Les Demolisseurs (The Wreckers)

 

The Wreckers, a sketch from 1896 by the Anarchist artist Paul Signac (1863-1935) famous for his work in Neo-Impressionism and a pioneer of the Pointillism style. I'm quite the novice when it comes to art, as in painting and sketches, but I've been endeavouring to improve my knowledge. I discovered Paul Signac while reading Ruth Kinna's introduction to Anarchism, The Government of No-one. And found this image depicting two workers to be striking. They're demolishing a house and the worker in the foreground is raising his pick at the audience. 

If you'll forgive the cliché, I don't know art, but I'm eager to learn. And to me this image plays with and depicts the intertwined relations between creation and destruction. The Anarchist Revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin famously stated, "the passion for destruction is itself a creative act".  The Reaction in Germany (1842). Here we have two workers or "Wreckers" dismantling a building and in the process creating something new, exactly what remains to be seen, it could be the foundations for a new building or just remain as an open space. 

Dialectics can be tricky to simplify and explain, personally I think that phrase and now this image is the best summary of it in its crude thesis+anti-thesis=synthesis. Or in this case, destruction includes creation and thus leads to a new phenomenon.  

Like with prose and poetry, many of the classics are in the public domain, which has made them much more accessible to me. 

 I can't afford to go to many galleries, so the freedom to distribute and share is much valued and appreciated. I hope to improve my knowledge and experience throughout the year. 

 

Portrait of Paul Signac, created in 1890 by his friend and collaborator Georges Seurat (1859-1891)