Paul Signac
French Painter 1863-1935
 Paul
Signac was a French neo-impressionist painter who, working with
Georges Seurat, helped develop the pointillist style. Signac
experimented with various media. As well as oil paintings and
watercolors he made etchings, lithographs, and many pen-and-ink
sketches composed of small, laborious dots. The neo-impressionists
influenced the next generation inspiring
Henri Matisse and
André Derain in particular, thus playing a decisive role in the
evolution of Fauvism. Paul Signac was born in Paris on November 11,
1863 into a rather wealthy family and originally planned to study
architecture. The neighborhood in which Paul Signac grew up lent itself
well to nurturing a vocation in the arts, and as an only child he
enjoyed the support of his liberal parents. As an adolescent, Signac
was attracted by Impressionist paintings in gallery windows and went
to the exhibitions held by the painters, then considered
revolutionaries. Paul Signac was largely a self-taught artist. He
spent a great deal of time at the Impressionist Exhibition of 1879
where he studied the works of the Impressionists, and through
careful observation he began to emulate their style. In 1880, at the
age of sixteen, he was thrown out of the fifth Impressionist
exhibition by
Gauguin for making a sketch after a picture by Edward
Degas and was
told disdainfully that "One does not copy here, Sir."
In 1884 Signac met
Claude
Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic
working methods of Seurat, and his theory of colors and became
Seurat's faithful supporter. Under his influence he abandoned the
short brushstrokes of impressionism to experiment with
scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure color, intended to
combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the
defining feature of pointillism. |
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 The
banks of the Seine were to inspire many paintings, drawings, and
watercolors by the young painter, but his earliest joy there was
boating. His first boat was a canoe that he christened Manet Zola
Wagner, a name expressing his youthful enthusiasm for modernity and
artistic independence. Signac was tireless in his attempts to
convert others to Seurat's methods. In 1885 Signac met
Camille
Pissarro, whom he introduced to Seurat. Finding in Seurat's
technique the answer to his craving to a rational style, Pissarro
adopted it with enthusiasm. Against the wishes of the
Impressionists, he invited the Pointillist to participate in their
eighth and last group show in 1886. On this occasion Signac
exhibited mostly scenes of the Breton port of Saint-Briac and of the
Paris suburbs. In December 1885 Signac undertook his first major
interior scene, The Milliners. In it he depicted a world
which he had come to know through Berthe Robles, who was herself a
milliner and who posed for the figure on the left, bending to pick
up her scissors. The painting, exhibited in May 1886 with the title
Appreteuse et garnisseuse Modes (rue du Caire) (Finisher and
trimmer. Millinery [rue du Carte]), shows a milliner's workshop in
the Sentier quartier, which is still the garment district of Paris.
The precise descriptions "finisher" and "trimmer" show that Signac
proceeded in the same way as his friends the Naturalist writers -
Huysmans, for example, described a dressmaker's shop in Les Soeurs
Vatard - informing himself about the trade and its terminology. |
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Many of Signac's paintings are of the French coast. He left the
capital each summer, to stay in the south of France in the village
of Collioure or at St. Tropez, where he bought a house and invited
his friends. In March, 1889, he visited
Vincent van
Gogh at Arles. The next year he made a short trip to Italy,
seeing Genoa, Florence, and Naples. Signac loved sailing and began
to travel in 1892, sailing a small boat to almost all the ports of
France, to Holland, and around the Mediterranean as far as
Constantinople, basing his boat at St.Tropez, which he "discovered."
From his various ports of call, Signac brought back vibrant,
colorful watercolors, sketched rapidly from nature. From these
sketches, he painted large studio canvases that are carefully worked
out in small, mosaic-like squares of color, quite different from the
tiny, variegated dots previously used by Seurat. Paul Signot's
friends included the journalist Felix Fénéon and the scientist and
mathematician Charles Henry, both of whom were interested in
Neo-Impressionism and published their views on color theory. In late
January 1888 Signac traveled to Brussels to exhibit at the Salon des
XX. He also wrote a review of the exhibition using the pen name Neo
that was published in Le Cri du People. By this time the
exhibitions of the Société des Artistes Indépendants were
well-established annual events thanks to Signac's efforts as an
organizer. Although Seurat was given first place among the
Neo-Impressionists, critics had also begun to appreciate
Signac's contribution to the movement. In 1890 Fénéon devoted an
issue of "Les Hommes d'Aujourd'hui" to the work of Signac. |
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 In
1890 Paul Signac painted a picture entitled "Against the
Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angels, Tones and
Colors, and a Portrait of Felix Fénéon" (shown here). The
abstract patterning of the background had some part in the
development of Symbolism. On March 29, 1891, Seurat died
suddenly in Paris. The death of his friend thrust Signac into a
primary position within the Neo-Impressionist movement.
Pissarro, however, predicted the end of pointillism without
Seurat. Indeed, Signac abandoned the technique in the early 20th
century. In the 1890s he became more involved with writing,
working on a journal he had begun in 1894. In 1896 the anarchist
journal Les Temps nouveaux published a black-and-white
lithograph by Signac titled "The Wreckers." Politically, Signac
was, and had been for some time, squarely in the anarchist camp
In January 1935 Signac participated in the 46th exhibition of
the Société des Artistes Indépendants; it was his final one.
That March he was invited to tour the USSR but declined for
health reasons. In May 1935 the Société named Signac its
honorary president. The following month he took to his bed with
what turned out to be his final illness. Signac lingered for
most of the summer but died in Paris on August 15, 1935. In 1947
fragments of his journal, edited by George Besson, were
published in Arts de France. |