Title: Radiance: The Neo-Impressionists
Author: MARINA FERRETTI BOCQUILLON
An absorbing examination of the birth and development of this extraordinary art movement in France and Belgium from the 1880s through to the outbreak of the First World War. Neo-Impressionism grew from the creative spark ignited by two young artists, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, in 1884. Adopting the lighter palette of the earlier Impressionists, but rejecting their swift technique and mixing of colours, Seurat and Signac championed the idea of painting in individual tones, placing touches of pure colour side by side with calm precision, in order to create radically luminous paintings informed by new optical colour harmonies. Featuring an essay by world-renowned Neo- Impressionist art expert Marina Ferretti Bocquillon, and generously illustrated with dazzling reproductions of works by Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Maximilien Luce and Théo Van Rysselberghe, among others, Radiance celebrates the profound impact the Neo-Impressionists had on visual culture at the close of the nineteenth century – leading ultimately to the birth of modern abstraction and colour painting.