Futurism

Giacomo Balla

Futurism came into being with the appearance of a manifesto published by the poet Filippo Marinetti on the front page of the February 20, 1909, issue of Le Figaro. It was the very first manifesto of this kind.

Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists. He and others espoused a love of speed, technology and violence. Futurism was presented as a modernist movement celebrating the technological, future era. The car, the plane, the industrial town were representing the motion in modern life and the technological triumph of man over nature. Some of these ideas, specially the use of modern materials and technique, were taken up later by Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968), the cubist, the constructivist and the dadaist.

Futurism was inspired by the development of Cubism and went beyond its techniques. The Futurist painters made the rhythm of their repetitions of lines. Inspired by some photographic experiments, they were breaking motion into small sequences, and using the wide range of angles within a given time-frame all aimed to incorporate the dimension of time within the picture. Brilliant colors and flowing brush strokes also additionally were creating the illusion of movement. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism.

Futurists mixed activism and artistic research. They organized events that caused scandal. Everything was there to help them to glorify Italy and lead their country into the age of modernity. Certain Futurists vehemently promoted themselves to try to join forces with the Fascists, who were coming to power at the time. But Mussolini showed a preference for the Novecento Italiano, movement of artists who identified with the classical order and Italian heritage.

Futurism was a largely Italian movement, although it also had adherents in other countries, France and most notably Russia. Close to Futurism with its inspirations and motivations was Precisionism, an important development of American Modernism.

Although Futurism itself is now regarded as extinct, having died out during the 1920s, powerful echoes of Marinetti's thought, still remain in modern, popular culture and art. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism.

Futurist Architecture

The Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia expressed his ideas of modernity in his drawings for La Città Nuova (The New City) (1912–1914). This project was never built and Sant'Elia was killed in the First World War, but his ideas influenced later generations of architects and artists. The city was a backdrop onto which the dynamism of Futurist life is projected. The city had replaced the landscape as the setting for the exciting modern life. They wanted to see the bare bones, the structure behind things as part of the aesthetic quality. Sant'Elia aimed to create a city as an efficient, fast-paced machine. He manipulates light and shape to emphasize the sculptural quality of his projects. Baroque curves and encrustations had been stripped away to reveal the essential lines of forms unprecedented from their simplicity. In the new city, every aspect of life was to be rationalized and centralised into one great powerhouse of energy. The city was not meant to last, and each subsequent generation was expected to build their own city rather than inheriting the architecture of the past.Futurist architects were sometimes at odds with the Fascist state's tendency towards Roman imperial-classical aesthetic patterns. Nevertheless, several Futurist buildings were built in the years 1920–1940, including public buildings such as railway stations, maritime resorts and post offices. Examples of Futurist buildings still in use today are Trento's railway station, built by Angiolo Mazzoni, and the Santa Maria Novella station in Florence. The Florence station was designed in 1932 by the Gruppo Toscano (Tuscan Group) of architects, which included Giovanni Michelucci and Italo Gamberini, with contributions by Mazzoni.

The Legacy of Futurism

Futurism influenced many other twentieth century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism, Surrealismand Dada. Futurism as a coherent and organized artistic movement is now regarded as extinct, having died out in 1944 with the death of its leader Marinetti, and Futurism was, like science fiction, in part overtaken by 'the future'.

Nonetheless the ideals of Futurism remain as significant components of modern Western culture; the emphasis on youth, speed, power and technology finding expression in much of modern commercial cinema and culture. Ridley Scott consciously evoked the designs of Sant'Elia in Blade Runner. Echoes of Marinetti's thought, especially his "dreamt-of metallization of the human body", are still strongly prevalent in Japanese culture, and surface in manga/anime and the works of artists such as Shinya Tsukamoto, director of the "Tetsuo" (lit. "Ironman") films; Marinetti's legacy is also obvious in philosophical ingredients oftranshumanism, especially in Europe. Futurism has produced several reactions, including the literary genre of cyberpunk—in which technology was often treated with a critical eye—whilst artists who came to prominence during the first flush of the Internet, such as Stelarc and Mariko Mori, produce work which comments on Futurist ideals.

