There is a lot to unpack in the title of the National Gallery’s new exhibition, Radical Harmony: Hélène Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists, very little of which explains why you should see it. Do many people know what a neo-impressionist is — or, more to the point, who?
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 “pointillism” (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 — yellow with violet, orange with blue — to maximise luminosity, while prioritising the harmony and balance of a composition.
Neo-impressionists were often accused of being mechanical, a criticism that this exhibition doesn’t entirely succeed in countering. Learning that Signac got on his high horse when he saw his friend Théo van Rysselberghe using more naturalistic colours, accusing him of breaking with neo-impressionist practices, doesn’t help.
Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp, 1885, by Georges Seurat
© TATE, LONDON 2025
Still, there are some lovely canvases here — the vast majority from the collection of the German-born Hélène Kröller-Müller, , 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.
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With a few exceptions — Van Rysselberghe’s image of painter Anna Bloch; Georges Lemmen’s 1890 monochrome drawing of Jan Toorop, or Toorop’s two curiously packed canvases — the portraits here are pretty dusty. What the neo-impressionists are good at is light and landscape.
Coastal Scene, 1892, by Théo van Rysselberghe
THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
Van Rysselberghe’s spare Coastal Scene, 1892, and Henri-Edmond Cross’s 1891-2 Beach at La Vignasse shimmer with cool and heat respectively. Seurat’s soaring coastline, Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp, 1885, and Van Rysselberghe’s picture inspired by it, “Per-Kiridy” at High Tide, 1889, have all the atmosphere you could wish for, with the call of the gulls on the edge of hearing.
And there are some very unexpected things: Seurat’s 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’s large-scale image of an iron foundry has shades of futurism, with its dynamic diagonals and its celebration of sweat and steel.
The Iron Foundry, 1899, by Maximilien Luce
COLLECTION KRÖLLER-MÜLLER MUSEUM, OTTERLO, THE NETHERLANDS. PHOTOGRAPHER: RIK KLEIN GOT
An anarchist, as several of the neo-impressionists were, Luce was a fierce supporter of workers’ rights who witnessed first-hand the inhumane conditions under which steelworkers toiled. The painting’s wryly witty caption points out that for many years it hung in the office of Kröller-Müller’s husband, who ran the family’s iron ore and shipping business.
I find these artists’ precision less thrilling than the looser work of their predecessors. A bit more anarchy wouldn’t go amiss. But the hang — the first exhibition in these basement galleries following four years of closure — is beautiful, the walls of cool grey and vivid violet setting off a series of colour-bombs.
★★★☆☆
From Sep 13 to Feb 8 2026, nationalgallery.org.uk