PARIS, FRANCE.- Musée d’Orsay presents Neo-Impressionism - From Seurat To Paul Klee, on view through July 10, 2005. Exhibition organised by the Réunion des musées nationaux and the Etablissement public du musée d’Orsay. Like the Impressionists, Neo-impressionist painters celebrated modern life. Their paintings described the world around them depicting contemporary leisure activities, urban landscapes, suburbs and the seaside. But unlike their predecessors, Neo-impressionist artists sought to find a medium of artistic expression which was stable, considered and scientific.

In the early 1880's, Georges Seurat studied treatises in optics and aesthetics by Chevreul, Rood and Charles Henry and so devised the technique of divided colours. The manifesto piece of the new school, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (1884-1886, Chicago, The Art Institute) ‚ represented in the exhibition by the beautiful sketch lent by the Metropolitan Museum ‚ was a veritable laboratory of a painting which allowed him to perfect the divided colour technique. The technique consists in juxtaposing small strokes of primary colour on the canvas where the "optical mix", traditionally created by mixing colours on the palette, is achieved instead by the viewers eye operating at a certain distance from the canvas. The first Neo-impressionist paintings by Seurat, Paul Signac, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, were exhibited in 1886.

The movement soon attracted recruits in France, where the new technique found very diverse interpretations, for example: Albert Dubois-Pillet, with his marked taste for the simplification of forms, Maximilien Luce who injected lyricism into the urban landscape and the world of the worker, Charles Angrand, who from the very beginning achieved a stunning modernity and Henri-Edmond Cross, who was particularly sensitive to the evocation of a virgin nature and the poetry of pure colours. The movement quickly spread to the rest of Europe, finding a particularly vivid echo in Belgium in the works of Theo Van Rysselberghe, Willy Finch, Henry Van de Velde and Georges Lemmen. Most of these were to remain faithful to the divided colour technique for some time and the exhibition includes two beautiful examples of their work. Through Jan Toorop, the movement then spread to Holland, and then finally to Germany, Switzerland and Italy, where several artists continued to follow its principles for varying lengths of time.

But whilst some found in Neo-impressionism an opportunity to patiently explore the resources of colour, others turned to it fleetingly, only long enough to free their palettes of mixed tones. Vincent Van Gogh, for instance, used a dotted brush-stroke on several occasions during his Parisian period, as is borne out here by his beautiful self-portrait (1887, Chicago, The Art Institute).

Seurat died prematurely in 1891, but interest in the division of colours was revived by the publication in 1898 of Signac's treatise, D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme. So it was, that on the eve of the 20th century, most innovative artists showed interest in Neo-impressionism.

Since the Neo-impressionist exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1968, the movement has not been presented to the public as a whole. Indeed the show at the Musée d'Orsay is the first exhibition dedicated to the Neo-impressionists ever to have been held in France.

It pays homage to the artists who founded the movement, re-establishing those painters who have long since fallen out of the public eye, to their rightful place. It demonstrates the diversity of approaches arising from Seurat and his friends' technique and highlights the fundamental role they played in the birth of 20thcentury painting. The exhibition circuit is organised around a series of sections underlining the Neo-impressionistís formal innovations: two-dimensionality, geometry, rhythm, arabesques, light and colour.

One of the primary consequences of combining the use of pure colours with a rhythmic brush stroke was the erasing of any illusion of spatial depth, emphasising the flatness of the canvas. The Neo-impressionists questioned traditional perspective, linear or atmospheric, by replacing it with purely formal arrangements of the represented elements. The surface of the painting existed as a universe independent from nature (Seurat, Alfalfa Fields. Saint-Denis, Signac, Saint-Briac. The Beacons, 1890 and Cross, Les Iles d'Or, 1892).

The shapes, radically simplified through a uniform treatment which contradicted the expression of modelling and volume, became remarkably geometric (Dubois-Pillet, The Towers of Saint-Sulpice, 1887 and Van de Velde, The Beach in Blankenberghe, 1888).

Neo-impressionist painters also refused to rely on traditional academic techniques to create the illusion of movement. To increase the dynamism of the "surface-plane" of their canvases, they employed a system of rhythmic lines (Seurat, The Bridge in Courbevoie, 1886) or the repetition of a motif which scanned the composition (Van Rysselberghe, Sailboats on the Escault, 1892 and Finch, Fairway in Nieuwport, 1889). For the same reasons, they favoured the arabesque, whose ample use guides the viewer's eye over the surface of their pictures (Seurat, Circus, 1891, Paris, Musée d'Orsay).

Like many of their contemporaries, the Neo-impressionists challenged the transcription of ephemeral reality sought by the impressionists. Aware of the expressive power of lines and colours, they came back to the great principles of composition in painting. With Posers ‚ represented here by three delicate studies ‚ Seurat revived the tradition of the nude, making a direct allusion to the work of the painter in the studio. Neo-impressionists wanted to transcribe the essence of a landscape or of a personality. They were interested in the figure and also in portraiture, a discipline in which they proved particularly brilliant (Signac, Femme à l'ombrelle, 1895; Van Rysselberghe, Paul Signac Steering the Olympia, 1897; L. Pissarro, The Artist's Studio. portrait of His Brother, 1887; Lemmen, The Serruys Sisters...).