A revival of sorts of the Futurist movement began in 1988 with the creation of the Neo-Futurist style of theatre in Chicago, which utilizes Futurism's focus on speed and brevity to create a new form of immediate theatre. Currently, there are active Neo-Futurist troupes in Chicago, New York, and Montreal.

Die Brücke

Otto Mueller

In 1905 the artists' association "Brücke" was founded by four students of architecture - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - in the city of Dresden.

Die Brucke made use of a technique that was controlled, intentionally unsophisticated and crude, developing a style hallmarked by expressive distortions and emphases. Die Brucke artists often used color similar to the Fauves, and they were also influenced by art form from Africa and Oceania.

Some of the painters in the group sympathized with the revolutionary socialism of the day and drew inspiration from Van Gogh's ideas on artists' communities. Die Brucke expressionists believed that their social criticism of the ugliness of modern life could lead to a new and better future.

The Group Members
 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 

Apart from their own artistic work, "Brücke" members two most important aims were to establish contact with artists of similar convictions and to introduce their anvant garde art to the public through collective exhibitions. In 1906 Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde joined the group, followed by Otto Mueller in 1910. In order to emphasize the international aims of the modernist movement, foreign artists such as Cuno Amiet, Kees Van Dongen, Axel Gallén-Kallela and others were contacted as well.

The "Brücke" style attempts the creation of pure expression through colour and form. Painted motives such as landscapes or nudes in natural settings become the symbolic expression of an inner experience of the world. Forms and shapes are reduced to their essentials and express the artist’s subjective feelings. Traditional rules of perspective and academic proportion are abandoned to heighten immediacy. In this context the artists gained important impulses from their examination of the art of indigenous peoples. Colour too was soon detached from naturalistic representation and became a means of expressing of emotion: it was applied radiantly with impulsive and spontanious brushstrokes.

   

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Artistin Marcella , 1910

Brücke-Museum, Berlin 

The founding members of Die Brücke in 1905 were four Jugendstil architecture students: Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966), Erich Heckel (1883–1970),Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976). They met through the Königliche Technische Hochschule (technical university) of Dresden, where Kirchner and Bleyl began studying in 1901 and became close friends in their first term. They discussed art together and also studied nature, having a radical outlook in common. Kirchner continued studies in Munich 1903–1904, returning to Dresden in 1905 to complete his degree. The institution provided a wide range of studies in addition to architecture, such as freehand drawing, perspective drawing and the historical study of art. The name "Die Brücke" was intended to "symbolize the link, or bridge, they would form with art of the future".

Die Brücke aimed to eschew the prevalent traditional academic style and find a new mode of artistic expression, which would form a bridge (hence the name) between the past and the present. They responded both to past artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Lucas Cranach the Elder, as well as contemporary international avant-garde movements. The group published a broadside calledProgramme in 1906, where Kirchner wrote:

"We call all young people together, and as young people, who carry the future in us, we want to wrest freedom for our actions and our lives from the older, comfortably established forces."

Fritz Bleyl
Die Segel, 1905 

As part of the affirmation of their national heritage, they revived older media, particularly woodcut prints. The group developed a common style based on vivid color, emotional tension, violent imagery, and an influence from primitivism. After first concentrating exclusively on urban subject matter, the group ventured into southern Germany on expeditions arranged by Mueller and produced more nudes and arcadian images. They invented the printmaking technique of linocut, although they at first described them as traditionalwoodcuts, which they also made.

The group members initially "isolated" themselves in a working-class neighborhood of Dresden, aiming thereby to reject their own bourgeois backgrounds. Erich Heckel was able to obtain an empty butcher's shop on the Berlinerstrasse in Friedrichstadt for their use as a studio. Bleyl described the studio as:

"That of a real bohemian, full of paintings lying all over the place, drawings, books and artist’s materials — much more like an artist’s romantic lodgings than the home of a well-organised architecture student."

