Jan.31 (Sat), 2004 – Jun.1 (Tue),2004

Sparks of Color: Pointillist and Fauve Paintings from the Collection was a special exhibition of European paintings in the Pola Museum of Art that represent Pointillism, the movement after French Impressionism originated by Seurat, and Fauvism, whose leading proponent was Matisse.

As the nineteenth century was turning into the twentieth, colors in painting began to glitter, shine, and sparkle more brightly than ever before. The Neo-Impressionists, who appeared suddenly on the art scene, further developed the expressive methods of the Impressionists. They disseminated their technique of Pointillism, which incorporated scientific color theories and involved painting with brightly colored, small touches of paint. The Fauves, on the other hand, created vivid paintings of intense color contrasts. Both the Neo-Impressionists and the Fauves pursued dazzling brilliance and bright colors, and their paintings are filled with joie de vivre.

The exhibition, which focused on painters’ experiments in color, featured oil paintings by such artists as Seurat, Signac, Matisse, Vlaminck, and Dufy, as well as the illustrated book Jazz by Matisse, the preeminent artist of color of the twentieth century.