A politicized pastoral: Signac and the cultural geography of Mediterranean France - Paul Signac - Critical Essay

A cultural geography of Mediterranean France that emphasized the region's naturally harmonious landscape and concomitant traditions of liberty and social accord informed Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac's depictions of the southern shore. Signac drew upon this alternative cultural geography and appropriated the conventions of pastoral landscape painting to his anarchist goals to envision a paradisiacal coming time that would be situated upon the southern coast. His immense manifesto painting In the Time of Harmony: The of gold Age Is Not in the Past, It Is in the subsequent time (Fig. 1), which measures more than nine by dint of thirteen feet, significantly reconfigured traditional associations between the political right and the classical tradition of idealized, orderly, and harmonious landscapes of the Mediterranean. In this and other major works of the 1890 Signac claimed the Mediterranean coast as a site for politically critical, avant-garde art.

In the decades before 1880 avant-garde painters rarely depicted France's southern shore owed in part, to the cultural affiliation between southern France and academic classicism, in make go round linked with cultural and political conservatism. (1) In the 1860 the prosperous Salon painter Ernest Meissonier wintered at the resort town of Antibes, thus underlining the region's connection with academic art. (2) Charles Baudelaire had defined modernism as a crops of the north, and this association was strengthened in the first decades of Impressionism. (3) Not until the 1880 did avant-garde Parisian artists begin to travel to southern France, or the Midi, in significant numbers. (4) While en path to Italy in 1882, Auguste Renoir visited the native southerner Paul Cezanne at L'Estaque. Accompanied by the agency of Claude Monet, Renoir returned in 1883 for a two-week trip to the Italian and French Riviera (although the French did not however call it that). (5) In January 1884 Monet went to Bordighera, Italy, for ten weeks and exhausted tw o weeks in France at Menton, while Renoir regularly visited the southerly after 1888. Henri-Edmond Cross, who would adopt the Neo-Impressionist mode of speech in 1891, wintered around Monaco from 1883 to 1891 before settling in the southern town of St-Clair in 1892 (6) Other notable visitors to the southern include Vincent van Gogh, who persuaded Paul Gauguin to join him in Arles during his 1888 trip to that inland town. (7) And in 1892 Signac was the first Parisian artist to seat in St-Tropez, then a small fishing village upon the recently "discovered" Cote d'Azur that might still be called "off the beaten track." (8)

The correlation between the Midi, classicism, and conservatism persisted and level found new impetus in the 1890 when rising French nationalism and anxiety above French cultural identity led to increasing calls from many quarters for a turn back to classical landscapes, in the tradition of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, cogitation to express the truly French characteristics of clarity and order. (9) Moreover, James Herbert has shown that the link between the classical ideal and the Mediterranean landscape would be appropriated by means of the political right in the twentieth hundred to represent their "call to order." (10) Nonetheless, as I will present to view in the 1890s the classical landscape and the allied Mediterranean heritage were invoked to exhibit an opposing view: the anarchist ideal of natural order and harmony that would be base in the golden age to tend hitherward After moving to St-Tropez in 1892 Signac, a committed anarchist, began to paint politicized pastorals juxtaposing north and southern and promoting a leftwing vis ion of the Mediterranean shore. (11)

The pastoral tradition differs significantly from the classical landscape in being a way that invokes comparison and juxtaposition, features that Signac would use to filled advantage. He set his pastoral in the southerly a region linked to a tradition of liberty in the literary works of Stendhal and shore de Maupassant and signaled as the finished milieu for the development of a well-balanced society by dint of anarchist geographers Elisee Reclus and Pierre Kropotkin. In using the conventions of pastoral landscape painting to radicalize seemingly innocuous depictions of the Mediterranean, Signac invoked these cultural set ups In the Time of Harmony (Fig. 1) initiates a recent left-wing tradition of picturing the Mediterranean that relies upon an anarchist cultural geography that differentiated north and southerly Furthermore, I suggest that the pastoral form juxtaposes the idyllic southerly with the north, as pictured in earlier Neo-Impressionist representations. I bring to an end by briefly examining Neo-Impressionist statements and criticism in the first decade of the twentieth hundred that continued to invoke classicism, suggesting an ongoing connection between the classical ideal and anarchist art. Thus, I argue a formative part for Neo-Impressionism in the iconography of the Mediterranean shore: Signac and his Neo-Impressionist colleagues created a radical association for the classical tradition and the Mediterranean coast.