Neo-Impressionism

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Movement in French painting that developed from Impressionism in the 1880s and flourished until the early years of the 20th century. The name was coined in 1886 in a review of the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, held in Paris that year. Among the artists who exhibited there was Georges Seurat, who was the chief creator and outstanding exponent of Neo-Impressionism.

He was impressed by the sense of light and colour in Impressionist pictures but wanted to handle these qualities in a more methodical and scientific way, rather than spontaneously and instinctively, as the Impressionists themselves did. Instead of mixing colours together on his palette, Seurat used small touches or dots of pure colour, carefully placed in relationship to one another on the canvas so that when the picture was viewed from the ideal distance the dots seemed to blend with one another. The idea was that this would produce more lively colour effects than if the paints were physically mixed together. Seurat's own paintings do create sparkling colour effects, but none of his immediate followers could match him in this respect; their pictures often look rather more contrived than his. His most important disciple was Paul Signac, whose work influenced Henri Matisse early in his career and in this way helped to inspire fauvism. The technique of using small dots of colour is called pointillism. Seurat himself preferred to use the term ‘Divisionism’; this is now sometimes used to refer to the theory behind his pictures, with ‘pointillism’ describing the actual method of applying paint, but the terms are sometimes used interchangeably.

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