Paul Signac (1863-1935) was a French painter who took over Neo-Impressionism when Georges Seurat died at 31. He is known for pictures built from small touches of pure color, for harbors painted from the boats he sailed, and for running the Salon des Indépendants, the exhibition with no jury, for 27 years.
The label people stick on his style is one he and Seurat avoided. They called their method divisionism, the separation of color into pure touches that the eye blends, and left "pointillism" to the critics. Seurat was gone by 1891. Signac had forty-four years left to decide what to do with what he left behind.
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Signac was twenty and self-taught when he met Seurat in 1884, and he became his friend, his supporter and his loudest advocate. Seurat died suddenly on 29 March 1891, less than a week after the two had attended a farewell dinner for Gauguin. Signac went to the funeral two days later. In May he drew up an inventory of Seurat's works so that the estate could be settled.
Camille Pissarro, who had backed both men, drew the obvious conclusion. With the leader dead, he declared, pointillism was finished. Signac was 27. He did not agree, and he did not prove it by copying the dead man. Within a few years he was painting from a boat on the Mediterranean, with strokes far larger than Seurat's dots, and he would spend the rest of his life making the movement outlast its founder.
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