Les Fauves

Vision after the Sermon
Paul Gauguin

Fauvism has its roots in the post-impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin. It was his use of symbolic colour that pushed art towards the style of Fauvism. Gauguin proposed that colour had a symbolic vocabulary which could be used to visually translate a range of emotions. In 'Vision after the Sermon' where Gauguin depicts Jacob wrestling with an angel, he paints the background a flat red to emphasise the mood and subject of the sermon: Jacob's spiritual battle fought in a blood red field of combat. Gauguin believed that colour had a mystical quality that could express our feelings about a subject rather than simply describe a scene. By breaking the established descriptive role that colour had in painting, he inspired the younger artists of his day to experiment with new possibilities for colour in art.

Les toits de Collioure
Henri Matisse 

At the start of the 20th century, two young artists, Henri Matisse and André Derain formed the basis of a group of painters who enjoyed painting pictures with outrageously bold colours. The group were nicknamed 'Les Fauves' which meant 'wild beasts' in French. Their title was coined by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles who was amused by the exaggerated colour in their art. At the Salon d'automne of 1905 he entered a gallery where Les Fauves were exhibiting their paintings. Surprised by the contrast with a typical renaissance sculpture that stood in the centre of this room, he exclaimed with irony, "Donatello au mileau des fauves!" ( Donatello in the middle of the wild beasts! ). 

Besides Matisse and Derain, other artists included Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Louis Valtat, the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel, Maurice Marinot, Jean Puy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Manguin, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen, the Swiss painter Alice Bailly, and Georges Braque (subsequently Picasso's partner in Cubism).

Harlequin and Pierrot 
André Derain 

The paintings of the Fauves were characterised by seemingly wild brush work and strident colours, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction. Fauvism can be classified as an extreme development of Van Gogh's Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat and other Neo-Impressionistpainters, in particular Paul Signac. Other key influences were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated colour—notably in paintings from Tahiti—strongly influenced Derain's work at Collioure in 1905.

La Petite Lina
Charles Camoin

Fauvism was not a formal movement with a manifesto of rules and regulations. It was more an instinctive coming together of artists who wished to express themselves by using bold colours, simplified drawing and expressive brushwork. 'Les Fauves' simply believed that colour had a spiritual quality which linked directly to your emotions and they loved to use it at the highest possible pitch.

Within a few years, Fauvist techniques were adopted and developed by the German Expressionists and their various splinter groups. Fauvism was gradually subsumed into the canon of modern art, but its influence liberated the use of colour for future generations of artists, who ultimately explored colour as an abstract subject in its own right.

Expressionism

A term used to denote the use of distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect, which first surfaced in the art literature of the early twentieth century. When applied in a stylistic sense, with reference in particular to the use of intense colour, agitated brushstrokes, and disjointed space. Rather than a single style, it was a climate that affected not only the fine arts but also dance, cinema, literature and the theatre. Starry Night Vincent van Gogh Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist attempts to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements.  Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the  surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics. Wassily Kandinsky  Cossacks  Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has also been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval artforms and, more directly, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement. Expressionist art tends to be emotional and sometimes mystical. It can be seen as an extension of Romanticism. In its modern form it may be said to start with Van Gogh and then form a major stream of modern art embracing, among many others, Munch, Fauvism and Matisse,Rouault, the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups, Schiele, Kokoschka, Klee, Beckmann, most ofPicasso, Moore, Sutherland, Bacon, Giacometti, Dubuffet, Baselitz, Kiefer, and the New Expressionism of the 1980s. It went abstract with Abstract Expressionism.   Einstein Tower Erich Mendelsohn In architecture, two specific buildings are identified as Expressionist: Bruno Taut's Glass Pavilion of the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition (1914), and Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany completed in 1921. The interior of Hans Poelzig's Berlin theatre (the Grosse Schauspielhaus), designed for the director Max Reinhardt, is also cited sometimes. The influential architectural critic and historian Sigfried Giedion, in his book Space, Time and Architecture (1941), dismissed Expressionist architecture as a part of the development of functionalism. In Mexico, in 1953, German émigré Mathias Goeritz, published the "Arquitectura Emocional" (Architecture emotional) manifesto with which he declared that "architecture's principal function is emotion". Modern Mexican architect Luis Barragán adopted the term that influenced his work. The two of them collaborated in the project Torres de Satélite (1957–58) guided by Goeritz's principles of Arquitectura Emocional. It was only during the 1970s that Expressionism in architecture came to be re-evaluated more positively.

