Viaduc à Auteuil

Paul Signac's Viaduc à Auteuil is an historic painting from one of the great masters of Neo-Impressionism. This picture, which was formerly in the collection of Gaston Lévy, one of his greatest patrons and collectors and the founder of Monoprix, shows the viaduct at Auteuil in 16th arrondissement of Paris, with a train trundling across the Seine, discernible by its plume of white smoke, which trails across the sky. The white of the smoke creates a subtle contrast with the deliberately muted, even hazy, hues that Signac has used to capture this scene, accenting its luminosity, itself probably owing a debt to Signac's visit to London in 1898 to see the works of J.M.W. Turner. Signac has used dabs of colour to evoke the shimmering water, the smoke coming from the train, the boat and the buildings, each in a different hue, and also the sky itself. Meanwhile, the arches and structure of the viaduct add a rational rigour to the composition, spanning across with an almost abstract regularity, recalling the fascination with the industrial that was captured in the pictures of the bridge at Argenteuil painted by Claude Monet some decades earlier.

Since the birth of Neo-Impressionism in the 1880s, there had been a gradual evolution, not least in the works of Signac himself. After the death of Georges Seurat in 1891, Signac introduced an increasing freedom into his work, using larger brushmarks to create the mosaic-like surface of paintings such as Viaduc à Auteuil. In this he may also have been informed by his increasing use of watercolour, a medium to which he turned in the early 1890s, and the return to occasional pleinairisme that this involved.

Shortly after Viaduc à Auteuil was painted, it was included in Signac's first one-man show, held at the Galerie Bing. On that occasion, this picture was one of those named by Edmond Cousturier in his enthusiastic review (perhaps his enthusiasm was to be expected: his wife Lucie was herself a painter and a student of Signac). Viaduc à Auteuil was also shown at Signac's show at the Galerie E. Druet in 1904, an exhibition visited and admired by Henri Matisse, and in 1907 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. That one-man exhibition was organised by Félix Fénéon, one of the great promoters of Neo-Impressionism and a friend of Signac's; it had a clear effect on the painters of the day, for instance André Derain, who wrote to Matisse, his fellow Fauve, to state: 'Signac triumphs at Bernheim's' (Derain, quoted in M. Ferretti-Bocquillon, ed., Signac, 1863-1935, exh. cat., New York, 2001, p. 311). On the occasion of that exhibition, Signac made illustrations of some of the pictures featured for the catalogue; it may be to this that the drawing in the collection of the Louvre, Paris relates.

As well as featuring in shows which impressed Matisse and Derain Viaduc à Auteuil was also one of only two paintings sent to the survey of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism partly organised by Count Harry Kessler in Weimar in 1903; this show later travelled to Krefeld. Signac's works would be extensively publicised and exhibited in Germany over the coming years. Indeed, it was in 1903 that his celebrated book, D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme, was published in Krefeld, translated into German. Signac's bold colour theories would have a lasting impact on the development of German art at this time.