Water Music: Signac’s Development of a Visual Symphony
Chris Gioia, Princeton Class of 2009A touch is only one of the infinite colored elements which will, when assembled, compose the painting, an element having precisely the same importance as a note in a symphony. (Signac qtd Ratliff 259)
For Paul Signac, a French Neo-Impressionist painter of the late nineteenth century, the harmony experienced when listening to a symphony served as his inspiration for a series of paintings that he produced in 1891 titled La Mer. French for “the sea,” La Mer exemplifies a radical break from the traditional notions of visual artwork, as the five paintings in this series use motifs of the sea to represent different movements of a symphony. The relationship that Signac develops between the sea and harmony, particularly derived from the experience of a symphony, suggests the sea as a symbolic representation of music. Moving as one mass, the sea for Signac truly exemplifies a harmonic entity, all water flowing and moving together with various currents and waves, lacking individual and separable parts. As Signac explained, the “infinite colored elements” unite to form the paintings' "music," just as individual musical notes can be arranged to form a symphony. In this way, Signac literally creates “infinite colored elements” emblematic of music in his La Mer series through the technique of “divisionism,” also known as “pointillism.” Literally using “a touch” when applying paint in the pointillist style, Signac, like a composer arranging musical notes, adds "touches" of various colors to his canvases to develop a harmonious whole, with dots of color representing musical notes. In this way, Signac's studied understanding of color and the rigors of the pointillist technique, combined with the ties of musical harmony to oceanic harmony, allowed him to produce a visual symphony in his La Mer series, thereby joining the genres of painting and music.
The Exhibit
Musical Influences
Visual Movements
Color and Music
Conclusion
Works Cited
About the Author
The Gallery
Opus 217: A Precursor to La Mer
Debussy's "La Mer"
The Gesamtkunstwerk
