The obvious and facetious thing to say about this exhibition is that it’s dotty – literally, paintings with an awful lot of dots – but that would be in poor taste because George Seurat, who practically invented the movement known as Neo Impressionism, didn’t care for the term Pointillism (dottiness) – he preferred the grander-sounding Divisionism. But there’s no getting round it. The pictures here are almost all made of dots, in whole or in part. By the time you come to the end you have dots before your eyes. And for about 15 years avant-garde art was all about the dots.
The exhibition at the National Gallery is based largely on the collection of the serious and spiritually minded Helene Kröller-Müller, a German collector married to a Dutch entrepreneur who was both public spirited and wealthy; she left her huge collection to the Netherlands and – fun fact - was the first to set modern art against a white background.
