Georges Seurat, Le Chahut, 1889–1890, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.
The title of the National Gallery's new exhibition, with its overt reference to the Kröller-Müller collection gives a misleading sense that the curators have shipped in an almost ready-made show. The Kröller-Müller has the best Neo-Impressionist collection in the world, as well as an extensive selection of van Goghs which barely get a look in here, but the curators have gone out of their way to source beyond Otterlo, to plug gaps and tell new stories, notably that of Anna Boch. The result is a pretty comprehensive survey of core Neo-Impressionism, although the exhibition's stated aim, to underline the radical politics of the movement, is perhaps less successfully achieved.
The work of Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Paul Signac (1863–1935) is often labeled as Pointillism, a dismissive term coined by critics who thought they had reduced painting to a series of dots. The artists themselves preferred the term Divisionism or Neo-Impressionism to describe their new, more scientific approach to Impressionist subjects, which centred on the colour theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul. The Impressionists had exploited his ideas of complementary colours, but the Neo-Impressionists wanted to do so more rigorously, using small, regular dots and making the viewer’s eye do the work of mixing and contrasting the pure colours.
The opening room of the Radical Harmony sets this context and gently acclimatises visitors to Neo-Impressionism with a series of landscapes and seascapes. There are obvious links back to Impressionist subjects and locations but the paintings themselves deliberately avoid the immediacy and naturalism of the earlier works. This is partly an inevitable result of the Pointillist technique which creates a structure and rigidity, and close-up gives an element of abstraction to the picture surface. Flags do not flutter in the breeze; waves seem frozen; time stands still. However, the artists also make compositional choices. Seurat deliberately emphasized that these are constructed images with his inclusion of painted borders. Signac numbered his works like musical compositions. Both focused on flattened geometry, strong lines, and angles which accentuate the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and sometimes create almost surrealist oddness. Signac's Portrieux, the Lighthouse, Opus 183, reimagines the central structure as a baton wielding bandmaster on a harbour stage.
Alongside this, the exhibition introduces Helene Kröller-Müller, the German-born collector whose works form the basis of Radical Harmony. The daughter of a wealthy industrialist, who married a Dutch entrepreneur, Kröller-Müller became one of the richest women in the Netherlands and used her huge spending power to become a pioneering female collector. She increasingly bought directly from the artists she admired, and eventually amassed over 12,000 items including furniture and ceramics, as well as paintings. All of this sits slightly uneasily alongside the curators’ central argument that these painters were political as well as artistic radicals. There seems more than a little irony in the fact that Maximilien Luce's The Foundry hung for many years in the offices of the Kröller-Müller's iron ore business.
Yes, many of these artists had anarchist friends and sympathies, but plenty of people did in the last years of the nineteenth century. It is a lot harder to see any such ideas carried through to their art, whether in Signac's sketch for In the Time of Harmony which could just as easily show a family picnic as a bucolic pre-industrial idyll, or in restrictive interiors, which seem more like a bridge between Caillebotte's uptight bourgeoisie and the Nabis rather than a call to arms. Jan Toorop‘s (1858–1928) Morning (After the Strike) and Evening (Before the Strike) are an exception, forming melodramatic contrast where the beauty of the colours seems strangely at odds with the subject matter. In fact, these so-called radicals were often surprisingly reluctant to actually show urban workers: their cityscapes and port scenes are more often almost devoid of figures. Many seemed to retreat to the countryside. The sole example of Van Gogh’s work, The Sower, is a timeless, almost Biblical subject with a deeply symbolic sun radiating across the sky. Anna Boch‘s (1848–1936) During the Elevation is a conservative religious scene of an overflowing church and traditionally dressed congregation.
Anna Boch, During the Elevation, 1892, Stadsmuseum Oostende, Ostend, Belgium.
The next sections are dominated by a series of very middle-class portraits and scenes of domesticity: well-dressed figures in well-furnished rooms. Théo van Rysselberghe‘s (1862–1926) In July, Before Noon is Impressionism in all but name, with its snapshot-like composition of leisured ladies, sunlight dappled like Renoiresque powder puffs on their dresses. In contrast, Toorop, who emerges as the real start of the show, gives his Portrait of Marie Jeannette de Lange a combination of delicate naturalism in his representation of the sitter and a background so packed with objects and pattern that it becomes a Symbolist representation of her character. His use of a restricted tonal range and heavily impastoed dots creates an almost sequin-like effect as the paint catches the light.
Strutting through these and given top billing against a dramatic, deep purple wall, although it hardly needs such theatrics, is Seurat's La Chahut, not seen in the UK since the 1950s. Seurat’s monumental can-can dancers high-kicking with fixed smiles and watched by leering figures, as the orchestra plays, rejig the compositional tricks of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Now we are not part of the mayhem but, like the performers themselves, alienated and detached, frozen in an unreality of sleazy sepia. Life is a cabaret, but it doesn’t look much fun.
Increasingly Chevreul's complementary colour contrasts are rejected in favour of tonal uniformity. Rysselberghe’s Coastal Scene is a study in blue, and van de Velde’s Twilight is dominated by violet hues. The curators choose to end the exhibition with a series of landscapes which emphasize this sense of peaceful harmony, although works like Johan Thorn Prikker’s (1886–1932) Basse Hermalle, Sun at Noon hint at the possibility of something more radical. His sparse pastel dashes, which hark back to van Gogh’s brushwork, create a simplified, flattened abstraction in which the landscape seems almost incidental. This is the point at this the exhibition could look forward, joining the dots between these artists and Henri Matisse (who gets only a mention), Piet Mondrian or other groups like the Italian Futurists who used pointillism. That it doesn't feels like a missed opportunity.
Ultimately, then, there is less “radical” and more “harmony,” but that is no bad thing. This is a Zen-like exhibition which encourages you to take your time, breathe deeply, and appreciate the deceptive complexity and inherent beauty of the works. Neo Impressionism can often be represented as scientifically cold and dull, here is it inventive, lyrical and genuinely enthralling.
This is a version of the review published in DailyArt Magazine
