Word: signac
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...signify too much in judging his paintings, but Paul Signac (1863-1935) had what comparatively few artists--or people of any kind, for that matter--ever get: an enviably happy life, whose pleasures never reduced him to complacency. He was well off--and generous in buying his friends' pictures. He was talented. He loved the sea and was able to exercise that love by constantly cruising the Mediterranean coast of France in an 11-m cutter christened, in homage to Edouard Manet's infamous nude, the Olympia. (His first and much smaller boat he named, to show his artistic affiliations...
...Signac was also an energetic and talented writer, an avid reader and bibliophile, and an ardent backer of the avant-garde in the days when that word actually meant something. "The golden age has not passed," ran the subtitle he appended to an enormous didactic canvas, In the Time of Harmony, 1893-95. "It lies in the future." The picture set out to depict the joys of anarchist cooperation: free love, picnics, games of boule on the beach, farm labor made easy by a steam-powered reaper in the distance. What in fact lay in the future was the trenches...
...filled with idealistic dreams of fraternal love and spontaneous world order. None of the painters in his circle were untouched by anarchist ideas, particularly those of Pyotr Kropotkin. Some, notably Maximilian Luce, were vigorous activists, marked down by the police. Signac was never that militant, but his best friend among critics, Felix Feneon, was always suspected (though this was never proved) of having helped carry out a deadly bomb attack on a fashionable Paris restaurant, Foyot's. Signac never hurt anyone, though he was right in the thick of the closest relationship between political and aesthetic radicalism that the 19th...
...master of the dot in French painting? Georges Seurat, most would answer. But there was at least one other: Seurat's friend and luminous fellow painter, Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac (1863-1935). Signac, an avid yachtsman, helped create the French Riviera as a subject for painting--and Saint-Tropez, where he settled from 1892 on, as a mecca for tourism. His pursuit of pure color sensation, the yellow of beaches and the purple of shade under the umbrella-pines, made his canvases radical in their time. Yet to a modern eye, his paradisiacal view of the world--a world...