Word: signac
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...hrle collection is in keeping with its quiet residential neighborhood in Zurich. But it doesn't begin to betray the priceless treasure inside: one of the world's most impressive private collections of European art, with works by Delacroix, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Gauguin, Canaletto, Braque, Signac, Picasso and other masters from the 16th to the 20th centuries...
...long turned to pixels as a medium, from the stunning Roman, Byzantine and early Christian mosaics (think of “Alexander at Issus,” or Ravanna’s splendid ceilings), to the Impressionistic dabs of paint employed by Monet and the Pointillism of Seurat and Signac. Chuck Close became famous for his large-scale portraits, using a grid of abstract pixels to create the larger picture.Smuts’s monochromatic panels recall all this, and also consciously take a jab at the monochromatic paintings of the early minimalists. For Smuts, each tessera is important...
...that terrible emerald-green sea ... what an inspired conception!" He had read about Impressionism, too, but imagined it to be simply the use of lighter tones. In Paris he discovered such older painters as Monet and Pissarro, and met the young avant-garde of the day: Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Signac, Gauguin, Bernard. His old palette went out the window ("Last year I painted almost nothing but flowers," he wrote in 1887, "so I could get used to colors other than gray.") He experimented with Impressionist brushstrokes and pointillist "stippling" - one superb gallery here pairs off Monet's Boats...
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...
...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...