Radiant points of departure Radiance: NGV's neo-Impressionist
summer The National Gallery of Victoria's latest exhibition
introduces us to the extraordinary personalities who contributed
to the birth and development of neo-Impressionism in France and
Belgium from the 1880s through to the outbreak of the First
World War. When Georges Seurat unveiled his huge painting A
Sunday on La Grande Jatte in Paris in 1886, he shocked the
Parisian art scene to its core. Instead of mixing colours on the
palette or the canvas, Seurat had, with great patience and
precision, placed lozenges of block colours side by side on the
canvas. Known as pointillism, the idea was to make colours more
vibrant as they hit the viewer's eyes. "What he was on about was
the notion that by applying individual dabs of colour side by
side, because they bounce off each other, that creates light
when it hits our retina," explains the National Gallery of
Victoria's senior curator of international art, Ted Gott.
Radiance : The Neo-Impressionists Pau