Image to word, Paris to New York: “From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism,” by Guillaume Apollinaire

From the exhibition Les temps nouveaux, de Seurat à Matisse, opening October 16 at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris: Theo van Rysselberghe (1862-1926), “Reading by Emile Verhaeren,” 1903. Oil on canvas, 181 x 241 cm. Gand, Musée des Beaux-arts de Gand. © www.lukasweb.be – Art in Flanders, photo Hugo Maertens. “After a serious physical and moral crisis,” notes “Le petit Robert” encyclopedia, Emile Verhaeren “discovered the poetic beauty of the modern world and the grandeur of human effort,” confident, under the influence of Hugo, Nietzsche, and Whitman, in mankind’s promising future, as his poetry fed on the new industrial landscapes and the emergence of the machine age. “Rallying to the cause of a fraternal socialism,” the encyclopedia continues, Verhaeren next published a series “powerfully lyrical” collections, including: “Hallucinated countrysides (1893),” “Tentacular Cities (1895),” and “The Tumultuous Forces (1902).” Its veneer seemingly almost monochromatic when viewed at reduced resolution as here, this painting is in reality a tour de force of Neo-Impressionism at its zenith. At first we resisted using it; compared to Seurat’s 1884 “Sunday afternoon on the Grande-Jatte Isle,” it seems closer to Delacroix than Seurat, the Neo-Impressionist device behind its construction not immediately evident. But studied at high-resolution, the make-up of the tableau is positively molecular. Only here, the dots’ intermittent interruption by strategically placed swaths of light or dark blue makes the divisionism almost invisible. In the Seurat you see the science behind the miracle; in the Rysselberghe the minutious effort is less apparent. Painted nearly 20 years later, the Rysselberghe is the natural evolution of the Seurat in its sophisticated employment of the tools of divisionism. Seurat broke the atom down into its particles; Rysselberghe put it back together again to be transformed into seamless light. And speaking of light, even the narrative — no Sunday finest here for Verhaeren’s audience, just sober business suits — is not so staid after sustained study: While his audience is costumed in somber blue, the reader/writer sports a smoldering vermillion — as if set on fire by the text. (This was just a year after Zola’s suspicious death by gas asphyxiation.) And every single one of the auditors maintains a skeptical disposition towards the writer. Add to this the drooping Greek statuettes — representing the Hellenic ideal the attainment of which, as Zola had pointed out 40 years earlier in heralding the Imressionist era, was the painter’s primary preoccupation before Delacroix and his successors arrived and relegated it to the academy (or, more recently, the first floor of the Met and the basement of the Louvre) — and the tableau on the wall of factory chimneys darkening the landscape which confronts Verhaeren’s embrace of industrialization with Maximilien Luce (another free-thinking painter to whom Verhaeren was close) or Camille Pissarro’s more sober view, and another synthesis, the confrontation of words with image — is complete. — PB-I

by Guillaume Apollinaire
Translated by Paul Ben-Itzak

Text from the August 7, 1911 issue of L’intransigent, as reproduced in “Chroniques d’art, 1902-1918,” Published by and copyright Gallimard, 1960, with texts assembled and annotated by L.C. Breunig. Art from — and courtesy — Artcurial’s September 24 auction of Ancient and 19th century art in Paris (for the Delacroix), the exhibition Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), Les temps nouveaux, de Seurat à Matisse, opening October 16 at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it runs through January 27 before migrating to the Museum of Modern Art (for the Rysselberghe, Seurat, Cross, and Signac) and the Dance Insider & Arts Voyager’s archived coverage of the 2012 exhibition “Maximilien Luce, de l’esquisse (draft) au chef-d’oeuvre,” at the Musée de l’Hotel-Dieu in Mantes la Jolie (for the Luce).

“The academic painter Delacroix.”

— Art History course description, Bard College, 2019

An updated edition of Paul Signac’s rare booklet, previously issued in a very limited edition by La Revue Blanche, has just been published.

“From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism” is the title of this brief work which Paul Signac has dedicated to the memory of his companion, the great painter Georges Seurat.

Seurat has still not received the recognition he deserves. Beyond the merits of the innovations which they brought to art thanks to the application, which he was the first to practice, of Neo-Impressionist theories, his works have, in their drawing, their composition, the very discretion of their luminosities a style which sets them apart and maybe even above the work of the majority of painters, his contemporaries.

Georges Seurat (1859-1891), “A Sunday afternoon on the Grande-Jatte Isle,” 1884. Study. New York, NY, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image of the MMA.

No painter makes me think of Moliere as does Seurat, the Moliere of “The Bourgeoisie Gentleman,” a ballet full of grace, of lyricism and of good sense.

The Neo-Impressionist painters, of whom Paul Signac is the most gifted and the most famous, are those who, to cite our author, “founded, and, since 1886, have developed the technique referred to as ‘divisionism,’ which utilizes as a means of expression the optical mix of tones and tints.” This technique can be traced to the art of the Byzantine mosaicists, and I even recall a day on which Signac, in a letter to Charles Morice, evoked the Libreria de Siene.

But we don’t need to look back that far.

In his book, Signac abundantly demonstrates how this luminous technique, which brought a sense of order to the Impressionist innovations, was foretold, even applied, by Delacroix, to whom it had been revealed by an examination of the paintings of Constable.

From September 24’s  Artcurial auction of ancient and 19th century masters in Paris: Eugène Delacroix, “Two studies of draped figures.” Image courtesy and © Artcurial.

Signac scrutinizes even more closely the impact of the Impressionists and of their precursor Jongkind.

Then he gets to Seurat who, in 1886, exposed the first divisionist painting, “A Sunday afternoon on the Grande-Jatte Isle.”

Pointilism was thus born and went on to produce magnificent works which nobody dared ridicule. Today painting seems to be following a path directly opposed to that which the Neo-Impressionists took. Delacroix’s two celebrated slogans, “Grey is the enemy of every painting!” and “Banish all Earthen colors” would mystify the young painters who want to return to the basics of forms and drawing, just as before them there was a return to the essentials of composition, light, and color intensity.

Au contraire, the new painters paint in hard to reproduce grey tones and search out the elegance of Earthen colors.

Henri-Edmond Cross, “The Golden Isles,” between 1891 and 1892. Oil on canvas, 59.5 x 54 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. © Patrice Schmidt/musée d’Orsay, distribution RMN.

The art of Neo-Impressionism drew but a small number of adepts. It requires, in effect, a lot of application and science, not to mention talent.

The meticulousness that it demands discourages artists who are inconstant or in a rush.

Maximilien Luce, “The dredging machine in Rotterdam.” Oil on canvas. Courtesy Ville de Mantes la Jolie, Musée de l’Hotel-Dieu.

It has furnished modern art with a number of very beautiful and very luminous works, those of Seurat, of Henri-Edmond Cross, of Luce, of Van Rysselberghe, etc., which are rightly admired today and which the future will remember.

Paul Signac’s little booklet marks an important date in the history of contemporary art.

Paul Signac (1863-1935) , “The Time of Harmony: The Golden Age is not in the past, it’s in the future (Retort),” 1896. Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 81 cm.  Kasser Mochary Foundation, Montclair, NJ.  Kasser Art Foundation, image © Nikolai Dobrowolskij.