The Joy Of Color

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Both Signac and Seurat strove to give a noble, architectural permanence to fleeting effects by analyzing shape and light in terms of dots of color. They wanted rigor and system, not Impressionist spontaneity. Each man influenced the other; Seurat was the greater artist, but it was a real partnership. Thus it was Signac who persuaded Seurat, and not the other way round, to purify his color by banishing earth pigments from his palette. Later Signac would give up on the dot, using larger spots in a sort of mosaic. Under the influence of Turner, whose luminous watercolors and oils he adored, he plunged into fantasies of radiant color that weren't governed by the theoretical system with which Seurat is forever associated. Seurat might have changed too, but he died in 1891 at the sadly early age of 32, after a career of only nine years.

Luck--and a yachtsman's robust health--granted Signac some 40 years more than Seurat got. But he never painted better than he did in the late 1880s and early 1890s. His best pictures of the Cote d'Azur--of Cassis, of St.-Tropez--possess a wonderful rigor, density and subtlety of color. The danger inherent in pointillism was that all those microdots, if their tonal relations were not perfectly controlled, could look like a bad case of measles. In his middle years Signac almost always avoided this. The seascapes become what they are meant to be: a vibration of light.

Cap Canaille, Cassis, Opus 200, 1889, is a superb example. The day is fading. The tartans, or lateen-rigged fishing boats, triangular scraps of white sail on the blue, are flocking back to port. The pallid horizon is delicately tinted with pink, lavender, yellow. The foreground, with its purple house and lavender rocks, is already darkening. But the sunset has lit up the prismatic shape of the headland to a blazing orange-yellow, a thrilling and almost transcendent intensity. It is the kind of painting that can absorb any amount of looking, and after 10 minutes with it you can appreciate how Signac grasped the sensuous abundance of the world.