The summer at Signac’s elbow

In the summer of 1904, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), thirty-four years old and not yet famous, packed up and left Paris for the south. He went to Saint-Tropez, then a small fishing town on the Côte d’Azur (the French Mediterranean coast), and he went there for a specific reason. Living and working in Saint-Tropez was Paul Signac (1863–1935), the leading living practitioner of a method of painting that Matisse wanted to learn from the inside. Nearby lived Henri-Edmond Cross(1856–1910), another painter of the same school. Matisse spent the summer working at their elbow.

The method had a founder who was already dead. Georges Seurat (1859–1891) had invented it in the 1880s and died young; Signac had carried it forward as its chief living theorist. The idea was to build a picture not by mixing colors on the palette but by laying down small, separate touches of unmixed color side by side, on the theory that the eye, at a distance, would blend them into something brighter and more luminous than any mixed paint could be. The movement had a name, Neo-Impressionism(literally “new Impressionism”), and the labels around it (Divisionism, Pointillism) get used so loosely that they are worth pulling apart on their own. For now, hold the picture of it: a canvas covered in thousands of tiny separate dabs of pure color that fuse, when you step back, into shimmering light.

Matisse did not arrive cold. He had already read Signac’s book on the subject, a treatise with the heavy title D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (“From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism,” serialized in 1898, published as a book in 1899). It was, in effect, the method’s manifesto, an argument for divided color dressed up as art history. So Matisse came to Saint-Tropez primed by the theory; the summer was where he finally practiced it, under the eye of the man who had written the rulebook. The picture that came out of that summer is one of the strangest things in his whole career, because it is both a faithful piece of homework and the door he was about to walk through and slam behind him.