Radical Harmony

  Yesterday I was in the wicked city, having lunch with an old friend and visiting the pointillism exhibition, Radical Harmony, at the National Gallery. This display of paintings from the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, seems to have had lukewarm reviews, for some reason – I guess it's a style of painting that can seem rather sterile and limited. For myself I love it, largely because it was favoured by Seurat, one of the greatest of all late-19th-century painters (IMHO). The National Gallery has one of his that has never before been seen in Britain – Le Chahut (the Can-Can), a late and intriguing work that seems to suggest that Seurat, towards the end of his too-short life, was going to move off in new, unexpected directions, perhaps towards something more geometric and abstract, less naturalistic. 

I was glad to see a small-scale version of Les Poseuses (for my money, one of the great paintings of its time) and several of the coastal views painted by Seurat and Paul Signac. There is also Seurat's extraordinary portrait drawing of Signac, a miracle of ultra-delicate draughtsmanship. 
For me the revelation of the exhibition was Theo Van Rysselberghe, a Belgian artist I had barely heard of. The stricter pointillists were sniffy about his work, as he strayed from the technique, mixing it with other, looser manners of applying paint to canvas – but the results, especially in his portraits, could be rather wonderful. Among the large portraits on display are a lovely one of his wife –

and an equally impressive portrait of Anna Boch, an artist and collector, who has the distinction of being the purchaser of the only painting Van Gogh sold in his lifetime (La Vigne Rouge) –

And here, for good measure, is Maria Sèthe at the Harmonium . Maria was the wife of the Belgian architect and designer Henry Van de Velde – 

Van de Velde also painted, and his restful, vaguely melancholy Twilight caught my eye – 

Needless to say, these are not paintings that reproduce very well, and you really do need to see them. The exhibition, which is on a manageable scale and is not attracting blockbuster crowds, is on until February. I'd recommend it to anyone at all interested in post-impressionist art.