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Signac never achieved a masterpiece of the order of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, but how many painters have? In the late 1880s and early 1890s, though, he brought off a sequence of ravishingly beautiful landscapes that stand with the best of late 19th century art, along with some remarkable figure paintings.
The latter include the somber and acerbic hymn of hate to the boredom French lefty intellectuals always attribute to respectable middle-class life, Sunday, 1888-1890. (Does the worthy proletariat ever suffer from ennui? Apparently not.) Nothing is happening. A young husband in a stiff jacket and striped pants is poking the fireplace in a desultory way. His wife stares out the window, her back to us. The folds and pleats of her costume, intensely formal, suggest a caryatid--but a caryatid with nothing at all to support and nothing whatever to do. An equally bored-looking cat, if cats can look bored, hesitates between the two of them. The very air is congested with the excessive patterns of a middle-class interior, with its ugly mock-Henri II furniture. It manages to be monumentally static, miserable and funny, all at once.
At the opposite extreme from this image is Signac's wonderful and bizarre Portrait of Felix Feneon, Opus 217, 1890-91--the fox-jawed face with its little tuft of beard in profile, the hand holding a cyclamen, against a madly spiraling background of fruit-jelly abstract forms. The dandified, loony energy of Feneon's argot-filled writing seems impacted into that background, even though its source is a Japanese kimono pattern. My, you think, those guys must have had some laughs together. Which they did.
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.