In his happiest moments [Signac] succeeded in giving the modern picture—that makeshift with which we beautify our dwellings—a brilliant and even ideal form, making it a beautiful spot on the wall, that lends itself readily to a frame, and represents, if not all, yet the most valuable thing we need in a rational home—beautiful color in a beautiful form.
—Julius Meier-Graefe,  Modern Art

Paul Signac’s achievement is not insignificant. According to Meier-Graefe, the most sensitive and gifted critic of the art of the 1890s, Signac managed, in spite of his inconsistent production, to offer in his best work a taste of what had become aesthetically possible in painting. This was a result of the radical pictorial manipulations that had appeared with increasing regularity in French painting after 1860. With certain well-founded reservations, Meier-Graefe was willing to grant that, together with Georges Seurat, Signac had via the color-divisionist technique hit on a kind of creative bedrock. Meier-Graefe acknowledged the expression-inhibiting potential of the new technique—its enormous complexity made great demands on the artist—but Signac and a few others were able to deploy it effectively. Seurat, one of Meier-Graefe’s most comprehensive enthusiasms, showed that there was virtually no limit to the monumental (even public) possibilities inherent in the divisionist system.

Writing around 1900, Meier-Graefe was not alone in his enthusiasm. The intelligent and eloquent French critic Félix Fénéon had championed the “Neo-Impressionism” of Seurat and Signac early in the 1880s. And he was not alone, either: many others