In the context of this artwork, explore the Criticism of the Overview.
At the start of the movement, Neo-Impressionism was not welcomed by the art world and the general public. In 1886, Seurat's first exhibition of his now most famous work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, inspired torrents of negative criticism. The commotion evoked by this artwork could only be described with words like "bedlam" and "scandal".Neo-Impressionists' use of small segments of color to compose a whole picture was considered even more controversial than its preceding movement; Impressionism had been notorious for its spontaneous representation of fleeting moments and roughness in brushwork. Neo-Impressionism provoked similar responses for opposite reasons. The meticulously calculated regularity of brush strokes was deemed to be too mechanical and antithetical to the commonly accepted notions of creative processes set for the 19th century.
According to modern sources, much of the critique of the Neo-Impressionists at the time is just out of focus. In December 1894, the independent socialist daily La Petite République featured a front-page column by critic Adolphe Tabarant. He remarked on the new Neo-Impressionist cooperative gallery in the Rue Laffitte, focusing on Luce and Signac, also known as the young masters: "The art has, perhaps, a tendency toward an ill-tempered synthesis, toward a scientific observation that is too dry. But how it vibrates, and how it rings with truth! What an expenditure of coloring, what a profusion of agitated notions, in which one senses the noble and sincere passions of those young men who, after lamented Seurat, strive to capture all the secrets of light from the sun!"The Neo-Impressionists were supported from the beginning in 1884 by the Journal des Artistes. Other papers also discussed the future Neo-Impressionists together, thus showing that they had formed as a group through tier creation of a democratic exhibit space, not their movement or artistic style.After the turn of the century, the critic Félix Fénéon critiqued Signac’s idealism in his later work. He compared Signac to Claude and Poussin by saying that Claude Lorrain knew all the details of the real world, and that he was able to express the world contained it by his beautiful spirit. He relates Signac to an "inheritor of landscape tradition that envisioned the realm of harmony".
Signac Poussin Claude Impressionism A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte Félix Fénéon Claude Lorrain