Points of departure

“Neo-Impressionism” at Portland Museum of Art

By Josh Rogers

“Neo-Impressionism:Artists on the Edge” shows at Portland Museum of Art through October 20. Call (207) 775-6148.

“THE STEELWORKS IN CHARLEROI, FACTORY CHIMNEY,” 1896, by Maximilien Luce.

Seurat’s dots are careful, small, and reserved. Cross’s are eerily patterned and unnatural. And Signac’s would grow from tiny blotches of tasteful pastels to sizeable rectangular panels of vivid color. Not only are the visible differences great in the Neo-Impressionism movement, the subject matter is wildly divergent, too. The roughly 60 paintings that make up Portland Museum of Art’s new exhibit, “Neo-Impressionism: Artists on the Edge,” showcase a group of artists at once unified in their use of small primary- and secondary-colored dimples of paint to show light, and edging away from each other in their stylistic approach and subject matter. They were certainly edging away from Impressionism.

By the late 1880s and early ’90s, many of the original Impressionists – Renoir, Pissaro, Cézanne – had moved on to pursue other painting methods and a new movement had grown up from Impressionism and against it. A diverse group, working in a variety of directions, the Neo-Impressionists were generally united in their formalization of scientific order to the Impressionist style. Get up close to one of Monet’s haystacks, or any other Impressionist painting, and you’ll see a cacophonous riot of slapdash brushwork. Get close enough to the PMA’s two Seurats that the security guard starts to eye you nervously and you’ll see thousands of precisely rendered, evenly spaced dots – a far cry from “Water Lilies.”

Georges Seurat, considered the Father of Neo-Impressionism, is most famously known for his “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” a tour de force of the painting technique that he referred to as divisionism: basically, painting the textures of light with veracity by setting tiny dots of complementary colors side by side on the canvas. The idea is what we use today in most color printing: green is not green – it’s a mixture of blue and yellow light that combines on the retina to create the illusion of green. Seurat thought that splitting the colors on the canvas created a more pure and accurate image than was rendered through traditional methods of mixing paint on a palette and then applying it to the canvas.

Seurat was the most devout practitioner of divisionism — or, as it is more commonly known, pointillism. But, this show also includes two charcoal drawings by the artist, which demonstrate that besides his deft use of color, Seurat was also a master of creating the illusion of solid form, which was not always the case with his Impressionist forefathers. This is apparent in his painting “Harbour and Quays at Port-en-Bessin.” Each object – lampposts, bridge, fenceposts – is monumental in its solidity. Three figures (a man with his head down, a stooped old woman, and a child) don’t so much populate the stark foreground as describe an endless gulf that exists between them. The lone child (is she lost?) with a featureless face is turned towards the viewer, as the man and woman pass her by.

Where Seurat saw universal rules governing color and light, many of his followers saw laws governing human society. The dichotomy inherent in divisionism appealed to many of Seurat’s followers who saw the world split in terms of man vs. industry, for instance – anarchists, leftists, and communists. In this way, Neo-Impression was a radical departure from Impressionism. According to The Oxford Dictionary of Art, although Impressionism was committed to visual Realism, “their outlook was nevertheless distinct from that of Social Realism. Social amelioration was not one of their aims and they saw no merit in the representation of vulgarity or ugliness.” Many of the Neo-Impressionists were politically active, however. Nowhere is this commitment to social causes more apparent than in the paintings of Maximilien Luce — once jailed for 42 days (later acquitted) when French president Sadi Carnot was assassinated by an Italian anarchist — who captured both the vulgarity and ugliness of modern life in his work.

In one painting, Luce captures the plight of steelworkers in Charleroi, France, a notoriously harsh region in which to work. Monstrous brick chimneys tower above a few tiny workers shoveling coal and straining with heavy wheelbarrow loads. The grotesque glow from the fires casts a dramatic light on the barbarous working conditions of the men. Surrounding everything is a dark purple cloud – it’s not clear if the men have been forced to work into the night, or perhaps worse, that with all the smoke, the sun has been literally blotted out. Looking at the acrid smoke belched from the smelters raises the question: How does this relate to the usual pastoral, pleasant scenes in this show? Like every other Neo-Impressionist, Luce has used color to illuminate his subject. The tenets of divisionism apply perfectly to socialist worldviews. He shines the same light on everything, and his subjects, in turn, reflect their truths.

