Paul Signac

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. The museum's... collection offers an unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media. MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The archives contain primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. It also houses a restaurant, The Modern, run by Alsace-born chef Gabriel Kreuther. The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1928 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. They became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies".
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The Toledo Museum of Art is an internationally known art museum located in the Old West End neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, United States. The museum was founded by Toledo glassmaker Edward Drummond Libbey in 1901, and moved to its current location, a Greek revival building designed by Edward B.... Green and Harry W. Wachter on January 17, 1912. The building was expanded twice in the 1920s and 1930s. The museum contains major collections of glass art of the 19th and 20th century European and American art, as well as small but distinguished Renaissance, Greek and Roman, and Japanese collections. Notable individual works include Peter Paul Rubens's The Crowning of Saint Catherine, significant minor works by Rembrandt and El Greco, and modern works by Willem de Kooning, Henry Moore, and Sol LeWitt, as well as Fragonard's Blind man's bluff. A concert hall within the east wing, the Peristyle, is built in a classical style to match the museum's exterior. The hall is the principal concert space for the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.
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The Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection was established by the Bührle family in Zürich, Switzerland to bring to public viewing Emil Georg Bührle's important collection of European sculptures and paintings. The Foundation's art museum is in a Zurich villa adjoining Bührle's... former home. Although the collection includes a number of Old Masters and Modern art including works by Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso , it comprises mainly French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism paintings by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Alfred Sisley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh and others. On 10 February 2008, four paintings worth CHF 180 million were stolen. The four paintings are Cézanne's The Boy in the Red Vest , Degas' Count Lepic and His Daughters , Monet's Poppies near Vétheuil and Van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches . Three of the four paintings have since been recovered.
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Divisionism was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches which interacted optically. By requiring the viewer to combine the colors optically instead of physically mixing pigments, divisionists believed they were... achieving the maximum luminosity scientifically possible. Georges Seurat founded the style around 1884 as chromoluminarism, drawing from his understanding of the scientific theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and Charles Blanc, among others. Divisionism developed along with another style, pointillism, which is defined specifically by the use of dots of paint and does not necessarily focus on the separation of colors. Divisionism developed in nineteenth century painting as artists discovered scientific theories of vision which encouraged a departure from the tenets of Impressionism, which at that point had been well-developed. The scientific theories and rules of color contrast that would guide composition for divisionists placed the movement of Neo-Impressionism in contrast with Impressionism, which is characterized by the use instinct and intuition.
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Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of... experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called Contemporary art or Postmodern art. Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism.
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Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Fry used the term when he organized the 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism while rejecting... its limitations: they continued using vivid colours, thick application of paint, distinctive brush strokes, and real-life subject matter, but they were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, to distort form for expressive effect, and to use unnatural or arbitrary colour. The Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with the triviality of subject matter and the loss of structure in Impressionist paintings, though they did not agree on the way forward. Georges Seurat and his followers concerned themselves with Pointillism, the systematic use of tiny dots of colour. Paul Cézanne set out to restore a sense of order and structure to painting, to "make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums". He achieved this by reducing objects to their basic shapes while retaining the bright fresh colours of Impressionism.
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Pointillism is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed the technique in 1886, branching from Impressionism. The term Pointillism was first coined by art critics in the late 1880s to... ridicule the works of these artists, and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation. Neo-impressionism and Divisionism are also terms used to describe this technique of painting. The technique relies on the ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to blend the color spots into a fuller range of tones. It is related to Divisionism, a more technical variant of the method. Divisionism is concerned with color theory, whereas pointillism is more focused on the specific style of brushwork used to apply the paint. It is a technique with few serious practitioners today, and is notably seen in the works of Seurat, Signac and Cross. However, see also Andy Warhol's early works, and pop art. The practice of Pointillism is in sharp contrast to the traditional methods of blending pigments on a palette.
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