Signac, Paul (1863-1935)
Le Grand Canal à Venise (The Grand Canal, Venice)
1905
Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 92.1 cm
Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo
It may immediately strike you that the style of this painting is different from almost any other in this gallery. Compare it to a nearby Impressionist painting by Pissarro or Monet, and the difference becomes even clearer. Though often using fragmented brushstrokes, the Impressionists blended their colors on the canvas. Paul Signac and other Neo-Impressionists like Georges Seurat and Cross sought a more scientific process based on color theory and optics. They treated color as light, placing dots or strokes of pure pigment side by side so that the eye would “mix” them when the canvas was viewed from a distance. While Seurat applied paint in dots (points in French)—leading to the term pointillism to describe the technique—his admirer Signac came to favor longer dashes that resemble the individual stones of a mosaic. Signac was, in fact, influenced by the Byzantine mosaics he had admired on trips to Istanbul and Venice. (TMA)