Les Nabis

Led by Paul Seriusier, the Nabis group of painters were dedicated to following the example of Paul Gaughin in his painting and color techniques. Their name derived from the Hebrew word navi, which means prophet. The group was  comprised of Post-Impressionist artists who became interested in graphic art. The movement shared many of the ideas of the Art Nouveau style and  Symbolism. Les Nabis began as a rebel group of young artists who met and  formed at the Academie Julian in Paris. In addition to fine arts, members of  the group also worked in printmaking, poster design, illustration, textiles,  furniture, and set design. Their emphasis on design was shared by the parallel Art Nouveau movement. Both groups also had close ties to theSymbolist painters. In 1890, they began to successfully participate in public exhibitions, while most of their artistic output remained in private hands or in the possession of the artists themselves. By 1896, the unity of the group had already begun to break: The Hommage à Cézanne, painted by Maurice Denis in 1900, recollects memories of a time already gone, before even the term Nabis had been revealed to the public. Meanwhile, most members of the group—Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard— could stand, artistically, on their own. Only Paul Sérusier had problems to overcome—though it was his Talisman, painted at the advice of Paul Gauguin, that had revealed to them the way to go. Woman with Dog Pierrre Bonnard Among the artists who considered themselves Nabis was Maurice Denis, whose journalism put the aims of the group in the eye of a progressive audience, and whose definition of painting — "a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order" — expressed the Nabis approach. His Théories (1920; 1922) summed up the Nabis' aims long after they had been superseded by the fauve painters and by cubism. Other Nabis were Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Paul Ranson andFélix Vallotton. The sculptor Aristide Maillol was associated for a time with the group. The post-Impressionist styles they embraced skirted some aspects of contemporary art nouveau and Symbolism. The influence of the English Arts and Crafts Movement set them to work in media that involved crafts beyond painting: printmaking, book illustration and poster design, textiles and set design. Maxime Dethomas  Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), le Nabi très japonard      Maurice Denis (1870-1943), le Nabi der schönen Ikonen Maxime Dethomas (1869-1929)  Meyer de Haan (1852-1895), Nabi hollandais  Rene Georges Hermann-Paul (1864-1940)  Henri-Gabriel Ibels (1867-1936), Georges Lacombe (1868-1916), le Nabi sculpteurAristide Maillol (1861-1944) Paul Ranson (1864-1909), le Nabi plus japonard que le Nabi japonard József Rippl-Rónai (1861-1927) Ker-Xavier Roussel (1867-1944)Paul Sérusier (1864-1927), le Nabi à la barbe rutilante Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) Jan Verkade (1868-1946), le Nabi obéliscal Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940)

Symbolism

Symbolism or Symbolist, the practice of representing things by symbols, or of investing things with a symbolic meaning or character, is a 19th-century artistic movement rejecting Realism. A symbol is an object, action, or idea that represents something other than itself, often of a more abstract nature.

To provide some intuition, a first definition of a symbolic architecture is an architectures that utilizes symbol manipulations in a fixed manner to represent its processing. Subsymbolic architectures do not use symbols to represent their processing. A common alternative to symbolism is to use analog representations and transformations.

