CategoriesStyles and Movements
Neo-Impressionism
French painting of the late 1880s and 1890s built from small, separate touches of unmixed colour, applied according to the science of optics.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Neo-Impressionism are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Neo-Impressionist painters treated colour as something to calculate. Reading the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul on simultaneous contrast and the physicist Ogden Rood's Modern Chromatics (1879), Georges Seurat and Paul Signac set strokes of pure pigment side by side so that neighbouring hues would heighten each other in the eye rather than on the palette. Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86) caused a stir at the final Impressionist show in 1886, and the critic Félix Fénéon named the tendency that year.
Look for a shimmering, granular surface, figures simplified almost to silhouettes and deliberate compositions. Camille Pissarro used the method for a few years; Maximilien Luce, Henri-Edmond Cross and the Belgian Théo van Rysselberghe kept it going after Seurat died in 1891. Signac set out its principles in From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism (1899), and its intense colour fed into Henri Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté (1904) and Fauvism.
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