Radical Harmony: a ‘luminous’ look at Neo-Impressionism

Seurat's Le Chahut (1889-90): a genuine masterpiece

(Image credit: Alamy)

It’s not a very inviting title, “Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists”, said Nancy Durrant in the Times. “Do many people know what a neo-impressionist is – or, more to the point, who?” But actually, this is a lovely show, which fans of Georges Seurat will not want to miss. He and Paul Signac were leading lights of neo-impressionism, commonly known as “pointillism”, a movement rooted in the idea that certain colour combinations could suggest particular moods. They “used dots of pure colour, contrasted with opposing hues on the colour wheel – yellow with violet, orange with blue – to maximise luminosity, while prioritising the harmony and balance of a composition”. In short, they invented pixellation well avant la lettre. This exhibition is largely drawn from the holdings of the Dutch collector Helene Kröller-Müller. It contains some great pictures, not least a proto-futurist “large-scale image of an iron foundry” by Maximilien Luce, and Théo van Rysselberghe’s portrait of the painter Anna Boch. Personally, I find the painstaking precision of these artists “less thrilling” than the looser work of their impressionist predecessors, but it’s often beautiful nonetheless.

Seurat (1859-1891) “had kaleidoscope eyes”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “He saw in limitless colours that swarm and bubble on his canvases in galaxies of tiny dots.” Often choosing quite “barren subjects” – a rock, an empty harbour – he “found endless wonder in the most banal reality”, and used his observational powers to reinvent painting. He died aged just 31, but works here such as 1888’s sublime “Port-en-Bessin”, a Sunday “inspired a generation” of followers. Sadly, they weren’t nearly as talented as him, and not nearly as revolutionary as the exhibition makes them out to be. His disciple Signac, for instance, may have been politically radical, but as an artist he was anything but. “Most of the portraits here are highly conventional under a thin pointillist veneer.”

Detractors of the neo-impressionists called them “bubonistes” – plague spreaders, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Critics thought that they were “responsible for the death of painting”, which “makes them sound more exciting and heavy-metal than they were”. The pointillists were, in fact, “clean and fastidious”, and sometimes rather “detached from messy human passions”. But there are luminous moments in this show, and “flashes of poetry”, too. These are best observed in the one genuine masterpiece here, Seurat’s “Le Chahut” of 1889-90. The work depicts the gas-lit interior of a Montmartre cabaret, with a quartet of can-can dancers on stage. In the corner lurks a “creepy” onlooker, complete with “porcine snout and phallic cane”, gazing upwards. “Le Chahut” is the principal reason for visiting this otherwise “demanding” and slightly disappointing exhibition.