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Artist or Maker: Signac, Paul (1863-1935)

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Provenance: The artist's studio.
Dr. Lalande, a gift from the artist.
M. Bell, Basel, by 1930.
R. Hasenböhler, Bern.
Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, London, 2 December 1981, lot 20.
Acquired at the above sale, through the agency of James Kirkman Ltd., London.

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Exhibited: Paris, La Revue indépendante, January 1888.
Brussels, 5e Exposition des XX, February 1888, no. 12.
Paris, Quatrième Exposition des Artistes Indépendants, March - May 1888, no. 632 (titled 'Op. 167. Collioure (Pyrénées - Orientales)').
Paris, Galerie Le Barc de Bouteville, 1ere Exposition des peintres impressionnistes et symbolistes, December 1891 - February 1892, no. 103 (titled 'Balancelles à Collioure').

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Literature: Cahier d'opus [The artist's handlist, produced 1887-1902], no. 167 (titled 'Les Balancelles').
F. Fénéon, La Revue indépendante, January 1888, p. 174.
L'Art moderne, 5 February 1888, pp. 41-45.
Néo [P. Signac], Le cri du peuple, 9 February 1888, p. 3.
E. Verhaeren, La Revue indépendante, March 1888, p. 457.
E. Demolder, La Société nouvelle, vol. I, 1888, p. 183.
M. de Faramond, La Vie franco-russe, 24 March 1888, p. 114.
A. Alexandre, Paris, 26 March 1888, p. 2.
Néo [P. Signac], Le Cri du peuple, 29 March 1888, p. 3.
G. Kahn, La Revue indépendante, April 1888, p. 162.
J. Le Fustec, Journal des artistes, 1 April 1888.
G. Geffroy, 'Pointillé - Cloisonnisme', in La Justice, 11 April 1888, p. 1.
F. Fénéon, 'Le Néo-Impressionnisme à la Quatrième Exposition des Artistes Indépendants', in L'Art moderne, 15 April 1888, pp. 121-123.
La Revue indépendante, Paris, May 1888, p. 408.
J. Christophe, Journal des artistes, 6 May 1888, p. 148.
R. Darzens, La Revue moderne, 10 May 1888, p. 445.
Entretiens politiques et littéraires, February 1892, p. 93.
Cahier manuscrit [The artist's handlist, produced 1902-1909].
G. Lévy [in collaboration with the artist], Précatalogue, produced circa 1929-1932, p. 165.
Exh. cat., Signac, Musée du Louvre, Paris, December 1963 - February 1964, pp. 22-26.
Sotheby's Preview, November - December 1981 (illustrated p. 2).
Art at Auction. The Year at Sotheby's, 1981-1982 (illustrated p. 84).
L'Oeil, November 1981, no. 316, p. 7 (illustrated).
Connaissance des Arts, March 1982 (illustrated p. 33).
The Burlington Magazine, March 1982 (illustrated p. 86).
F. Cachin, Signac: catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 2000, no. 155 (illustrated pp. 100 and 185).

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF SIMON SAINSBURY

Painted in September to October 1887, Collioure. Les Balancelles is a masterpiece dating from the early mature period of Paul Signac's Neo-Impressionism. It was only during 1886 and 1887 that Signac had truly consolidated his own Pointillist style, taking much of his inspiration from the ideas and rigour, both intellectual and painterly, of his friend Georges Seurat. Within a short time, Signac had become not only one of the foremost adherents of Pointillism, but had also mastered the concepts and techniques to the extent that he was creating masterpieces in his own right while also acting as a spokesman for it, a role that was clearly unsuited to the more reticent Seurat. It was around Signac that more and more adherents gathered, especially in Belgium, where at precisely the time that Collioure. Les Balancelles was painted, the artist had come into contact with Les XX, a group of avant-garde artists in whose early 1888 exhibition in Brussels this picture was shown. Earlier in the year, he had also met Vincent van Gogh, an encounter that would completely change the Dutch artist's appreciation of colour. While he never adopted the colour theories of Neo-Impressionism, Signac's Pointillism nonetheless prompted an explosion of kaleidoscopic, richly built-up oils in the masterpieces that Van Gogh created during the next couple of years.

Collioure. Les Balancelles is a luminous painting which perfectly encapsulates Signac's intense accomplishment in adapting the Pointillist techniques to his own purposes. It is filled with the sense of harmony that would come to inform all of his most highly-regarded works. Bathed in an intense light, highly evocative of the Mediterranean, where Signac was staying at Collioure, this picture has a deliberate visual rhythm, a dimension of his work that would increase over the following few years, resulting in some of his later pictures even receiving titles that contained explicit references to music. It was partly with this in mind that Signac assigned 'Opus' numbers to his more finished works at this time, as here. In terms of composition, the sails, the masts, the barrels and indeed the horizon and the breakwater all combine to create an evocative echo of sheet music, resembling quavers, breves and crotchets.

Signac's appreciation and exploitation of the subtleties of colour, which are emphasised through the heightened intensity of the Pointillist manner, are apparent throughout Collioure. Les Balancelles, not least in the contrast between the different barrels, or the variations in hue of the sky, which is more lapis-like where it provides a contrasting backdrop to the sails on the left, whereas it fades to a luminous, bleached light blue to the right. Signac has used the tiny dabs of colour, sometimes contrasting and sometimes underscoring the general colour in each area, in order to create a surface that is alive with activity, lending the colour an almost electric vividness. However, with masterful restraint and understanding, he has avoided using this scene as a pretext for an explosive, proto-Fauve exploration of intense colours per se, as Matisse and Derain would almost two decades later when they visited Collioure together. Some people were surprised by the paleness that seeped into Signac's paintings of the South of France, prompting him to explain, discussing the pictures of Cassis that he created during the same period, that in fact,

'I think that I have never done paintings as 'objectively exact' as those of Cassis. In that region there is nothing but white. The light, reflected everywhere, devours all the local colours and makes the shadows appear grey' (Signac, quoted in exh. cat., Signac 1863-1935, New York, 2001, p. 108).

