Théo van Rysselberghe (1862–1926) - Per-Kiridy’ at High Tide, 1889,
"The inability of some critics to connect the dots doesn't make pointillism pointless" - Georges Seurat.
Private collectors and their collections of art fascinate me. Having both the agency and drive to acquire and curate a selection of artworks based on your own particular tastes must be totally satisfying. Over the years I have visited a number of exhibitions centred on once private art collections now on public display and shared them (here, here, here, here, here, and here), the latest of which is this collection put together by Helene Kröller-Müller a pioneering female collector who from 1907 began amassing an extraordinary trove of works by modern artists such as Picasso, Braque, Léger, Mondrian, Van Gogh, Signac and of course Seurat whose works feature strongly in this exhibition. Kröller-Müller was born into into a wealthy German industrialist family who made their money supplying raw materials to the mining and steel industries. To house her growing collection in 1910 Kröller-Müller created a museum house in the Hague which she opened up to the public giving them access to works of modern art. An eponymous foundation was established to protect the art and estates, and in 1935 Kröller-Müller and her husband donated their entire collection of 12000 artworks and objects to the Dutch people. This exhibition - Radical Harmony at the National Gallery focuses on a fraction of Kröller-Müller's collection, that devoted to Neo-Impressionist painters who applied small dots of pure colour to the canvas which when viewed from a distance created textured nuanced tone, now known as pointillism. Georges Seurat (1859-1891), was the main proponent of pointillism. His innovation in painting derived from quasi-scientific theories about colour, form and expression. He believed that lines tending in certain directions, and colours of a particular warmth or coolness, could have particular expressive effects. Seurat also pursued the discovery that contrasting or complementary colours can optically mix to yield far more vivid tones that can be achieved by mixing paint alone. Although radical in his techniques, Seurat's initial instincts were conservative and classical when it came to style. He saw himself in the tradition of great Salon painters, and thought of the figures in his major pictures almost as if they were figures in monumental classical reliefs. The subject matter though - the different urban leisure pursuits of the bourgeois and the working class - was fully modern, and typically Impressionist. In Seurat's later work he left behind the calm, stately classicism of early pictures like Bathers at Asnières, and pioneered a more dynamic and stylised approach that was influenced by sources such as caricatures and popular posters. Perhaps the most significant and exciting painting in this exhibition is Seurat's highly stylised 1899-90 painting La Chahut. In which we are transported to a Parisian nightclub. Directly in the foreground, centre-stage is the back of a double bass player providing the music for an enthusiastic line of ladies dancing a high-kicking can-can. Their eyes are closed as they are lost in the rhythm of the music executing their dance moves. The silhouette of the bass player is created from dark purple dots, contrasting sharply with the warmer peach, orange and brown tones of the dancers in the middle ground. It is the jewel in this exhibition and it was a pleasure to be able to view it at close quarters on its London debut as well as some of Seurat's sublime, atmospheric charcoal drawings. As for the rest of the paintings by this group, I think the landscapes as a whole by the likes of Signac and Pissarro work particularly well as they seem calm and expansive, lending themselves to the pointillist technique where the dots of colour blend creating nuanced tones capturing the dazzling light effects of the landscapes beautifully. I don't think the figurative paintings in this particular style work that well though, as the figures in them mostly appear quite stiff and formal. As a subtext to the exhibition curators have investigated the radical politics of certain painters affiliated to this Neo-Impressionist movement who also captured in paint the working class struggles as a reaction against the industrial age in some of the paintings. This is a little ironic given how Kröller-Müller acquired her wealth and was able to afford to patronise this group of painters. As a former illustrator I was aware previously of the graphic output of artist Jan Toorop featured in the exhibition, but had no idea he was also a painter. Although the most well known practitioners of the pointillist style are Seurat and Signac, this exhibition serves as a good introduction to other practitioners of the technique such as Théo van Rysselberghe, Henry van de Velde, Henri Edmond Cross, Maximilien Luce, Anna Boch, Johan Aarts, and Johan Thorn Prikker who are not as well known in the UK.
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