Maximilien Luce

French, (1858–1941)

Maximilien Luce was one of the original pioneers of the Neo-Impressionist movement. Often known as the pointillists, these painters sought to apply optical science to art for the first time, challenging the looser technique of the Impressionists. Using small brushstrokes, the style sought to create an unprecedented brightness and vitality by using the contrasts and harmonies revealed by the invention of the colour wheel; understanding for the first time that the viewer’s eye was able to synthesise these into natural tones. After its foundation by Georges Seurat in the mid 1880s, Luce would join the movement in 1887 and work closely with Seurat and his protégé Paul Signac.

Lagny, le Pont de Fer sur la Marne is one of a small corpus of works which hail from the first phase of Neo-Impressionism. The 1880s represents the movement at its most avant-garde, shocking both the Impressionists and the academic establishment, with its scientific technique. With its array of bright blues, greens and pinks, Luce demonstrates his masterful control of colour; creating rich shadows and bright highlights with a more varied brushwork than that exhibited by his contemporaries. Yet Lagny, le Pont de Fer sur la Marne represents more than a beautiful evocation of Neo-Impressionist technique. With its two mysterious foreground figures standing out amidst their suburban setting, Luce’s work is also a compelling document for the revolutionary aspirations that underpinned the tranquil surfaces of his canvases. Between pointillism and politics, Maximilien Luce’s painting is a rare and emblematic example of the NeoImpressionist project.

Luce’s varied brushstrokes and visible impasto contribute to create a work that feels far more alive than compositions by Seurat or Signac, who were often subject to complaints by contemporary critics that in their works ‘life had come to a standstill’. Brushwork and colour thus converge in the work of Luce; his palette is more muted than his fellow artists, but his works nonetheless achieve a more naturalistic finish. The colouring of Lagny, le Pont de Fer sur la Marne represents a symphony in orange and purple that unifies sky, reflection and shadow. The artist’s complex use of pinks and purples was noted at only his second appearance at the Salon, with the crtic Jules Christophe noting that across the ‘ten important canvases by Maximilien Luce … all are harmonized in violet’. Luce’s inventive Neo-Impressionist technique allows the painting to be suffused throughout with the colour’s warm tones, unifying the diverse areas of colour across the composition.

In his 1898 treatise on painting, Signac made the argument that for art to be significant it had to ‘consist of both compositional harmony and moral harmony’, and it is these twin facets that define Luce’s career and Lagny, le Pont de Fer sur la Marne in particular. The accomplished brushwork and scientific colouring imbues the painting with a warmth and life that helps to further its utopian message. At the same time, the presence of its complex figures ensures that there is a point to all of the complex technique demanded by NeoImpressionism.