Dot Dot Dot

Dot Dot Dot . . .

From a couple of steps away, the eye no longer perceives the brushwork: the pink, the orange and the blue are composed on the retina, coalesced in a vibrant chorus, and the sensation of the sun imposes itself. . . . the optical mix creates luminosities that are much more intense than the blending of the pigments .

Félix Fénéon on Dubois-Pillet’s pointillist paintings, July 1886

The oldest painting in our exhibition, Landscape at La Grande Jatte (cat. no. 1 ), was made in 1884 – 86 by Albert Dubois-Pillet ( 1846 – 1890 ) a disciple of Georges Seurat. Dubois-Pillet painted the same place as Seurat had in his iconic grand canvas La Grande Jatte , enthusiastically following Seurat’s revolutionary methods. Seurat had conducted his explorations of optics with a thoroughness not seen since the Renaissance, but what is exciting for us today is not only that these paintings are relentlessly scientific, but that they are at the same time ingratiatingly popular. A Manifesto painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884, is a life-sized depiction of a Sunday idyll. Seurat had in fact relied on another original mind, French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul ( 1786 – 1889 ), whose exploration into the optical mixing of colors led to his discovery of several types of contrasts of color and tone, and a formulation of the law of simultaneous contrast: that colors mutually influence one another when juxtaposed, each imposing its own complementary color on the other. (His invention led to the modern use of commercial paints: in order to represent colors by definite standards, he brought together all of the colors of the visible spectrum, relating them to