Now the term symbolic architectures will be defined in more detail. A natural question to ask is what is a symbol? Allen Newell considered this question in Unified Theories of Cognition. He differentiated between symbols (the phenomena in the abstract) and tokens (their physical instantiations). Tokens "stood for" some larger concept. They could be manipulated locally until the information in the larger concept was needed, when local processing would have to stop and access the distal site where the information was stored. The distal information may itself be symbolically encoded, potentially leading to a graph of distal accesses for information.

Newell defined symbol systems according to their characteristics. Firstly, they may form a universal computational system. They have memory to contain the distal symbol information, symbols to provide a pattern to match or index distal information, operations to manipulate symbols, interpretation to allow symbols to specify operations, and,capacities for there to be: (a) sufficient memory, (b) composibility (that the operators may make any symbol structure), and (c) interpretability (that symbol structures be able to encode any meaningful arrangement of operations).

Finally, Newell defined symbolic architectures as the fixed structure that realizes a symbol system. That it is fixed implies that the behavior of structures on top of it (i.e. "programs") mainly depends upon the details of the symbols, operations and interpretations at the symbol system level, not upon how the symbol system (and its components) are implemented. How well this ideal hold is a measure of the strength of that level.

The advantages of symbolic architectures;

- Much of human knowledge is symbolic, so encoding it in a computer is more straight-forward

- How the architecture reasons may be analogous to how humans do, making it easier for   

- Humans to understand (the flip-side of 1)

- They maybe made computationally complete (e.g. Turing Machines)

  Examples of symbolic architectures are;

  Atlantis by E. Gat.

  Dynamic Control Architecture by B. Hayes-Roth.

  ERE by Drummond et al.

  Homer by Vere & Bickmore.

  Icarus by Langley.

  MAX by D. Kuokka.

  Prodigy by Carbonell et al.

  RALPH by Ogasawara and Russell.

  SOAR by A. Newell et al.

  Teton by VanLehn & Ball.

  Theo by T. Mitchell et al.

Pre-Raphaelites

Dumbarton Castle
John RUSKIN

The term Pre-Raphaelite, which refers to both art and literature, is confusing because there were essentially two different and almost opposed movements, the second of which grew out of the first. The term itself originated in relation to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an influential group of mid-nineteenth-century avante garde painters associated with Ruskin who had great effect upon British, American, and European art. 

Toward the middle of the 19th century, a small group of young artists in England reacted vigorously against what they felt was "the frivolous art of the day": this reaction became known as the "Pre-Raphaelite" movement. Their ambition was to bring English art (such as it was) back to a greater "truth to nature." They deeply admired the simplicities of the early 15th century, and they felt this admiration made them a brotherhood.

While contemporary critics and art historians worshiped Raphael as the great master of the Renaissance, these young students rebelled against what they saw as Raphael's theatricality and the Victorian hypocrisy and pomp of the academic art tradition. The friends decided to form a secret society, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, in deference to the sincerities of the early Renaissance before Raphael developed his grand manner. The Pre-Raphaelites adopted a high moral stance that embraced a sometimes unwieldy combination of symbolism and realism. They painted only serious - usually religious or romantic - subjects, and their style was clear and sharply focused. it entailed a unique insistence on painting everything from direct observation.

Ophelia
John Everett MILLAIS

The group initially caused outrage when the existence of their secret brotherhood became known after their first works were exhibited in 1849. They also offended with their heavily religious and realist themes that were so unlike the popular historical paintings. However, the Royal Academy continued to exhibit Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and after 1852 their popularity burgeoned. Their work, though certainly detailed and for the most part laboriously truthful, became progressively old-worldish, and this decision to live in the past, while deploying the judgments of the present, makes the work of an artist such as John Everett Millais (1829-96) appear disturbingly unintegrated. His Ophelia, Hamlet's drowned lover, was modeled with painstaking attention on a real body in water, surrounded by a ravishing array of genuine wildflowers. Millais spent four months painting the background vegetation on the same spot in Surrey, England. He then returned to London to paint his model, Elizabeth Siddal, posing in a bath full of water, so determined was he to capture the image authentically. The result is oddly dislocated, as if the setting, woman, and flowers did not belong together, each keeping its own truth and ignoring that of the others.

