Paul Signac

Paul Signac

Paul Signac was a French artist and writer who lived from 1863 to 1935. He is mostly associated with the pointillist art style of the Neo-Impressionism artists. He was a founding member of the Société des Artistes Indépendants which provided avant-garde artists with a space to develop their ideas. The Société des Artistes Indépendants helped pave the way for Modern art styles such as Fauvism and Cubism. 

Signac was born in Paris, France in 1863 to a liberal middle class family. The family moved into the Montmartre neighborhood and were widely exposed to avant-garde culture. He began his early education studying to become an architect. However, after seeing an art exhibition of Claude Monet in 1880, Signac was taken with impressionism, the idea of painting en plein air, and the non-traditional art subjects. He quit architecture to instead pursue the visual arts. Signac is mostly self-taught. He started painting in 1881. His style at the time was mostly impressionistic. His major early influences were Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Gustave Caillebotte.

In 1884, along with Albert Dubois-Pillet and Odilon Redon, Signac was a founding member of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. This avant-garde society allowed all artists to exhibit their work with no judges or awards given. Their goal was to foster artistic creativity without any limitations or repercussions. At the Société des Artistes Indépendants first exhibition, Signac met fellow artist, Georges Seurat, who had a profound impact on him. Seurat created the theory of pointillism. Pointillism sought to use individual points of color, unblended, right onto the canvas. The theory was that the eye of the viewer would blend the colors upon looking at the entire piece.

Signac was taken with the pointillism method. He abandoned the longer brush strokes used by the impressionists for the small, unblended dots of pointillism. In 1885, Signac and Seurat debuted their pointillism style at the final Impressionist exhibition. Up close, as with Impressionism, the canvas looks to be covered with little, tiny points of purples, oranges, and greens. As the viewer backs up, the scene of the painting emerges from the points of color.

Signac was an avid sailor. After 1892, he spent a lot of time sailing into port cities across the Mediterranean, on his own small boat which kept its base at Saint Tropez, France. He reached as far as Constantinople (which didn’t change its name to Istanbul until 1923 after the country of Turkey was formed). From these trips, Signac would produce sketches, many of which were turned into large paintings.

Signac was an important figure in the Parisian art scene in the late nineteenth century. He befriended many artists in the scene, including Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, and Camille Pissarro. In addition to painting, he was also a writer. He wrote art theories and produced a number of politically inspired writings detailing his views. In 1898, he published From Delacroix to Impressionism which detailed his views on Post-Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism.

In 1908, Signac was elected as the president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which role he served in until his death in 1935. As the president, he supported the up-and-coming artists of the modern age, including the Cubists and Fauvists. Signac was the first person to buy a painting from Henri Matisse. Signac was very successful in his lifetime. By the early 1900s, watercolor paint became his favorite medium, and he created a huge output of these until his death. Paul Signac died in 1935 in Paris at age 71 from sepsis.

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