A nice little exhibition about a movement that I knew very little about before. Beginning in France and Belgium in the 1880s with Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, neo-impressionism took impressionism as its starting point and sought to incorporate the then new sciences of optics and colour perception and theory, using careful dabs of bright colours in a 'divisionistic' style - juxtaposing complementary colours, both at the level of detail and overall picture - with the aim of inducing the intended effects through the viewer's perceptual response to the use of colour and line rather than swift brushstrokes aimed at capturing the essence of a moment in the traditional impressionist style.
By and large, I found the paintings in the exhibition pleasant rather than amazing - they have a tendency to perhaps be a little mannered, at least by comparison to the finest of the impressionist (including late impressionist) style...having said that, a couple by Maximilien Luce were very striking - "Views of London (Cannon Street)" (1892-3) and "The Louvre and the Pont du Carrousel, night effect" (1890), the former dusk and the latter night, both making use of violets, lilacs, greens, city lights on water. And my favourite in the exhibition, Theo van Rysselberghe's "Canal in Flanders, gloomy weather" (1894), is wonderful, done with a vivid blurriness, like a photograph of a memory.
Actually, in some ways, the most interesting thing about the exhibition was the way that the use of colour, particularly in later neo-impressionism, very clearly prefigures that of a range of more familiar movements that would follow in the 20th century - bringing to mind Matisse and the fauves - and the turn towards something approaching abstraction, again in that later part of the movement.
(w/ Trang)
By and large, I found the paintings in the exhibition pleasant rather than amazing - they have a tendency to perhaps be a little mannered, at least by comparison to the finest of the impressionist (including late impressionist) style...having said that, a couple by Maximilien Luce were very striking - "Views of London (Cannon Street)" (1892-3) and "The Louvre and the Pont du Carrousel, night effect" (1890), the former dusk and the latter night, both making use of violets, lilacs, greens, city lights on water. And my favourite in the exhibition, Theo van Rysselberghe's "Canal in Flanders, gloomy weather" (1894), is wonderful, done with a vivid blurriness, like a photograph of a memory.
Actually, in some ways, the most interesting thing about the exhibition was the way that the use of colour, particularly in later neo-impressionism, very clearly prefigures that of a range of more familiar movements that would follow in the 20th century - bringing to mind Matisse and the fauves - and the turn towards something approaching abstraction, again in that later part of the movement.
(w/ Trang)
