (1863-
1957), members of Les XX, adopted the Neo-
Impressionist style.
The Neo-Impressionists, reacting against the
'romantic' naturalism of Impressionism, and seeking a more scientific
method with which to convey their pictorial ideas, found sympathy in the
latter half of the 1880s among the Symbolist writers and poets who had
begun to displace naturalism in literature in the early 1880s. As their
theories extended in the second half of the
1880s, the Neo-Impressionists discovered a kinship between their aims
and those of the
Symbolist writers like Felix Feneon, their most astute supporter, Gustave
Kahn and Jean
Moreas. The Neo-Impressionists no longer sought merely to capture fleeting
effects of light and color in nature, as they saw the Impres-sionists
doing, instead they wished to render a
more universal and timeless record of con-temporary life. Signac was
the theoretician of the new movement, explaining its ideas and defending
it in his book From Eugene Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, which was published
in 1899, in fact long after the movement's peak. Although inevitably written
from Signac's personal bias. it reflected the ideals of the Neo-Impressionists,
and it has been characterized by the influential modern art historian,
Linda Nochlin, as 'an important document of that aesthetic universalism,
that attempt to unite and synthesize all human thought and feeling in
a symbolic, law-based harmony which ani-mated so many literary and artistic
enterprises of the last twenty years of the nineteenth century.'
In 1886, the year in which The Dining Room was begun, Signac adopted the
'dot' brush-stroke which Seurat had developed in his monumental canvas
Sunday Afternoon on the He de la Grande Jatte painted between 1884 and
1886. In addition to its function in dividing the different color components
within a picture, the dot technique enabled the Neo-Impression-ists to
render minute variations in tonal value. In general, the Impressionists
had sought to rid their paintings of tonal modeling, which was still associated
with academic painting, and instead to study effects in which contrasts
of tone (light and dark) were reduced to a mini-mum. The flatness this
brought to their paint-ings enabled them to maximize the tensions inherent
in painting, between the two-dimen-sional picture surface, and the illusion
of depth. The Neo-Impressionists restored tonal modeling to their pictures,
but instead of reverting to the gradations between white and brown charac-teristic
of academic classicism, they explored the means of presenting tonal gradation
through the use of juxtapositions of pure color.
In Signac's Dining Room. the scene is backlit from a window, giving a
dramatic light creating silhouettes and strong contrasts of light and
shade. This type of lighting was used occasion-ally by Degas, but not
by the Impressionists, who avoided such extremes of contrast. When sunsets
were painted by them, for example certain of Monet's haystack series from
1890-1891, any shadows were brilliant with colored light, reflected from
surrounding objects and the sky. In Signac's picture, the back lighting
creates a strong sense of form and structure in the composition, a frozen
solemnity which may be an ironic criticism of the formal, ritualistic
quality of the middle-class life depicted. Form is created by gradations
of color from pale tints to full saturation. Thus, the highlighted areas
are shown as barely tinted or yellowish whites. These then pass through
a series of minute gradations in which increasing amounts ot local color
are added until, in the darkest parts, almost pure saturation of the tube
colors is reached. To darken the shadow hueswithout adding sullying black
or earth colors, | green and blue are mixed on the palette and juxtaposed
next to purer blues. Effects of re-flected color among the local ' colors
are represented by additional dots of the appropriate hues. The careful
gradation of tones applied in small dots gives a stiff, sculptural artificiality
to the composition, whose color scheme is dom-inated by the complementary
colors orange-yellow to blue-violet.
As with Impressionist painting, opaque paint is a crucial feature of the
Neo-Impression-ist technique. Mat, opaque hues, with white added, have
far greater light-reflective lumin-osity than transparent colors, through
which light penetrates before being reflected back to the eye, producing
darker, more saturated color. Thus mat, opaque, unvarnished sur-faces
bounce the maximum amount of tinted light back to the eye to create the
effects of partial optical fusion these artists desired. Sig-nac was instrumental
in encouraging Seurat to abandon earth colours, such as those used in
Bathing, Asnieres (1883-1884), and to adopt the purer version of the Impressionist
palette.
He was also influential in van Gogh's lightening of his palette. Signac
and Vincent van Gogh worked together at Asnieres in 1887. and
Signac encouraged the Dutch artist to replace his somber, essentially
tonal palette with bright
'prismatic' colors, thus introducing him to a more modern use of complementary
contrasts than that which van Gogh had learned through I studying Delacroix.
Signac's use of strong contrejour or back light exaggerates the stylized
starkness of his figures.
Their strict profile and full face poses echo those used two years earner
by Seurat in his monumental work, La
Grande Jatte, and show the influence of stylized ancient Egyptian art
on both painters. Like '• Seurat, Signac did a series of major paintings
of modem life themes.
Signac's three paintings, aUof interiors, were executed in the later
1880s. Dining Room was painted on a g standard portrait 50 format canvas.
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