When all the dots add up

What a loss it would have been if the gruff Paul Gauguin had frightened away young Paul Signac forever. A Degas picture at the 1879 Salon des Impressionistes inspired the 16 year-old to put pencil to paper. "We don't copy here, Mon- sieur," Gauguin declared, throwing Signac out of the exhibition.

Signac was the adored only child of wealthy leather goods merchants - the Hermes of their day - who indulged his artistic leanings. The year after Signac's ill-treatment by Gauguin, the aspiring painter's father died. He and his mother moved to the Paris suburb of Asnieres, next to the Seine, where Signac's life-long passion for water and sailing began. Asnieres and Montmartre would provide his first subjects - suburban landscapes, river banks, boulevards in snow. Also in 1880, Signac visited a Monet exhibition. He had hesitated between writing and painting, but Monet convinced him that he had to become an Impressionist.

With no formal training, Signac began painting in earnest at the age of 18, in the style of Manet, Degas, Monet and Caillebotte. At 21 he exhibited at the first Salon des artistes independants, where he met Georges Seurat, his elder by four years. The young men saw one another daily, and were excited by new "scientific" theories of painting.

Zola and the naturalists believed that scientific principles could be applied to fiction. The neoimpressionistes - as they would be dubbed by the critic Felix Feneon in 1886 - believed the same was true of art. "Confidence in science was a hallmark of the late 19th century," explains Marina Ferretti, who, with Anne Distel is the curator of the major Signac retrospective at the Grand Palais. "The Post-Impressionists were men of their time. They were modern. They were absolutely convinced that science equalled progress."

Seurat was the originator of the divisionist theory, which said that colour must be mixed by the eye of the viewer, not on the canvas. In 1885, Seurat repainted "Un dimanche a la Grande Jatte", entirely with dots. Signac would follow Seurat's example the following winter, repainting his own The Milliners in dots.

The critics were merciless. "There's nothing to see but confetti," Georges-Albert Aurier wrote in 1890. Should the new style be called "confettism"? he mocked. Or since there were dots, why not "pointillism"? Although the term "pointillist" stuck, the artists preferred the more scientific-sounding "divisionism". In Holland, a similar school called itself "luminism".

Signac rejected the term "pointillist". "In his opinion it reduced a complex method to its most simple element," Marina Ferretti says. "The most important thing to him was the division of colours - that colours not be mixed on the canvas. The little dots were a means to maintain the purity of colour. At Saint-Tropez in 1895 he enlarged his brush strokes to a rectangular shape. For him, the dots were a secondary, superficial aspect of it."

In 1891, Seurat caught a fatal chest infection while organising the Salon des Independants in the Grand Palais - ironically the venue for the Signac exhibition. His grief-stricken friend Signac held exhibitions of Seurat's work in Paris and Brussels. By 1897, the critic Yvanhoe Rambosson wrote that "fortunately" there were only two pointillist painters left, Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, and that the former was "a good artist spoiled by a theory".

Nonetheless, "Signac was faithful until the very end," Marina Ferretti says. "He always painted as a divisionist, until his last breath." When applied to human figures - as in The Din- ing Room, A Sunday, or Woman Reading - the technique gives an impression of geometric stiffness. But from the late 1880s, in Brittany and on the Cote d'Azur, Signac painted mostly water and sky, with breathtaking luminosity.

One day in 1892, Signac anchored his yacht in a little harbour called Saint-Tropez. He was the first to "discover" what would become the world's most fashionable port. "I am swimming with joy," Signac wrote to his mother. "I could work here for the rest of my life - it is happiness that I've just discovered."

With Berthe Robles, whom he had met nine years earlier at the "Chat Noir" cabaret in Montmartre, Signac settled down in Saint-Tropez, buying a villa which he named La Hune (the topmast). Some of his most exquisite paintings are views of the town and its surroundings, including Saint-Tropez, La Terrasse, on loan from the National Gallery of Ireland.

By the late 1890s, Signac was painting with the brilliant pinks, purples, greens and blues that would soon be adopted by the Fauves. When he began Capo di Noli on the Italian riviera in 1898, Signac wrote in his diary, "I would like to attain an extreme polychromy . . . If it is loud, there will always be time to tone it down later."

In part due to the influence of his book From Eugene Dela- croix to Post-Impressionism, young artists flocked to SaintTropez to learn from Signac. It was at La Hune that Matisse painted the first Fauvist canvas, Luxe, calme et volupte" in 1904, which Signac purchased. In 1913, Signac gave Berthe the villa and left her to live with one of his students, Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange, in Antibes. They had a daughter named Ginette, also a painter, whose daughter Francoise Cachin has just retired as Director of the Museums of France. Cachin loaned three of her grandfather's paintings for the Grand Palais exhibition.

"Everyone in the family was a painter," she recalled in an interview with The Irish Times. "My grandmother, my aunts. It was very tedious because I had to pose all the time for my mother. I was bored to death."

SIGNAC fancied himself an anarchist; one of his biggest murals showing a working man's seaside paradise was initially entitled "In the Time of Anarchy". Wasn't it ironic that the grand-daughter of an anarchist should become the highestranking curator in France? "I think he would have been very happy to know his grand-daughter was looking after museums, that I created the Musee d'Orsay," Francoise Cachin said. "He adored museums. And an anarchist who did such orderly painting - I'm not sure what it means."

Cachin has published a complete catalogue of all of Signac's work, so she was familiar with the 81 oil paintings and 53 drawings and water colours selected by Anne Distel for the exhibition. "It was the later paintings that struck me," she said. "I was somewhat critical of them in the past, but now I find them charming; his desire to link up with the great art of the 17th and 18th centuries, after starting out as a maverick, an Impressionist who never went to the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He needed to return to images engraved in history.

The big canvas of the port of Saint-Tropez was obviously a return to the tradition of Vermeer, Claude Lorrain and Turner, at a time of utter modernity."

"Signac 1863 - 1935" is at the Grand Palais in Paris until May 28th, open every day except Tuesday from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m., until 10 p.m. on Wednesday.

In homage to Signac's friendship with Van Gogh, the exhibition will travel to Amsterdam from June 18th until September 9th, then to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from October 9th until December 30th.