The demolisher

In June 1896 Signac noted in his journal that he wanted to paint a series of men at work, the haulers, the demolishers, the builders. That September a lithograph of his showing wreckers with pickaxes appeared in a print album issued by Les Temps nouveaux, the anarchist paper edited by Jean Grave. On 4 January 1897 he began this canvas on the same theme, two and a half metres tall. A shirtless labourer swings his pick over the rubble while a second man attacks the ruins behind him, and beyond them palatial buildings stand broken under a pink sky. Signac showed it at the Salon des Indépendants in 1901 as a panel for a Maison du Peuple, one of the meeting halls of the workers' movement. It never reached one. His family gave it to the state in 1947, which sent it for half a century to the museum of Denain, a coal-mining town in northern France.