Of the two exhibitions being hosted over the autumn at the LAC, one is dedicated to a major representative of the art of the second half of the 19th century, and great precursor of modern painting: Paul Signac (1863–1935). The exhibition, the product of fruitful collaboration with Lausanne’s Fondation de l’Hermitage, comprises more than 150 works from an exceptional Swiss private collection, and includes paintings, drawings, watercolours and engravings. This collection represents the largest privately held body of the artist’s work, and offers a remarkable view of his entire artistic journey, from his early Impressionist paintings and his Neo-impressionism period through to his final work. 

The path of the exhibition traces the various phases which marked Signac’s creative and stylistic evolution, starting from the point at which he abandoned his study of architecture and decided to dedicate himself, teaching himself, to painting. Although he had already had some prior contact with figures within the Impressionist group, his meeting with Georges Seurat in Paris in 1884 was to prove pivotal to his artistic development. From that moment on, the two maintained a close personal friendship and founded, alongside Odilon Redon, the Société des artistes indépendants, which, the following year, gave rise to the Neo-Impressionism artistic movement. Under the influence of Seurat, Signac abandoned the short, quick brushstrokes of the Impressionists, in order to experiment with Pointillism, a pictorial technique that used minute dots of pure colour, drawing its inspiration from contemporary scientific research into light. Thanks to both his pictorial work and theoretical contributions, Signac became a figure of reference for many within subsequent generations, not least those active in the fields of Fauvism and Cubism.