"A large painting looks from a distance to be a classic 1930s style French poster, but get closer. Closer. Much closer, and you'll realise that it's not painted conventionally, but made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny dots. This is Le Chahut by Georges Seurat and is the centrepiece of an exhibition about pointillism, painting by dots. Pointillism was one of several styles that emerged in the 30-40 years around the turn of the 19th century, upending painting entirely."
"The idea behind it was that rather than blending, for example, blue and yellow paints on the palette to create green, they would place tiny dots on the canvas, and when you stand back, the yellow and blue dots merge to form green. Although somewhat faded from popular consciousness today, pointillism is all around us. It's what underpins a lot of colour printing - the use of tiny dots of the three core colours to form the thousands of colours we see when the page is held up. The modern printer uses microscopic dots that the eye can't see individually, but the artists revelled in showing off what they were up to - expressing the dots visibly as part of the artwork itself."
"Most of the exhibition draws on a collection by one remarkable woman, Helene Kröller-Müller, the daughter of a rich industrialist who spent her wealth on art, put much of it on display for the public, and just before she died, gave the whole lot to the Dutch government. As a group collection united by technique, it's an exhibition that wanders somewhat from portraits to landscapes to overtly political."
Le Chahut by Georges Seurat exemplifies pointillism, a technique that constructs images from numerous tiny, discrete dots instead of blended paint. The method relies on optical mixing so adjacent colored dots merge visually when viewed from a distance. Pointillism underpins modern colour printing through the use of small dots of core colours to produce many hues. Artists frequently left dots visible as an aesthetic choice. A major collection assembled by Helene Kröller-Müller was donated to the Dutch government. The grouped works range from portraits and landscapes to politically themed scenes, including strike-related images and a foundry labourers painting.
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