THE INFLUENCE OF NEO-IMPRESSIONISM The inclusion of Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (The Art Institute of Chicago) in the final Impressionist exhibition, in 1886, had a profound effect on the subsequent development of European art. Before the year was out, artists as diverse in age and aesthetic temperament as Camille Pissarro, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Signac had begun to adopt Seurat’s technique, which he called Scientific Impressionism but which became known as Neo Impressionism. Neo-Impressionism consisted of applying spots of pure color side-by-side on the canvas so that, theoretically, the viewer’s eye would automatically mix the juxtaposed colors, thereby creating truer and more intense shades. By the early 189os, there were hundreds of artists throughout Europe influenced by Seurat’s technique who were painting dots of color on thoroughly organized canvases.

Georges Lemmen’s Portrait of the Artist’s Sister and Henri Edmond Cross’s Beach at Cabasson are two works created by artists early in the Neo-Impressionist phase of their careers. Lemmen had painted smooth, objective renderings of the people and interiors of his native Belgium before turning to Seurat’s technique in 1890. Cross (who changed his name from Delacroix to its English equivalent to avoid connections with the great Romantic painter) had been a successful Salon painter whose beautifully constructed, sensuous paintings of the late 1880's show little evidence that he would become susceptible to the influence of Seurat.

Lemmen’s portrait of his elder sister, Julie, who never married and acted as a nanny to his children, reveals the emphasis on silhouette, simplification and abstraction of shapes, and Neo-Impressionist technique of his mentor, Seurat. In this beautifully painted composition, the spots of color vary in size depending on the degree of detail and subtlety of modeling that the artist wished to convey. Where Lemmen differed from Seurat was in his interest in personality. Julie Lemmen’s delicate yet indestructible character, her sadness and severity, all are communicated through the avant-garde screen of dots that fixes her on the canvas.

Cross owed more to Seurat’s technique than Lemmen did, for he adopted the decorative surface construction and abstract analysis of landscape as well as the dotted facture of Seurat’s paintings. Seurat had died the year before Cross painted and exhibited The Beach at Cabasson, an investigation of the interplay between the human figure and the landscape — in this case, a beautiful stretch of beach along the French Riviera, near Cabasson, where the artist lived from 1891 until his death in 1910. One senses in Cross’s arresting composition a form of conscious quotation from Seurat’s work. The subject recalls the recently deceased artist’s high-keyed beach scenes, and the three figures were derived from the three females in his Models (Barnes Foundation, Marion, Pennsylvania). Yet, these are not three boys on the beach together but one boy posed in three different positions and placed with hieratic precision along the plane in the foreground. The figures, who seem to move in slow motion before us, immobilize the landscape; they take it beyond time. Thus, the painting hovers mysteriously between Neo Impressionism and Symbolism. The light depicted in the painting is the bright, eternal light of the Mediterranean, carefully observed by an inhabitant of the region, and, yet, the landscape is arranged in patterns so decorative that it becomes unreal.