Lady-Lilith
Dante Gabriel ROSETTI

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), the third founding member of the Pre-Raphaelites, became the recognized leader and even formed a second grouping of the brotherhood in 1857, after Millais and Hunt had gone their separate ways. Rossetti later came to be seen as a precursor of the wider European Symbolist movement. In the late twentieth century the Brotherhood of Ruralists based its aims on Pre-Raphaelitism, while the Stuckists and the Birmingham Group have also derived inspiration from it. 

Neo-Impressionism

Neo-Impressionism (a.k.a. Divisionism or Pointillism) is a movement and a style. It is a subdivision of the larger avant-garde movement called Post-Impressionism. 

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Georges Seurat

Neo-impressionism was coined by French art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886 to describe an art movement founded by Georges Seurat. Seurat’s greatest masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, marked the beginning of this movement when it first made its appearance at an exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris. Around this time, the peak of France’s modern era emerged and many painters were in search of new methods. Followers of neo-impressionism, in particular, were drawn to modern urban scenes as well as landscapes and seashores. Science-based interpretation of lines and colors influenced neo-impressionists’ characterization of their own contemporary art. Pointillism technique is often mentioned, because it was the dominant technique in the beginning.

At the start of the movement, neo-Impressionism was not welcomed by the art world and the general public. In 1886, when Seurat first exhibited his now most famous work,A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, there was an overwhelming effect of negative feelings. The commotion evoked by this artwork could only be described with words like "bedlam" and "scandal".

Sunday
Paul SIGNAC

Neo-Impressionists’ use of tiny dots to compose a whole picture was considered even more controversial than its preceding movement, impressionism. Impressionism had been notorious for its spontaneous representation of fleeting moments and roughness in brushwork. Neo-impressionism provoked similar responses for opposite reasons. The meticulously calculated regularity of brush strokes was deemed to be too mechanical. This style of painting was far from the commonly accepted notions of creative processes set for the nineteenth century.

Neo-Impressionism was first presented to the public at the Société des Artistes Indépendants who remained their main exhibition space for decades with Signac acting as president of the association. But with the success of Neo-Impressionism, its fame spread quickly. In 1886, Seurat and Signac were invited to exhibit in the 8th and final Impressionist exhibition, later with Les XX and La Libre Esthétique in Brussels.

Finally, in 1892, a group of Néo-Impressionist Painters united to show their works in Paris, "in the Salons of the Hôtel Brébant, 32, boulevard Poissonnière." The following year they exhibited at "20, rue Laffitte". The exhibitions were accompanied by catalogues, the first with reference to the printer: Imp. Vve Monnom, Brussels; the second refers to "M. Moline", secretary.

Henri Edmond CROSS

Neo-Impressionism is the specific name given to the Post-Impressionist work of Seurat and Signac and their followers. Both Camille and Lucien Pissarro had a Neo-Impressionist phase and their work continued to bear strong traces of the style. Neo-Impressionism is characterised by the use of the Divisionist technique (often popularly but incorrectly called pointillism, a term Signac repudiated). Divisionism attempted to put Impressionist painting of light and colour on a scientific basis by using optical mixture of colours. Instead of mixing colours on the palette, which reduces intensity, the primary-colour components of each colour were placed separately on the canvas in tiny dabs so they would mix in the spectator's eye. Optically mixed colours move towards white so this method gave greater luminosity. This technique was based on the colour theories of M-E Chevreul, whose De la loi du contraste simultanée des couleurs (On the law of the simultaneous contrast of colours) was published in Paris in 1839 and had an increasing impact on French painters from then on, particularly the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists generally, as well as the Neo-Impressionists.