Zur Zeit der Harmonie

Signac worked on this large canvas from 1893 to 1895, at the height of the anarchist ferment in France, and he first meant to call it In the Time of Anarchy. In those years bombings and trials had made the word dangerous, so he softened it to In the Time of Harmony and kept the real message in its subtitle, that the golden age is still to come. On a sunny shore near Saint-Tropez, people read, dance, pick fruit and paint, work and leisure flowing together in a society with no masters. He built the whole scene from tiny separate dots of pure color, the pointillist method put to the service of a political daydream. Since 1938 it has hung in the grand staircase of the town hall of Montreuil, a working-class town east of Paris.