{"id":133450,"date":"2025-09-10T09:55:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T09:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/133450\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T09:55:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T09:55:09","slug":"radical-harmony-at-the-national-gallery-review-a-series-of-colour-bombs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/133450\/","title":{"rendered":"Radical Harmony at the National Gallery review \u2014 a series of colour bombs"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a lot to unpack in the title of the National Gallery\u2019s new exhibition, Radical Harmony: H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Kr\u00f6ller-M\u00fcller\u2019s Neo-Impressionists, very little of which explains why you should see it. Do many people know what a neo-impressionist is \u2014 or, more to the point, who?<\/p>\n

But if you are a fan of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, then this is the show for you. Neo-impressionism, known more commonly by the term \u201cpointillism\u201d (which its practitioners did not like), was an influential approach to painting rooted in colour theory. These artists used dots of pure colour, contrasted with opposing hues on the colour wheel \u2014 yellow with violet, orange with blue \u2014 to maximise luminosity, while prioritising the harmony and balance of a composition. <\/p>\n

Neo-impressionists were often accused of being mechanical, a criticism that this exhibition doesn\u2019t entirely succeed in countering. Learning that Signac got on his high horse when he saw his friend Th\u00e9o van Rysselberghe using more naturalistic colours, accusing him of breaking with neo-impressionist practices, doesn\u2019t help. <\/p>\n

\"Oil<\/p>\n

Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp, 1885, by Georges Seurat<\/p>\n

\u00a9 TATE, LONDON 2025<\/p>\n

Still, there are some lovely canvases here \u2014 the vast majority from the collection of the German-born H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Kr\u00f6ller-M\u00fcller, , one of the richest women in the Netherlands at the turn of the 20th century. She set up a public museum in 1913 in Otterlo, which now also holds the largest collection of works by Van Gogh outside his eponymous institution in Amsterdam. One of his paintings, an 1888 variation on The Sower, is here, though he only dabbled in pointillism.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Read more art reviews, guides and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n

With a few exceptions \u2014 Van Rysselberghe\u2019s image of painter Anna Bloch; Georges Lemmen\u2019s 1890 monochrome drawing of Jan Toorop, or Toorop\u2019s two curiously packed canvases \u2014 the portraits here are pretty dusty. What the neo-impressionists are good at is light and landscape. <\/p>\n

\"Oil<\/p>\n

Coastal Scene, 1892, by Th\u00e9o van Rysselberghe<\/p>\n

THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON<\/p>\n

Van Rysselberghe\u2019s spare Coastal Scene, 1892, and Henri-Edmond Cross\u2019s 1891-2 Beach at La Vignasse shimmer with cool and heat respectively. Seurat\u2019s soaring coastline, Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp, 1885, and Van Rysselberghe\u2019s picture inspired by it, \u201cPer-Kiridy\u201d at High Tide, 1889, have all the atmosphere you could wish for, with the call of the gulls on the edge of hearing.<\/p>\n

And there are some very unexpected things: Seurat\u2019s Chahut, 1889-90, an interior cabaret scene, where dancers perform the scandalous cancan, is like a neo-impressionist take on Toulouse-Lautrec crossed with the English painter Edward Burra. Maximilien Luce\u2019s large-scale image of an iron foundry has shades of futurism, with its dynamic diagonals and its celebration of sweat and steel. <\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/p>\n

The Iron Foundry, 1899, by Maximilien Luce<\/p>\n

COLLECTION KR\u00d6LLER-M\u00dcLLER MUSEUM, OTTERLO, THE NETHERLANDS. PHOTOGRAPHER: RIK KLEIN GOT<\/p>\n

An anarchist, as several of the neo-impressionists were, Luce was a fierce supporter of workers\u2019 rights who witnessed first-hand the inhumane conditions under which steelworkers toiled. The painting\u2019s wryly witty caption points out that for many years it hung in the office of Kr\u00f6ller-M\u00fcller\u2019s husband, who ran the family\u2019s iron ore and shipping business.<\/p>\n

I find these artists\u2019 precision less thrilling than the looser work of their predecessors. A bit more anarchy wouldn\u2019t go amiss. But the hang \u2014 the first exhibition in these basement galleries following four years of closure \u2014 is beautiful, the walls of cool grey and vivid violet setting off a series of colour-bombs.
\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606
From Sep 13 to Feb 8 2026, nationalgallery.org.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is a lot to unpack in the title of the National Gallery\u2019s new exhibition, Radical Harmony: H\u00e9l\u00e8ne…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133451,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-133450","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}