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Paul Signac
Paul Signac (November 11, 1863 - August 15, 1935) was a
French
neo-impressionist
oil painting artist who, working with
Geoges Seurat,
helped develop the
pointillist style.
Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on November 11, 1863
into a family of a well-to-do master harness-maker.He started his
career in architecture, but abandoned this at the age of 18 to
pursue a career as a oil painting artist. He sailed around the
coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered. He also
painted scenes of cities in France in his later years.
In 1884 he 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.
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.
Signac himself 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; Signac inspired
Henri Matisse and
André Derain in particular, thus playing a decisive role in the
evolution of Fauvism.
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