“We know very well, do we not, that trees are not purple, that a brunette’s hair is not blue, that frock coats are made of black cloth — that faces are not covered with multicolored confetti. Therefore, if we want to imitate all of this, there is no point in using our beautiful colors for that purpose. We want something else; that is why we divide and contrast.”
PAUL SIGNAC
Neo-Impressionist painter, watercolorist and art theorist.
Born into a family of Parisian marchants, Paul Signac showed an interest in painting from a very early age. Self-taught, he abandoned his studies after discovering the work of Claude Monet and quickly became involved in the avant-garde artistic circles. In 1884, he took part in the founding of the Société des Artistes Indépendants (Society of Independent Artists), created to provide artists with an exhibition space free from juries or prizes. The same year, his meeting with Georges Seurat marked a decisive turning point. Together they developed the principles of Neo-Impressionism, a movement based on the division of colors and their optical recomposition through the viewer’s perception, which profoundly renewed landscape painting at the end of the 19th century.
Following Seurat’s death in 1891, Signac continued to develop Neo-Impressionism and became its leading theorist. In 1899 he published D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism), in which he outlined the principles of Divisionism and traced the evolution of modern painting. Elected president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1908, he defended the artists of his time and helped promote new generations of painters. Alongside his own work, he built a significant collection of pieces by his contemporaries, including Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Henri-Edmond Cross, Maximilien Luce, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. This collection reflects both his ties to the leading figures of modern painting and his engagement with the artistic currents of his time.
Throughout his career, Signac favored landscapes, ports and seascapes. Settled in Saint-Tropez from 1892, he found the Mediterranean coast to be an ideal setting for observing the effects of light. Building on the principles he developed with Seurat, he used the juxtaposition of colored brushstrokes and the optical blending of color. Over the years his brushstroke grew broader and freer, while his color harmonies gained in intensity. Both his oils and his watercolors are marked by a close attention to light, to the construction of space, and to the balance of colors.
From the 1900s onward, Signac gave increasing attention to watercolor, which he considered a medium in its own right. Created during his many travels along the French and European coasts, often in the company of Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange, a fellow Neo-Impressionist painter with whom he had a daughter, Ginette, born in 1913, his watercolors allowed him to quickly seize the landscape, the variations of light, and the atmosphere of the places he discovered. Freer in execution than his oil paintings, these works nonetheless hold to the same rigorous sense of composition. In the final years of his life, he undertook an ambitious series devoted to the Ports of France, celebrating the diversity of the country’s harbor landscapes.
A major figure of modern painting, Paul Signac made a lasting contribution to the development and international standing of Neo-Impressionism. Through his oeuvre, his writings and his commitment to fellow artists, he exerted a decisive influence on the generations that followed, particularly the Fauves, who found in his liberation of color an essential starting point for their own experiments. His paintings and watercolors remain today among the most accomplished expressions of light and color at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
His works were exhibited at the leading avant-garde venues from the 1880s onward. His solo exhibitions include those at Galerie Bing (1892), Galerie Druet (1904), Galerie Bernheim-Jeune (1907), and several exhibitions devoted to his watercolors in the 1920s and 1930s. He also took part in numerous group exhibitions : the Salon des Artistes Indépendants (from 1884), Les XX in Brussels, La Libre Esthétique, the Salon des Cent, the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the Venice Biennale, as well as many international events in France, Belgium, Germany and the United States. Since his death in 1935, his work has regularly been the subject of retrospectives at leading museums in France and abroad, confirming his central role in the history of modern painting.
