Norte Dame - Maximilien Luce

Norte Dame

Maximilien Luce was born in Paris in 1858 and died in 1941. Luce along with Georges-Pierre Seurat and Paul Signac were the founders of the pointillist style or also known as Neo-Impressionism. Maximilien Luce, in conjunction with his two fellow painter, began a movement was based on a "scientific" study of light and the analysis of the prismatic effect of colors which he worked strictly by for many years, until he later change to a less formal painting style which included landscapes, city scenes, and people doing everyday chores.

Norte Dame, is a painting done by Maximilien Luce circa 1900. Maximilien Luce was a French painter. The painting, Norte Dame, was painted on canvas, which measures 81.2 x 60.3 centimeters, with Oil, in the Pointillist style. Norte Dame is on exhibit in The Gluck Collection at The San Diego Museum of Art, Balboa Park. The Gluck Collection contains paintings that are from Post-Impressionism to Picasso, the pieces are on loan from private collections and French Modern Art.

I think what drew me to this painting is a memory of a vacation that I had as a young adult, where I visited Paris, France, as well as 8 other countries. It was the same basic style as a Jean Claude Monet that I had seen while at the Musée d'Orsay called Water Liles.

Maximilien Luce liked to use individual contrasting dots of color on the canvas. It reminds me of Claude Monet's Water Lilies painting. It is much like Water Lilies in that a primary coating is laid down and then follows by simple dots or dabs of paint. Based on the placement of the dots of paint gives the hue and intensity and feeling of the paint. When these dots of paint dry and light is shown on the painting, depending on the lighting would depend on what the viewer would see.

The Norte Dame painting is considered an urban scene. The urban scene depicted in Norte Dame is Norte Dame Cathedral, which stands for "Our Lady of Paris". The Norte Dame painting shows the cathedral in what appears to be early to late evening, as is noted by the obvious street lamps darting across the painting. The level of detail is amazing. The placements of the dots of paint really bring it alive. When viewing it from the right hand side it appears bluish-grey, but when viewing form the left hand side it appears to have a slight red tint. Maximilien Luce felt a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses music, thus creating a very powerful painting. Maximilien Luce was driven to prove this conjecture. Maximilien Luce thought the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of guesses or common sense and to show this Maximilien Luce used lines, color intensity, and color scheme, to which he was very successful.

The content could be considered historical.