Maximilien Luce at the Musée de Montmartre

La Seine à Herblay (The Seine at Herblay) 1890 Musée d'Orsay

The summer exhibition in Montmartre examines the different aspects of Maximilien Luce's art and his personality. It also documents the building transformations going on in late 19th century Paris and give us some shimmering pointillist landscapes. A close-up shows his different coloured dots of paint:

What is the purpose?... one might ask. Pointillism was a technique experimented with by Seurat, Signac and Pissarro, to encourage the viewer to mix the juxtaposed dots of colour in the eye rather than on the canvas- an extension of the Impressionist technique. The artist would paint a scene on the spot, then afterwards give it the divisionist or pointillist treatment, painstakingly, in the studio. An earlier study of the scene shows how Luce fixed his basic colour scheme: 

Study for the Seine at Herblay 1889 Paris, gallery Ary Jan

Luce painted the surroundings of Paris, often invited to stay at fellow artists' houses, for example chez Pissarro who lived in Eragny sur Seine. Luce was a Parisian, born on 13th March 1858. His parents were modest working class people living in Montparnasse. Having trained as a wood engraver, Luce later lived in the artist quarter of Montmartre, in the rue Cortot in fact where the museum is situated. 

Luce overlooked the garden of the Montmartre museum. He painted it in different seasons. For example in the snow:

Le jardin sous la neige, rue Cortot (The garden under snow, rue Cortot) 1891
Private Collection

He illustrates the transformation of his quarter, with the building of the Sacré Coeur (finished in 1912) and the disappearance of the Maquis (scrubland/shanty town). Luce had a penchant for purples:

Le Maquis, Montmartre 1904  Private Collection

His colours have the brightness of Impressionism. But he takes it a step further, in the same style of Seurat and Signac, to neo-impressionism or pointillism. The resulting works often have a shimmering stillness, unlike an Impressionist painting. Luce returned to Impressionism in his later works. 

Luce himself always identified with the workers. He was not rich or privileged. Politically he was on the left - an anarchist in fact, like several of his pointillist friends. This is his self portrait painted when he was about 52:

Autoportrait (Self-portrait) around 1910  on loan from Mantes-la-Jolie Town Hall

Painter Jean Texcier described him as a man whose 'rough exterior' concealed 'an exquisitely delicate and tender heart'. A modest man himself, his sympathies were with the ordinary people of Paris. He portrays a workman's simple 'toilette'; the pointillist treatment gives a curious motionless effect:

La Toilette 1887  Geneva, Association des amis du Petit Palais

This is one of seven works which Luce showed at the Society of Independent Artists. It was purchased by Signac. Luce later followed Signac as the President of the Society, but resigned in 1940 when Jewish artists were excluded by order of the Vichy regime. In 1871, Luce had supported the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune. He illustrated the massacre of the people in Montmartre by a painting in the Musée d'Orsay, of which there is his lithography on show here:

Une rue de Paris en mai 1871 (A road in Paris in May 1871) around 1910  Lithograph
Collection Dixmier

As a protest against political imprisonment, Luce illustrated a text by Jules Vallès (1832-1885), an icon for anarchical young men. Luce himself was briefly incarcerated in 1894, following a wave of anarchist attacks which culminated in the assassination of President Sadi Carnot in June 1894. The  Mazas prison where Luce was held for 42 days stood near the gare de Lyon. 10 lithographs give us the atmosphere of the prison:

Album: Mazas lithograph 1894 Private Collection

Luce rarely painted interiors. He was a man for the outdoors, whether it be the streets of Paris or its outskirts. An oil painting loaned by Geneva gives a colourful view from the window of a friend's house of the lively rue des Abbesses in Montmartre:

Rue des Abbesses, l'épicerie (Rue des Abbesses, the grocer's) 1896
Association of friends of the Petit Palais, Geneva

In his correspondence with friends Signac and Cross, Luce mentioned the difficulty he experienced in trying to capture the movement of the crowd.

As well as his home surroundings of Paris, Luce found further landscapes when he travelled to stay with friends in Brittany, Normandy and Saint Tropez:

Saint-Tropez, vu depuis la citadelle (Saint-Tropez, seen from the citadel) non dated.
Paris, Hélėne Bailly Collection

A pointillist scene in St Tropez gives the spectator an idyllic view of the South of France, something akin to Arcadia:

Baigneuses à Saint-Tropez (Bathers at Saint-Tropez) 1897 Geneva Association des amis du Petit Palais

A fan-shaped night time scene in London, where Luce travelled in 1892 with Pissarro, is scintillating:

Londres et Tamise dans la nuit (London and the Thames at night-time) 1892 
Private Collection

A Paris night-scape twinkles with a warm glow:

Paris, vue de la Seine, la nuit (vue de l'atelier de Pissarro) (Paris, view of the Seine, seen from Pissarro's studio) 1893 Musée Lambinet, Versailles

Luce painted many scenes in Brittany, where he had served for four years in the military and later made frequent visits, staying with painter friends. He enjoyed painting the stormy sea:

Paramé par gros temps (Paramé in rough weather) 1934 
Mantes-la-Jolie, musée de l'Hôtel-Dieu

This was just the kind of weather he had been hoping for on an earlier visit in 1893, when he complained to Signac that it was too calm and sunny in Brittany.

A visit to the North- Belgium and Charleroi- shocked him with its contrasts. He wrote to fellow artist  Henri-Edmond Cross that the country terrified him- "It is so ghastly and splendid that I doubt I can convey what I see" He did however assimilate and convey those awesome, luminous scenes:

Hauts Fourneaux à Charleroi (Blast Furnaces in Charleroi) 1896  Musée des Beaux Arts, Charleroi 

On 3 trips to Charleroi, painting day and night, Luce produced 33 works which he exhibited at Durand-Ruel's gallery in 1899. 

He came to terms with this dark country and captured some amazing lighting effects. He explored the fireworks of the furnaces:  

L'Aciérie (The Steelworks) 1898 Paris, Hélėne Bailly Collection

Luce also visited Holland, although he found the countryside too flat for his liking. Back in Paris, he illustrated its transformations with his paintings of building sites and scaffolding:

Le Chantier (The Building site) 1911 Musée d'Orsay

Luce finally married his companion, mother of his two sons, "Simone", who died in 1940. Luce died the following year, aged 82.

The exhibition has on display, for the first time, some remarkable painted ceramics by Luce, made in collaboration with his friend André Metthey:

This is the first Maximilien Luce retrospective in France since 1983. It provides an interestingly varied picture of the man and artist.

Maximilien Luce L'Instinct du paysage (The Instinct for landscape)

From 21st march until 14th September 2025

At the Musée de Montmartre, rue Cortot, Paris 18.

Metro: Lamarck Caulaincourt

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