アンティーブ、ピンクの雲

Signac had settled at Antibes in 1913, a year before the war, and the war largely stopped him painting. He was a pacifist with anarchist sympathies, past 50 and far from the front, and for long stretches he could not work at all. This canvas was one of the things that brought him back. He wrote to his old friend the critic Félix Fénéon that he was making a portrait of a cloud, and that he could see Michelangelo-like figures in it. He finished it in 1916, the year of Verdun and the Somme. The mosaic of separate rectangular strokes is the neo-impressionist method he had worked out with Seurat in the 1880s, by then grown much broader and looser than the fine dots they began with.