Radical Harmony at the National Gallery in London: how Seurat, Signac and others engaged with the turbulent politics of their day

Georges Seurat was an anarchist with a passion for harmony — a visionary who saw no contradiction between revolution and symmetry. All those chromatically balanced dots of colour, painstakingly applied to the canvas, alluded to self-discipline and mutual aid as much as to scientific observation.

As the leader of the Neo-Impressionist movement, Seurat pioneered pointillism, a technique that involved placing complementary colours next to each other to achieve luminosity. The results made the ordinary world extraordinary: ‘Great things are done by a series of small things brought together,’ he once said.

If this seems at odds with what the poet John Milton described as anarchy’s ‘wild chaos’, it is worth remembering the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous declaration that ‘Anarchy is order.’ To Seurat and his fellow conspirators, anarchism was about the freedom to impose one’s own rules and structures without the function of government: ‘Justice in sociology, harmony in art: same thing,’ said Paul Signac.

This September sees the opening of Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists at the National Gallery in London. Featuring artists such as Anna Boch, Jan Toorop, Henri-Edmond Cross, Théo van Rysselberghe and Signac, the exhibition considers Seurat and his artistic milieu through the politics of the time.

These days, the Belle Epoque is celebrated for its decadence and glamour — a world of cancan dancers and Proustian remembrances. Yet it was also an era of extreme inequality and industrial strife. That dichotomy is epitomised in Seurat’s two masterpieces, Bathers at Asnières and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, both painted in 1884. One depicts working-class swimmers against a backdrop of factories and chimney smoke, while the other shows the middle classes picnicking on the pleasant island of La Grande Jatte.

Exhibition co-curator Julien Domercq says that the Neo-Impressionists’ paintings caused shockwaves in Parisian society: ‘Pointillism is a systematic technique that did away with the arbitrary nature of Impressionism. Instead of fleeting impressions, Seurat and Signac devised a method that seemed to remove the artist’s individuality.’

This, together with their social critique of French society, caused the artists to be denounced as iconoclasts. Critics argued that pointillism was the death of painting — not that this bothered Seurat too much. He believed the state needed to be crushed so that a new form of society might emerge. Why not apply the same logic to painting?

In many ways, this radicalism was the result of the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. Seurat and his fellow Neo-Impressionists came of age in the aftermath of its brutal suppression, yet some of the commune’s progressive ideas, such as worker’s unions and mutual aid, found popular support in the burgeoning anarchist scene of the 1880s.

The young anarchist journalist Félix Fénéon was responsible for the name ‘Neo-Impressionism’. He considered Seurat to be at the vanguard of art, proclaiming that the artist and his followers were the future. Seurat’s untimely death in 1891, together with the anarchist violence and bombings that plagued Paris in the following years, derailed this vision.

The riddle presented by the National Gallery exhibition is this: why did the wife of a Dutch businessman living in Arnhem became such a champion of this radical art movement?

The answer can be found in the singular ‘museum house’, the Kröller-Müller Museum and sculpture garden in De Hoge Veluwe National Park in the Netherlands. This temple to modern art was established by the philanthropist Helene Kröller-Müller in 1938 as a place of spiritual and philosophical enquiry. Currently showing an exhibition of work by the Dutch artist Charley Toorop, daughter of the Neo-Impressionist Jan Toorop, it is home to 11,500 artworks, including one of the best Van Gogh collections in the world and a superlative array of Neo-Impressionist paintings.

Kröller-Muller was an unusual woman. Born in Essen in Germany in 1869, she rejected organised religion relatively early in life, finding a more spiritual existence through art. Her interest in the Neo-Impressionists began in 1912, when she visited Signac’s studio with her mentor, the art critic H.P. Bremmer. There she bought one of her favourite paintings, Seurat’s The Channel of Gravelines, in the Direction of the Sea (1890), an eerily still masterpiece depicting a fortified harbour town in northern France.

Inspired by the Neo-Impressionists’ commitment to harmony and nature (what the anarchist Peter Kropotkin termed ‘mutual aid’), Kröller-Müller developed her spiritual manifesto. Their paintings created ‘a unity of spirit’, she said, which allowed her to see the world ‘more calmly and deeply’.

Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists will feature some of Seurat’s best-known works from the Kröller-Müller collection, such as Sunday at Port-en-Bessin (1888) and The Channel of Gravelines. Other works include van Rysselberghe’s ultra-composed In July, before Noon or The Orchard (1890), a painting of a tea party executed in a riot of lime greens and vibrant yellows that seem to vibrate with the heat of the day, Henry van de Velde’s atmospheric Twilight (circa 1889) and Signac’s strange tableau The Dining Room, Opus 152 (1886-87), which conveys all the repressiveness of middle-class respectability.

The Neo-Impressionists’ domination of the avant-garde scene was short-lived. Tragedy struck in 1891, when Seurat died suddenly of suspected pneumonia at the age of 31. Without the ‘Messiah of a new art’, the movement struggled to remain relevant, yet its ideas filtered through to later modernists such as Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman.

A few years after Seurat’s death, Signac painted the euphoric vision In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age Has Not Passed, It Is Still to Come. It was made in response to a plea by Henri-Edmond Cross to forgo depicting societal strife in favour of the yearned-for utopian future: ‘Let us imagine instead the dreamed-of age of happiness and well-being,’ he wrote, ‘and let us show the actions of men, their play and their work in this era of general harmony.’

Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists is at the National Gallery in London from 13 September 2025 until 8 February 2026