“At an exhibition of Neo-Impressionism in 1893, a woman peered over the entrance turnstile at the paintings inside, while debating whether or not to pay the modest fee to one of the painters seated at the cash box. ‘Were these done by machine, Monsieur?’ she asked. ‘No, Madame,’ he calmly replied, ‘they were done by hand.’” While we cannot know whether this exchange recounted by Robert Herbert ever truly took place, the unease to which it alludes is instructive in considering the topic of this essay – possible intersections between Neo-Impressionism and digital art. For both art forms connect to science and technology in ways that can be profoundly unsettling for their viewers. In the hundred or more years since the inception of the Neo-Impressionist movement, we have become accustomed to the points of color employed by these artists in the creation of their images; however, it is worth recalling that the original viewers of these works were often taken aback by the artists’ reliance on scientific theories of light and color as the basis for their paintings. Likewise, contemporary viewers of digital art are sometimes unnerved by the combination of technology and aesthetics present in the works. We are accustomed to linking the work of art to the artist’s physical act of production and the insertion of a machine – the computer – into that process destabilizes our notions of what it means to create a work of art. In Gary Clark’s series Postcards from the Digital Highway, for example, the artist makes use of fractal-generating software to create fictive landscapes which are then further manipulated within the computer before being issued as prints. (Figure 1) The computer and its programs are essential to this production – although fractals occur in nature, they could not be recreated by the human hand – and yet, the artistic vision of the artist is also a necessary component of the work and serves to direct the final product. This fusion of aesthetic vision and technology may be fruitfully linked to the work of the Neo-Impressionists, who relied on scientific theories of color for the creation of their works, yet never abandoned the aesthetic impulse nor lost their awareness that the painter’s eye is of paramount importance in the creation of a successful image. As the nineteenth-century critic Felix Fénéon wrote, “These painters are accused of subordinating art to science. They only make use of scientific facts to direct and perfect the education of their eye and to control the exactness of their vision. Professor O. N. Rood has furnished them with precious discoveries….But Mr. X can read optical treatises forever and he will never paint La Grande Jatte.” Seurat, Signac, Pissarro, and the other Neo-Impressionists all utilized a knowledge of scientific theory and of mechanical processes (those employed in the production of color prints, for example) to guide their artistic explorations. Digital artists use technology in their artistic practice – often to assist them in producing work that couldn’t be created by conventional methods. But neither the Neo-Impressionists nor contemporary digital artists have ever lost sight of the fact that artistic vision and creativity are at the root of successful artistic practice and that serendipity, taste, and intuition play key roles in the creative process. A consideration of the points of connection between these two groups of avant-garde artists may illuminate the ways in which art and science or technology can be fruitfully joined in the service of artistic vision.

An exploration of the connections between digital art and Neo-Impressionism requires first an understanding of the characteristics of each artistic style, particularly as they relate to science and technology. The term digital art refers generally to art created on, or influenced by, the computer. The range of digital art is expansive – from digitally created sculpture, to room-size installations, to computer-rendered drawings, to Web-based works of art. In this essay, I will focus on one category of digital art, namely digital prints. Digital prints have a particular resonance with Neo-Impressionism on several levels and these will be explored here. In terms of their creation, digital prints bear a superficial similarity with Neo-Impressionism in their reliance on the dot or point, though these points are seldom seen in the final printed product. An exception can be found in the work of Jonathan Lewis, whose Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue (Mondrian) reveals its subject at the level of the pixel – the point of digital imagery. (Figure 2) The pixel is the smallest unit of color found in a digital image and also describes the resolution of the image on-screen and when printed. For example, a computer screen might typically have a resolution of 800x600 pixels, meaning that the screen displays 800 pixels across and 600 pixels down. Each one of those pixels represents a square of color information – when you see a complex image, such as a photograph, on a computer screen you are seeing those pixels set next to one another in such a way that the color seems continuous and realistic. If the screen image were magnified to the level at which individual pixels become noticeable, it would be apparent that on the computer the photograph is represented by squares of color of varying hue and intensity – the effect seen in Lewis’ image. Lewis created Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue (Mondrian) by digitizing (through scanning) a reproduction of Mondrian’s painting, magnifying the image so that the pixels were visible, and then cropping the image to obtain the desired circular section presented here. The resulting print succeeds in abstracting the abstract and also calls to mind the points employed by the Neo-Impressionists. The rhythmically arranged blue of Lewis’ print recalls the shimmer of landscape and sky in Neo-Impressionist images such as Paul Signac’s painting of 1890 Saint-Cast, Opus 209 (Figure 3) and Camaret, La Digue (1895) by Maximilien Luce (Figure 4).