Paul Signac

Paris, Monet, and the meeting with Seurat, 1863–1886

Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863 into a comfortable family. His parents wanted him to become an architect, but he preferred, as he said, to draw the Seine, and an 1880 exhibition of Claude Monet's work turned him decisively to painting. He took up boating at the same time, the start of a sailor's life that supplied much of his subject matter.[1]

In 1884 Signac helped found the Société des Artistes Indépendants, the jury-free exhibiting society whose motto was no jury and no prizes, and there he met Georges Seurat. Struck by Seurat's systematic method and his theory of colour, Signac abandoned the loose brushwork of Impressionism for small, scientifically juxtaposed dots of pure colour, meant to blend in the viewer's eye rather than on the canvas. He became Seurat's closest ally.[2]

Neo-Impressionism, Van Gogh, and anarchism, 1886–1900

In 1886 Signac met Vincent van Gogh in Paris, and the two painted together along the Seine at Asnières; Van Gogh admired his technique, and Signac later visited him at Arles and defended his reputation. Signac spent his summers in the south, at Collioure and Saint-Tropez, where he bought a house and gathered his friends, and he imagined the Mediterranean coast as the site of a future anarchist utopia.[3]

The politics were serious. From 1888 Signac read the anarchist writers Kropotkin, Reclus and Jean Grave, and contributed to Grave's paper. He painted his large canvas In the Time of Harmony, first titled In the Time of Anarchy until state repression of anarchists forced the change. Seurat's sudden death in 1891 left Signac the movement's leader, and in 1898 he published its manifesto, From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, a history of colour and a defence of divided brushwork.

The method's most striking early convert was an elder. Camille Pissarro, then in his mid-fifties and a founder of Impressionism, let Georges Seurat and Signac, two men half his age, teach him the divided stroke. Pissarro painted in dots from the mid-1880s until about 1890, then decided the method was too slow for what he wanted, and kept the colour lessons afterwards.

Saint-Tropez, Matisse, and the presidency, 1900–1935

Signac's house at Saint-Tropez became a crossroads of the new painting. In 1904 the young Henri Matisse spent a summer there, working beside Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross and adopting Signac's Divisionist method. He painted Luxe, calme et volupté, which Signac bought, and the pure colour he learned there fed straight into the Fauvism he launched in 1905. As president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants from 1908 until his death, Signac used the platform to exhibit the Fauves and the Cubists, and he was the first buyer of a Matisse.[1]

He married Berthe Roblès in 1892, with Pissarro and Maximilien Luce among the witnesses, and from 1913 lived with Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange, who bore his daughter, Ginette; he stayed friends with Berthe for life. Signac painted watercolours and port views across France into old age, and was named an official Painter of the Navy. He died of sepsis in Paris on 15 August 1935, aged 71, and was cremated and buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

How Signac painted

Signac built pictures from separate touches of unmixed colour laid side by side, so that the blending happens in the eye rather than on the palette, the technique he and Seurat named after its optical theory. After Seurat's death his own dots grew larger and more mosaic-like, and his colour brighter and freer, moving toward the pure hue that would liberate the Fauves. Water, light and boats are his constant subjects, painted from the sailor's vantage he knew first-hand.

He was also, unusually for a painter, the movement's theorist. From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism traces divided colour back through Delacroix and the Impressionists and sets out its rules, and it did as much as any painting to spread the method; Matisse's turn to Divisionism came from reading it. Signac worked in watercolour, etching and lithograph as well as oil, and treated the whole enterprise as both art and argument.

Reception and influence

Signac is remembered as the co-founder and, after Seurat, the keeper of Neo-Impressionism, and as the essayist who carried its theory to the next generation. Through his treatise and his Saint-Tropez summers he shaped Matisse, André Derain and the Fauves, playing a decisive part in the colour revolution of early modern art. His long presidency of the Indépendants gave the avant-garde a place to show.

His paintings hang in the Musée d'Orsay, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and museums across Europe, and the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts holds the largest group of his watercolours and drawings outside France. His granddaughter, the art historian Françoise Cachin, became a director of the French national museums, keeping his legacy in the family.