Luce’s critique of the burgeoning industrial society is more subtle in “The Factory Chimneys, Couillet near Charleroi.” Gone are the vulgar colors and dramatic lighting in this rather pleasant landscape. It’s all the more shocking, though, because the nice, pastel hues making up the valley work to obscure the small town’s ugliness. On closer inspection, most of the background, the distant hills, is obscured by pink and white smoke billowing from dozens of chimneys. Hidden in the shadows in front of the industrial complex is a trainyard cutting cruelly through what was once a peaceful valley. Two small figures (a man and his son?) are seen walking up and out of the valley on an old country path, the only signs of human life in the picture. Perhaps they’re returning to their farm, although, by the looks of the landscape, there may not be much rural country left.

Luce’s scenes of toil are echoed in a lithograph by Paul Signac, another prominent Neo-Impressionist figure. A man raises his heavy pickaxe in “The Stone Breakers,” the look on his face one of determination and utter weariness. Behind him, the sun is just over the horizon, suggesting the man is working either very early in the day, or late at night, magnifying the length of his toils.

“THE FACTORY CHIMNEYS, COUILLET NEAR CHARLEROI,” 1898-99, by Maximilien Luce.

Besides a growing focus on political causes, Neo-Impressionism’s visual innovations were expanding, too. Elsewhere in the exhibit, artists can be seen edging towards such divergent visual disciplines as Cubism, Expressionism, and Fauvism. A critic of the 1876 Impressionist exhibition called the exhibitors “lunatics,” the paintings “a terrifying spectacle,” and seethed: “Someone should tell M. Pissarro forcibly that trees are never violet, that the sky is never the color of fresh butter, that nowhere on earth are things to be seen as he paints them.” In fact, Impressionist painters like Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir were reacting against the emotion found in classical European art, trying instead to record nature in a more Realist fashion. Once one gets past the idea that trees are brown and their shadows are black, for instance, one can see that trees are, actually, quite often violet. Neo-Impressionism took this idea and turned it into a scientific principle that could be applied uniformly to everything. Later on in the Neo-Impressionist movement, however, some of its adherents began breaking out of Seurat’s color dogma, using divisionism to less Realist, more expressionistic ends.

Rysselberghe’s “The Regatta,” with its sailboats sweeping along the blue open ocean and its sunny orange coast, seems pleasant enough. Up close, however, rocks thrust up out of the water in aggressive plum-colored lines, flecked with violet and light purple. Other rocks are speckled mint green, pink, orange, and lime. Painted in 1892, Rysselberghe’s riotous use of color predates the 1905 show review in which the Fauves would get their name: “fauves” literally meaning “wild beasts.”

Edging away even further from the rigid scientific strictures developed by Seurat, Paul Signac’s 1909 view of Port d’Antibes is downright animalistic in its use of the color spectrum. Although he’s still employing Seurot’s ideas about complementary colors and pointillism, the “points” have grown into larger strokes, swirling in different directions to represent movement. A pink-red, orange, and purple tree undulates in the foreground, menacing the subtle pastels of the sailboat and the placid water in the background.

Henri-Edmond Cross’s “Antibes in the Afternoon,” painted just a year prior to the Signac, expands the artist’s palette to include vivid indigo trees and pink/orange grass. He’s also freed his brushwork from the craftsmanlike precision of Seurat and that of his own earlier years, allowing expressive slants and swirls to his broadened points.

The variety of styles in some of these artists’ careers is great. And there are interesting gulfs from artist to artist. “Neo-Impressionism: Artists on the Edge” demonstrates how artists working from a common idea can diverge so much, and at the same time, at what points they still converge. It’s exhilarating too – with its hints of Cubism, Expressionism, and Fauvism – to see the flashpoints of so many important movements in modern art in one show.

Josh Rogers can be reached at jrogers@phx.com.