[3] The Neo-Impressionists were able to create a movement very quickly in the 19th century, partially due to its strong connection to anarchism, which set a pace for later artistic manifestations.

[3] The movement and the style were an attempt to drive "harmonious" vision from modern science, anarchist theory, and late 19th-century debate around the value of academic art.

The artists of the movement "promised to employ optical and psycho-biological theories in pursuit of a grand synthesis of the ideal and the real, the fugitive and the essential, science and temperament.

Some members of the group attended gatherings for naturalist and symbolist authors at the home of Robert Caze who was an ex-communard and radical Republican journalist.

Soon other artists began to join the movement including Charles Angrand, Henri-Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Léo Gausson, Louis Hayet, and Maximilien Luce.

[1] After Seurat's death by diphtheria and his friend Albert Dubois-Pillet's by smallpox in the previous year, the Neo-impressionists began to change and strengthen their image through social and political alliances.

In 1886, Seurat's first exhibition of his now most famous work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, inspired torrents of negative criticism.

[2] Neo-Impressionists' use of small segments of color to compose a whole picture was considered even more controversial than its preceding movement; Impressionism had been notorious for its spontaneous representation of fleeting moments and roughness in brushwork.

The meticulously calculated regularity of brush strokes was deemed to be too mechanical[11] and antithetical to the commonly accepted notions of creative processes set for the 19th century.

He remarked on the new Neo-Impressionist cooperative gallery in the Rue Laffitte, focusing on Luce and Signac, also known as the young masters: "The art has, perhaps, a tendency toward an ill-tempered synthesis, toward a scientific observation that is too dry.

What an expenditure of coloring, what a profusion of agitated notions, in which one senses the noble and sincere passions of those young men who, after lamented Seurat, strive to capture all the secrets of light from the sun!

Other papers also discussed the future Neo-Impressionists together, thus showing that they had formed as a group through tier creation of a democratic exhibit space, not their movement or artistic style.

[9] Divisionism (also called Chromo-luminarism) was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of contrasting or complementing colors into individual patches which interacted optically to create shadow and dimension.

Georges Seurat founded the style around 1884 as chromo-luminarism, drawing from his understanding of the scientific theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and Charles Blanc, among others.

[15] Impressionism was a movement that originated in France in the 1870s, characterized by the use of quick, short, broken brushstrokes to accurately capture the momentary effects of light and atmosphere in a scene, usually outdoors.

[16][17][18][19] Divisionism, along with the Neo-Impressionism movement as a whole, found its beginnings in Georges Seurat's masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

His knowledge of the movement lead to illustrating Charles Henry's Cerle Chromatique et Rapporteur Esthétique, a widely influential book on color theory and later to his authoring the manifesto of Neo-Impressionism, D’Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionisme in 1899.

[21] Charles Blanc's Grammaire des arts du dessin introduced Seurat to the theories of color and vision that would inspire chromo-luminarism.

In fact, Signac's book, D’Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionnisme, published in 1899, coined the term Divisionism and became widely recognized as the manifesto of Neo-Impressionism.

Additionally, through Paul Signac's advocacy of Divisionism, an influence can be seen in some of the works of Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay and Pablo Picasso.

The combination of social art and artistic freedom and the departure from traditional color painting techniques attracted radicals to the movement of Neo-Impressionism.

In 1907 Metzinger and Delaunay were singled out by the critic Louis Vauxcelles as Divisionists who used large, mosaic-like 'cubes' to construct small but highly symbolic compositions.

Spearheaded by Grubicy de Dragon, and codified later by Gaetano Previati in his Principi scientifici del divisionismo of 1906, a number of painters mainly in Northern Italy experimented to various degrees with these techniques.

For example, Pellizza da Volpedo applied the technique to social (and political) subjects; in this he was joined by Angelo Morbelli and Emilio Longoni.

Further adherents in painting genre subjects were Plinio Nomellini, Rubaldo Merello, Giuseppe Cominetti, Angelo Barabino, Camillo Innocenti, Enrico Lionne, and Arturo Noci.

Divisionism was also an important influence in the work of Futurists Gino Severini (Souvenirs de Voyage, 1911); Giacomo Balla (Arc Lamp, 1909);[28] Carlo Carrà (Leaving the scene, 1910); and Umberto Boccioni (The City Rises, 1910).

[12][29][30] Divisionism quickly received both negative and positive attention from art critics, who generally either embraced or condemned the incorporation of scientific theories in the Neo-Impressionist techniques.

For example, Joris-Karl Huysmans spoke negatively of Seurat's paintings, saying "Strip his figures of the colored fleas that cover them, underneath there is nothing, no thought, no soul, nothing".

[31] Leaders of Impressionism, such as Monet and Renoir, refused to exhibit with Seurat, and even Camille Pissarro, who initially supported Divisionism, later spoke negatively of the technique.

French anarchy, particularly after Haussmannization, placed an emphasis on a classless society but Divisionists, and all artists, reinforced classes through middle-class consumerism of their works.