Paul Signac
Paul Signac (November 11, 1863 - August 15, 1935) was a French neo-impressionist painter who, working with Georges-Pierre Seurat, helped develop the pointillist style.[1] This movement inspired many other artists to develop the new style, proving that art can be unlimited in its range when stoked by human curiousity and imagination.
Signac commentated on his contemporary Geroges Seurat's works of pointillism as "the most beautiful painter's drawings in existence,"[2] attesting to the beauty and pride Neo-Impressionists found in their newly emerging style of art.
Biography
Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on November 11, 1863 into the family of a well-to-do master harness-maker.[3]
At age 16, Paul Signac was thrown out of the fifth Impressionist exhibit by leading Post-Impresssionist Paul Gaugin for sketching a painting by Edgar Degas.[4]
He started his career in architecture, but abandoned it at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter. Sailing around the coasts of Europe, Signac painted the landscapes he encountered, and in later years painted scenes of cities in France.
In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. At that time many of Signac's early works, including still-lifes and landscapes, were influenced by the impressionism of artists such as Monet.[5] He was then struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and by his theory of colors and became Seurat's faithful supporter. At the time, Seurat was working with an early stage of pointillism called Divisionism, which employed strokes not quite dot like.[6] Under Seurat's influence Signac abandoned the short brushstrokes of impressionism in order 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 1887, he met Vincent van Gogh in Paris. Not only did they become friends, but they often painted together and were exhibiting art work along with Georges Seurat by the end of 1887.[7]
The next year he made a short trip to [Italy]], visitig 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 would then paint large studio canvases that were 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.[8]
As president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants from 1908 until his death, Signac encouraged younger artists (he was the first to buy a painting by Matisse) by exhibiting the controversial works of the Fauves and the Cubists.
Private Life
On November 7, 1892 Signac married Berthe Roblès at the town hall of the 18th district in Paris; witnesses at the wedding were Alexandre Lemonier, Maximilien Luce, Camille Pissarro and Georges Lecomte.
In November 1897, the Signacs moved to a new apartment in the Castel Béranger, built by Hector Guimard, and a little later, in December of the same year, acquired a house in Saint-Tropez called La Hune. There the painter had a vast studio constructed, which he inaugurated on August 16, 1898.
In September 1913, Signac rented a house at Antibes, where he settled with Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange, who gave birth to their daughter Ginette on October 2, 1913. In the meantime Signac had left La Hune as well as the Castel Beranger apartment to Berthe: they remained friends for the rest of his life.
On April 6, 1927, Signac adopted Ginette, his previously illegitimate daughter.
Signac left several important works on the theory of art, among them From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, published in 1899; a monograph devoted to Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891), published in 1927; several introductions to the catalogues of art exhibitions; and many other still unpublished writings.
Politically he was an anarchist, as were many of his friends, including Félix Fénéon and Camille Pissarro.
At the age of seventy-two, Paul Signac died on August 15, 1935 in Paris from septicemia. His body was cremated and, three days later, in August, buried at the Père-Lachaise cemetery.
Legacy
In 2007, Paul Signac's "Cassis. Cap Canaille," from 1889 was sold in auction at Christie's for $14 million, setting a record for the artist.[9] Others of his works have sold in the several millions as while at similar auctions.
Gallery
Some of his well known paintings are: The Pine, Saint Tropez and Port St. Tropez.
Railway junction near Bois-Colombes (1885-18886)
Sunday (1888-1890)
Women at the Well (1892)
Two Milliners in the Rue du Caire (Paris) (c. 1885-1886)
The Town Beach, Collioure (1887)
Van Gogh's house, Arles (1933)
The Railway Junction near Bois-Colombes (1886)
Port of La Rochelle (1921)
Notes
- ↑ Columbia University Press
- ↑ Francine Prose. "Not the Seurat We Think We Know. " Wall Street Journal [New York, N.Y.] 29 Nov. 2007, Eastern edition: D.8. National Newspapers (5). ProQuest. Sno-Isle Libraries, Marysville, WA. 30 Nov. 2007 <http://www.proquest.com.access-proxy.sno-isle.org/>
- ↑ Oxford University Press, www.answers.com
- ↑ Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement, http://galenet.galegroup.com.access-proxy.sno-isle.org/servlet/BioRC
- ↑ [answers.com] Oxford University Press
- ↑ www.answers.com, Oxford University Press
- ↑ http://Biography Resource Center, galenet.galegroup.com
- ↑ Britannica Concise Encylopedia, www.answers.com
- ↑ <"QUICK TAKES; Matisse record eclipsed at auction. " Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles, Calif.] 8 Nov. 2007,E.2. Los Angeles Times. ProQuest. Sno-Isle Libraries, Marysville, WA. 30 Nov. 2007 <http://www.proquest.com.access-proxy.sno-isle.org/>
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Signac 1863-1935, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris 2001 ISBN 2-7118-4127-8
- The New Encyclopædia Britannica, 1988, Volume 10, Micropædia, pg. 796
External links
- Official website
- "People's history": Paul Signac, a biography of the artist, with information about his anarchist politics
- Paul Signac biography Renoir Fine Art Inc.
- Paul Signac biography Olga's Gallery
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