Indépendants’ Days
“PARIS IN the Days of Post-Impressionism: Signac and the Indépendants,” an exhibition on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through September 27, is at its core about two figures—one well known and the other unknown.
The former is Paul Signac, a leading Post-Impressionist painter, who, along with Georges Seurat helped develop Neo-Impressionism. The painting technique harnessed the optical theories of 19th-century scientists like Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood, and Charles Henry. It utilized Divisionism (the separation of color into individual strokes of pigment) and Pointillism (the application of those strokes in individual dots) to create shimmering canvases that expressed Impressionism’s thematic concerns in a new light.
The latter is an anonymous collector,
