Key Works: Paul Signac

In the late 1880s, Paul Signac co-developed Pointillism in France as a reaction to both the popular Impressionist movement and nascent theories surrounding optics and the human eye. Signac transformed the rapid, visible brushstrokes of his Impressionistic teeange works into small, controlled portions of color that similarly denoted light, but in a wildly different way. Signac’s highly stylized paintings magically divide shapes by color while including almost the entire rainbow in each shape. Always innovating and learning from his own practice, Signac’s later works abandon the controlled Pointallist method in favor of looser brushstrokes that abstracted his forms. His inventive separation of color from an object’s true-to-life image were significantly influential to the Modernist and abstract artists the West would see a few decades later.