The Joy Of Color

By ROBERT HUGHES

It may not signify too much in judging his paintings, but Paul Signac (1863-1935) had what comparatively few artists--or people of any kind, for that matter--ever get: an enviably happy life, whose pleasures never reduced him to complacency. He was well off--and generous in buying his friends' pictures. He was talented. He loved the sea and was able to exercise that love by constantly cruising the Mediterranean coast of France in an 11-m cutter christened, in homage to Edouard Manet's infamous nude, the Olympia. (His first and much smaller boat he named, to show his artistic affiliations, the Manet-Zola-Wagner, a heavy cargo for a mere day sailer to carry.) He "discovered" St.-Tropez long before tourism did, and built there a big rambling house, La Hune, which was his base and which still, happily, belongs to his descendants.

Signac was also an energetic and talented writer, an avid reader and bibliophile, and an ardent backer of the avant-garde in the days when that word actually meant something. "The golden age has not passed," ran the subtitle he appended to an enormous didactic canvas, In the Time of Harmony, 1893-95. "It lies in the future." The picture set out to depict the joys of anarchist cooperation: free love, picnics, games of boule on the beach, farm labor made easy by a steam-powered reaper in the distance. What in fact lay in the future was the trenches of Flanders and the murderous October Revolution. Luckily for him, Signac did not have the gift of prophecy, and even his anarchism belonged to the Belle Epoque.

He was filled with idealistic dreams of fraternal love and spontaneous world order. None of the painters in his circle were untouched by anarchist ideas, particularly those of Pyotr Kropotkin. Some, notably Maximilian Luce, were vigorous activists, marked down by the police. Signac was never that militant, but his best friend among critics, Felix Feneon, was always suspected (though this was never proved) of having helped carry out a deadly bomb attack on a fashionable Paris restaurant, Foyot's. Signac never hurt anyone, though he was right in the thick of the closest relationship between political and aesthetic radicalism that the 19th century could show. In sum, he seems to have had no enemies, an almost incredible achievement in any art world. Lucky the artist who can boast such a life--not that Signac was given to bragging.

Signac and Georges Seurat were the leaders of a group awkwardly styled the neo-Impressionists. Seurat has always been seen as the inventor, Signac as the follower. This unfairly simple view should, with luck, be dispelled by the retrospective of some 120 oils, watercolors and drawings by Signac on view through Dec. 30 at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, its only venue in the U.S.

The show is not to be missed. Signac, for much of his life, was a terrific painter: tough, contemplative, highly sensitive to color and gifted in the organization of forms. Sometimes his pictures are a little pedantic: he goes at his shapes with the stolid determination of a silkworm chewing its way across a mulberry leaf. But the best of them are filled with a joy in life that Seurat, a curiously melancholy artist some of the time, couldn't top. Signac makes you feel--really feel, not just think--what it can be like to be in a world ruled by the pleasure of color and by the calm reflection that is, so to speak, its postcoital afterglow.

Signac never achieved a masterpiece of the order of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, but how many painters have? In the late 1880s and early 1890s, though, he brought off a sequence of ravishingly beautiful landscapes that stand with the best of late 19th century art, along with some remarkable figure paintings.

The latter include the somber and acerbic hymn of hate to the boredom French lefty intellectuals always attribute to respectable middle-class life, Sunday, 1888-1890. (Does the worthy proletariat ever suffer from ennui? Apparently not.) Nothing is happening. A young husband in a stiff jacket and striped pants is poking the fireplace in a desultory way. His wife stares out the window, her back to us. The folds and pleats of her costume, intensely formal, suggest a caryatid--but a caryatid with nothing at all to support and nothing whatever to do. An equally bored-looking cat, if cats can look bored, hesitates between the two of them. The very air is congested with the excessive patterns of a middle-class interior, with its ugly mock-Henri II furniture. It manages to be monumentally static, miserable and funny, all at once.

At the opposite extreme from this image is Signac's wonderful and bizarre Portrait of Felix Feneon, Opus 217, 1890-91--the fox-jawed face with its little tuft of beard in profile, the hand holding a cyclamen, against a madly spiraling background of fruit-jelly abstract forms. The dandified, loony energy of Feneon's argot-filled writing seems impacted into that background, even though its source is a Japanese kimono pattern. My, you think, those guys must have had some laughs together. Which they did.

Both Signac and Seurat strove to give a noble, architectural permanence to fleeting effects by analyzing shape and light in terms of dots of color. They wanted rigor and system, not Impressionist spontaneity. Each man influenced the other; Seurat was the greater artist, but it was a real partnership. Thus it was Signac who persuaded Seurat, and not the other way round, to purify his color by banishing earth pigments from his palette. Later Signac would give up on the dot, using larger spots in a sort of mosaic. Under the influence of Turner, whose luminous watercolors and oils he adored, he plunged into fantasies of radiant color that weren't governed by the theoretical system with which Seurat is forever associated. Seurat might have changed too, but he died in 1891 at the sadly early age of 32, after a career of only nine years.

Luck--and a yachtsman's robust health--granted Signac some 40 years more than Seurat got. But he never painted better than he did in the late 1880s and early 1890s. His best pictures of the Cote d'Azur--of Cassis, of St.-Tropez--possess a wonderful rigor, density and subtlety of color. The danger inherent in pointillism was that all those microdots, if their tonal relations were not perfectly controlled, could look like a bad case of measles. In his middle years Signac almost always avoided this. The seascapes become what they are meant to be: a vibration of light.

Cap Canaille, Cassis, Opus 200, 1889, is a superb example. The day is fading. The tartans, or lateen-rigged fishing boats, triangular scraps of white sail on the blue, are flocking back to port. The pallid horizon is delicately tinted with pink, lavender, yellow. The foreground, with its purple house and lavender rocks, is already darkening. But the sunset has lit up the prismatic shape of the headland to a blazing orange-yellow, a thrilling and almost transcendent intensity. It is the kind of painting that can absorb any amount of looking, and after 10 minutes with it you can appreciate how Signac grasped the sensuous abundance of the world.