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PAUL SIGNAC (1863-1935) Venise. La Douane de mer signed and dated “P Signac 1908” (lower right);...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:700,000.00 - 900,000.00 USD
PAUL SIGNAC (1863-1935) Venise. La Douane de mer signed and dated “P Signac 1908” (lower right);...

PAUL SIGNAC

(1863-1935)

Venise. La Douane de mer

signed and dated “P Signac 1908” (lower right); signed, inscribed and dated “Venise (1908) La Douane de mer-P. Signac” (on the stretcher)

oil on canvas

65.4 x 81.2 cm (25 3⁄4 x 32 in.)

painted in 1908

Estimate: £480,000–620,000

$700,000–900,000




Provenance

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired directly from the artist in 1908 for FF850)

Moderne Galerie Thannhauser, Berlin (acquired from the above in 1927)

Private Collection, Berlin (acquired from the above; sale: Christie’s, London, June 29, 1999, lot 32)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner




Exhibited

Venice, XIIe Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Citta di Venezia, 1920, no. 59 (as Venezia)




Literature

Françoise Cachin, Signac: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Paris, 2000, p. 289, no. 470 (illustrated)
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Although Signac had planned to go to Venice in 1903, he cancelled his trip to avoid working too closely with his friend and contemporary Henri Edmond Cross, concerned that their respective paintings might become indistinguishable. Ironically, when he did visit Venice a year later and again in 1908 during his brief travels through Portofino, Florence, Siena and Rome, the resulting paintings bear more than a passing similarity to those by Claude Monet of the same period (see Monet’s Saint-Georges Majeur, 1908, Indianapolis Museum of Art). Signac would have been aware of Monet’s revolutionary paintings from as early as the 4th Impressionist Exhibition in 1879, and it is clear that he held a lifelong admiration for the father of Impressionism’s work. It was the fluidity and luminosity of Monet’s paintings that led Signac from the rigid formality of Georges Seurat to develop his own divisionist colour theories.
The viewpoint of the present painting appears to be from the Hotel Britannia at the entrance of the Grand Canal. It exemplifies Signac’s progression from the formal scientific approach that portrayed a certain decorative classicism in his earlier works. Here, with looser brushstrokes and a richer palette, he conveys his own declaration on the principles of colour and light. Signac used the visually stunning architecture of the city as a structure on which to further his own adaptation of the pointillist techniques that he had adopted as early as 1886.