Capo di Noli, perto de Gênova

By 1898 the movement Signac had built with Georges Seurat had lost its founder. Seurat had died young, seven years before, and Signac had moved south to settle on the Mediterranean coast. This headland on the Italian Riviera near Genoa is worked entirely in separated touches of pure colour, a method Seurat called divisionism and most people call pointillism. What matters here is not the impression of a real afternoon. Signac calculated the whole thing in the studio first, balancing a mosaic of orange, violet and green so the colours mix in your eye rather than on the canvas. Those blocks of unmixed colour carried further than he planned. Within a decade the Fauves in France and the Expressionists in Germany were building their pictures out of them.