Pointillism

Pointillism refers to a style in painting. It had its heyday in the years 1889-1910. Pointillism is assigned to the Post-Impressionism.

Important artists of pointillism are Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Henri Edmond Cross, the Belgian Théo van Rysselberghe and for some years also Camille Pissarro. On the German side, Paul Baum is the main representative of pointillism.

Term

Georges Seurat wanted to call the style of painting he developed originally Chromoluminarismus (color light painting), but opted for Divisionists ( division painting). More commonly, however, were the terminology Paul Signac, Pointillism ( puncturing style), and Fénéons more evolutionary labeling as Neo-Impressionism, the accepted Signac later.

Characterization

Typical of the Pointillism is strictly geometrically composed, often ornamental looking picture construction. In contrast to Impressionism a realistic snapshot is no longer sought, but a really well-thought. This approach is to move from the overall composition of the image of the geometrical relationships, the screen layout, the relations of light and objects down to the individual elements, Seurat referred to as Divisionists.

Basics

Early 1880s the painter Georges Seurat worked intensively with the then new findings on the chromatics. He studied the work of James Clerk Maxwell, Ogden Nicholas Rood, Charles Henry and especially Eugène Chevreul color perception and for additive color mixing. From these findings, he developed in the years 1883 and 1884 a new painting technique.

This is based on the simultaneous contrast of adjacent colors. The entire image consists of small, regular splashes of color in pure colors. The overall color of a surface is obtained only in the eye of the beholder, and from a certain distance. Through optical fusion and additive color mixing, the color dots to form shapes.

Pointillism leaves in this way the path of Impressionism to find the autonomous image and its own laws. Due to the additive color mixing the colors have a tendency to greater luminosity, while the mixing on the easel, the colors are darker and dirt colors are almost inevitable.

Development and emergence

Seurat's first large painting, Bathers at Asnières, was only hinted painted pointillist manner, but leaves in terms of image composition and resolution in pixels already hinted the later development. When it was rejected in 1884 in the Salon de Paris, it was seen in the Salon des Independants.

The pioneering work for the new art direction was the image of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. From the film genre, takes the image a common impressionistic issue: people outdoors in their Freizeitvergnügung. However, Seurat arranges these people under the picture composition, aligns them along the horizontal and vertical main lines. He is careful to show a cross section of people from different walks of life. It presents, in unrealistic systematics, these people from the front, rear and the profile. It gives the impression of an exaggeration of reality, a solemn staging. This impression is reinforced by the fact that Seurat includes the frame of the image in the painting.

After the death of Seurat in 1891 Paul Signac was the leading theorist and artist of pointillism.

First reactions

For audiences, artists and critics was obvious that we had to deal with something that is completely new. The reception was mixed, many painters were fascinated by it, to put the painting on a scientific basis, including Paul Signac, Charles Angrand, Henri Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois - Pillet, Léo Gausson, Louis Hayet, Maximilien Luce, Hippolyte Petitjean, at the beginning of movement Camille Pissarro, who over the Divisionists but later critically remarked, and his son Lucien. Others, such as Edgar Degas, the new direction rejected already from the beginning. The art dealer and great patron of the Impressionists Paul Durand- Ruel expressed disappointment that was influenced by Camille Pissarro younger colleagues, but where the market for Impressionist paintings just started to improve only.

Negative critic described the painting as Confettisme. The critic Félix Fénéon however, campaigned for the new art direction. He looked at her as trend-setting and coined the term Neo-Impressionism in 1886 to highlight this. It dealt intensively with the theoretical foundations apart and knew Charles Henry and some other theorists personally. He was editorial secretary of the journal Revue Indépendante and editor of La Revue blanche. Until the death of Seurat, he accompanied his work and the work of Signac with benevolent, well-founded criticisms in these journals.

Further dissemination

An essential role for the further spread of pointillism played in 1883, Belgian artist group Les Vingt ( The Twenty ). This quickly took a central role in the Belgian art world. Her exhibitions they invited a wide variety of artists. In 1887 they exhibited in Brussels again and again the images of Seurat and his Parisian colleagues. Younger artists like Théo van Rysselberghe, Henry van de Velde Jan Toorop, Johan Joseph Aarts, Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig Jan Vijlbrief and other adapted the new way of seeing.

In Italy, the painter Giovanni Segantini, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Emilio Longoni and Angelo Morbelli adapted the pointillist technique and developed them further to their own characteristics.

Influence on the art of the 20th century

The influence of pointillism in the artistic development has been underestimated for a long time. Large parts of the criticism and the bourgeois public saw him often as trivial technical means. However, many well-known artists such as Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Elie and Robert Delaunay, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin continued intensively with the pointillist technique apart and went through a phase of pointillist experiments. From the view of some historians, this suggests that the Pointillism an essential role in the development of the paradigms of earlier eras, objectivity and playback, to those of the 20th century, abstraction and design, plays.

The art historian Robert Rosenblum judges Seurat, that he could even compete with Cézanne ( "can rival even Cézanne " ), and endorses him great foresight to ( "look far into the past and into the future" ), the painting Grande Jatte he calls " a kind of Eiffel Tower of painting".