It is this that is apparent in swathes of Collioure. Les Balancelles, where the colour appears to have been leeched out. Signac has created this effect through the juxtaposition of tiny flecks of paint that, depending on the artist's intent in each area of the picture, deliberately lighten or intensify the tone of the colour. Thus, there are blues and reds evident in the shadowed ends of the barrels, as well as almost flesh-tone colours in parts of the sea and sky, designed, according to the application of theories of colour and perception, to heighten the general effect of the painting. In Collioure. Les Balancelles, the lively surface shows that Signac was not rigorously enslaved to the dictates of the Pointillism he had espoused and advocated. The darting brushstrokes show a happy medium between the enthusiastic rendering of the scene and the stringent boundaries implied by the concepts that underpinned Neo-Impressionism. The scientific, clinical techniques and discipline of Seurat have been foregone in order to create a picture that retains a warm and vibrant humanity, an enjoyment of the paint and the act of painting, that was made palpable by the surface and texture of the oils.

Signac was an enthusiastic painter, and also an enthusiastic sailor, and scenes of ports, harbours and seascapes would become more and more central to his work over the forthcoming years, partly because he sailed so much from place to place. The theme of water naturally had artistic aspects to recommend itself as well, allowing for a more thorough, complex, rewarding and ultimately poetic exploration of effects of light and colour. At the same time, it allowed Signac to indulge in his two great loves, as is already evident in the care with which he has depicted these feluccas, which have an exotic aspect to them, heightening the sense of the artist revelling in the new world of life in the South, life in the Mediterranean, to which he was now being exposed. These crafts, more often associated with sailing on the Nile, bring a certain sense of the foreign to the painting, accentuating its lyricism, while the sails themselves serve a great formal purpose in providing the sweeping triangles of bleached light that emphasise the other deliberately muted colours of the scene surrounding them.

Signac painted four scenes during his stay at Collioure, each one showing the harbour to a different effect. Two of the other pictures in this series of four are in prominent museum collections: Collioure. Le Clocher (C151) is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Holland, while Collioure. La Plage de la ville (C153) is in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. It is an indication of the quality of all these works that, within a short time of their execution, the critic and friend of Signac, Félix Fénéon, wrote about the beauty of:

'four landscapes from Collioure (August-September-October 1887), perspectival effects driving a sharp angle of the sea into the beach, houses as daunting as citadels, no greenery, a final calm, a generally, infinitely gentle blondness. For the Midi of M. Signac's paintings is in no way apocryphal: it is a Midi in which the orange of the sun reflected everywhere pales the sky, renders the local qualities anemic, weakens the reactive force of the colours, clarifies the shadows. More superbly than ever before, M. Signac demonstrates the virtues of observation and harmony' (Fénéon, 1888, quoted in ibid., p. 131).

Intriguingly, of these four paintings, it was the present work that merited the most attention, featuring in a small but historic exhibition in the offices at 11, chaussée d'Antin of La Revue indépendante in January 1888. There, it was shown alongside a selection of works by some of the other great artists of the day including Manet and Signac's fellow Neo-Impressionists, Pissarro and Seurat. It was then shown in Brussels at the 1888 exhibition organised by Les XX, with whom Signac had made such important contacts during the year of its execution, when he had accompanied Seurat to Belgium. Signac had in fact been told off, and subsequently briefly shunned, by Seurat on the first occasion, as he was upset at the former's 'proselytising.' This had, though, led to Signac's acquaintance with Théo van Rysselberghe among others, and to his increasing importance and respect amongst the Belgian avant garde, which would be reflected in the adoption of the Neo-Impressionist idiom by a swathe of artists there during the following months and years, including Willy Finch and Henry van de Velde.

It was this new esteem that doubtlessly contributed to Signac being asked to join the exhibition the following year. Of the 1888 exhibition of the works of Les XX and their selected guests, Signac himself wrote a review under the pseudonym 'Néo' in which he described, in perhaps unsurprisingly favourable terms, Collioure. Les Balancelles and its sister pictures as:

'Four seascapes from Collioure, a Midi with blond shadows and sparkling with soft colours. One is surprised not to see the emphatic blues which are the pride of the run-of-the-mill painters of Mediterranean landscapes. These gentlemen do not see that orange tone-- the light of the sun reflected from all sides-- discolours the shadows, attenuates the local colours, and washes out the pure sky. The Goncourt brothers, better painters than M. Montenard, have Coriolis say: 'Look at the white there in the corner of the studio; well, I am going to surprise you: that is precisely the value of the colour of the shadow at Magnesia in the month of July'' (Signac, 1888, writing under the pen-name Néo, quoted in exh. cat., Signac 1863-1935, New York, 2001, p. 130).

Signac is bringing the attention of his readers to the deliberate avoidance of bright colours in Collioure. Les Balancelles and its fellows, while emphasising his restraint and discipline in capturing that blinding Mediterranean light. It is a telling reflection of the accomplishment of this picture in particular that when Collioure. Les Balancelles was shown at the Quatrième Exposition des Artistes Indépendants later that year, Rodolphe Darzens would emphasise the superiority of this picture to its sister works, writing,
'But the most beautiful of these four canvases is no. 632: a large white sail floating on the high sea. All the skill of the painter results in the complete harmonisation of this cruel and dazzling whiteness with the bluish tones of the sky and the sea and the yellow tones of the sand or the edifices' (R. Darzens, 1888, quoted in F. Cachin, Signac: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Paris, 2000, p. 185).