Product Description

During his fifty-year career, the French Neoimpressionist artist Paul Signac produced powerful works in many media. This beautiful book, which examines various aspects of Signac's career and reproduces in color some two hundred of his paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints, is an unprecedented overview of his art and influence. The book traces Signac's artistic development, which began with the luminous plein air paintings he made in the early 1880s, continued with his explorations of color harmony, contrasts, and neoimpressionist technique made in close association with Georges Seurat, and culminated with the scintillating works of his maturity, in which the rigors of pointillism gave way to richly patterned, decorative color surfaces. Essays discuss Signac's triumphs as a painter, draftsman, watercolorist, and printmaker, examine his role as a promoter of his own works and those of his colleagues, and shed new light on his appreciation of the works of his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. The volume also includes an annotated chronology and a map that pinpoints the sites depicted in Signac's works.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #812642 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
While Georges Seurat is the best-known pointillist, he wasn't the only one. Signac: 1863-1935 reintroduces a tireless advocate of neo-impressionism, a painter whose suburban imagery and leisured lifestyle belied his left-wing political views. Lively essays by scholars and curators portray different facets of Paul Signac's career. Virtually self-taught, he found the catalyst for his mature style in the small-scale brushwork of the slightly older Seurat, but replaced his serene, formal quality with overtly decorative patterning. As a yachtsman, Signac was drawn to marine subjects such as boats gliding on sparkling water at different times of day. After moving from Paris to Saint-Tropez in 1892, he took up watercolor, ideal for painting sunsets. Attempts at translating his political convictions into art (culminating with the monumental figure of a worker wielding a pickax) met with failure. But Signac's brilliance as a colorist is indisputable, infusing each of the 223 plates in this handsome book. --Cathy Curtis

From Library Journal
This volume, which accompanies a traveling exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is the first major overview of neoimpressionist artist Paul Signac in nearly 40 years. Tracing Signac's artistic development, the catalog effectively examines the artist's close relationship with fellow neoimpressionist Georges Seurat and shows how his interest in color, line, aesthetic harmony, and subjective experience in painting developed. The essays, written by American and French Signac scholars, demonstrate that the painter at first emulated Seurat's artistic style but then came to use more color and looser brushstrokes, and how as Signac worked more and more in the medium of watercolor, he produced some of his most successful works. Signac emerges as a theorist and critic through excerpts from his book, D'Eug ne Delacroix au neo-impressionisme, in which he explained Neoimpressionism to the public. The artist's political motivations are also observed he always stood against official bourgeois conventions and in favor of liberal causes as are his efforts to support the arts in general. With beautiful illustrations and valuable, if not especially groundbreaking, information on Signac, this volume is recommended for all libraries that collect art books. Sandra Rothenberg, Framingham State Coll., MA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher
This book is the catalogue of the first retrospective of Signac's work in nearly forty years, which has been held at the Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and will be at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York from October 9 to December 30, 2001.

Customer Reviews

LIGHT--COLOR--HARMONY: PAUL SIGNAC: MASTER NEO-IMPRESSIONIST...
Signac is too often overlooked in turn-of-the-century studies. He was a master Neo-Impressionist whose personal style was somewhere between Seurat and Van Gogh.

This is a very fine tome on Signac, a good value for the price. Equally good for students of the period, and an exceptionally nice "coffee table book" as well.