Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists at the National Gallery is an exhibition about dots in painting. Long before the dot in art became associated with Damien Hirst or Yayoi Kusama, a small group of artists in the late 19th century delved into the latest scientific colour theory and came up with a style of painting involving dots. Or more specifically, the use of dots of pure colour juxtaposed to maximise the luminosity of their pictures, which they believed created harmony and balance.
The movement, led by Georges Seurat, took the brushstrokes of the Impressionists a stage further. Joined by a group of visionary artists that included Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Maximilien Luce, they experimented with landscapes, seascapes, portraits, domestic scenes, and even political subjects using this innovative technique. However, the critics of the time saw it as signifying the death of painting, due to the methodical nature of a painting’s production, which they saw as removing an artist’s individuality, usually expressed through their brush strokes.
Radical Harmony is also an exhibition about art collecting and, in particular, one person’s unique taste in art. The majority of paintings in the exhibition are from Helene Kröller-Müller’s collection, now housed at the Henry van de Velde-designed Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, in the Netherlands. She is known for amassing one of the largest collections of Van Gogh’s work, with more than 90 paintings and 185 drawings, second only to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, although there is only one on display here, The Sower (1888). At the National Gallery, it is her collection of Neo-Impressionist works that is the focus of this exhibition. It features works from Belgian and Dutch artists who also joined the movement, such as Jan Toorop and Théo van Rysselberghe, alongside the French artists: Seurat, Signac, Luce, and Cross. The sole woman artist represented here is Anna Boch, whose work is not in the Kröller-Müller collection.
The pointillist technique is most suited to landscapes and seascapes. Paul Signac, in his views of Portrieux in Brittany, has simplified the composition, reducing it to lines and shapes. Similarly, Théo van Rysselberghe in Coastal Scene (1892) limits the palette to mainly blues and white and again reduces the elements to blocks of land, sea and sky. Jan Toorop’s Sea of 1899 reduces the North Sea coast to bands of horizontal pale colours. These paintings do feel new, modernist and harmonious.
The portraits, on the other hand, are traditional and wooden, particularly the two by van Rysselberghe. It is only when looking close up that the dot painting technique emerges. There is little interaction between the figures in Signac’s The Dining Room Opus 152 or van Rysselberghe’s outdoor picnic scene, In July, Before Noon (1890). They lack the softness and fluidity of similar Impressionist scenes.
Georges Seurat is by far the most radical artist here. He seamlessly blends scientific colour theories with images of modern Paris. His painting Chahut (1889-1890) is the centrepiece of the show. Chahut is the 5th of 6 major canvases by Seurat, who died a year after it was finished at the age of 31. It was first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendents in 1890 and depicts life-size figures of dancing women and men with their legs kicking high in the air. The Chahut was a late 19th-century form of the Can-Can that was more frenetic and provocative. The painting is far from naturalistic, unlike many of the other works in the show, with forced energy and stylised figures. It was the mathematician and esthetician, Charles Henry, who asserted that ascending lines and warm colours render feelings of pleasure, while descending lines and cool colours arouse feelings of sadness. Here, the repetition of the diagonal lines in the legs of the dancers, the neck of the double bass and the conductor’s baton indicates this sense of joy. The composition is carefully constructed to imitate images of performing dancers found in poster designs of the time. Yet it also has a classical element to it. The repetitive leg movements and the orangey-brown colour tone are reminiscent of Ancient Greek Black figure vases seen at the Louvre at the time. Other stylised features taken from popular contemporary images are the gas lamps and the caricature-like exaggeration of the dancers’ eyes and the men’s moustaches. The back view of the bass player is a device often used by Degas, but here it is being stylised. On a closer look, this figure exemplifies the use of Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s colour theory; the juxtaposition of purple and yellow, and blue and orange creates a vividness.
Chahut is a complex painting from an artist cut short in his attempt to redefine painting. If he had lived longer, who knows where his experimentations would have led him.
The least convincing part of the exhibition is the section on Radical Politics, which tries to link the Anarchist communists of the time and the artists who supported them, who saw ‘Neo-Impressionism and its aesthetic harmonies as compatible with progressive ideas and a compassionate attitude to ordinary, working people’ as the wall notes explain. This comes across as a bit of a stretch.
The exhibition does offer a compelling exploration of this pivotal moment in art history and highlights the technical abilities of the artists involved, but it is Seurat’s work that continues to stand out.