Divisionism, and a coarser dot

Before we look at the canvas, three words, because they get used as if they mean the same thing and they do not. The first is Neo-Impressionism, the name of the whole movement, the loose group around Seurat and then Signac. The second is Divisionism, the name of the theory: divide each color into its components and lay the parts side by side so the eye, not the brush, does the mixing. (Signac himself preferred this word.) The third is Pointillism, the name of the technique, strictly the business of doing all that with regular round dots. People throw “pointillist” around as a synonym for the whole thing, but it really describes only the look.

And here is the catch that makes Matisse’s picture odd: he did not use neat round dots. Look closely at the surface and the marks are short, blocky dashes, little squarish strokes of color, much coarser and looser than Seurat’s fine, even points. So the most precise way to describe the picture is this. The method is Divisionism; the word “pointillist” fits the look but not the marks, because the marks are dashes, not points. A small distinction, but it is the visible fingerprint of a painter who is borrowing a system rather than living inside it.

Matisse made the picture in two stages. That summer at Saint-Tropez he painted an oil study on the spot, a smaller working version (it survives, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it is a different object from the painting we are looking at, so do not let the two get confused). Then, back in Paris over the following autumn and winter, he worked the full canvas up to its finished size. The museum that owns it dates the finished picture to “Autumn–Winter 1904,”which is why we call it a 1904 painting, with the understanding that the brush was still moving over the winter of 1904–05.

The finished canvas is not large for what it attempts, a little over three feet tall and just under four feet wide (about 3 ft 2¾ in by 3 ft 10⅝ in). Onto that modest surface Matisse laid an entire imagined world, stroke by separate stroke. It is worth pausing on the sheer labor of the method: every patch of sand, every inch of sky, every limb is built from individual dabs, none of them blended into the next. That is the discipline Signac’s theory demanded, and Matisse, the dutiful summer student, gave it to him, just barely.