Divisionist
Images built from separate strokes, dots or units of colour that combine in the viewer's eye rather than on the palette.
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About
Divisionism rests on an optical idea: colours placed side by side, unmixed, can look more luminous than the same pigments stirred together. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed the method in Paris in the mid-1880s, drawing on the colour theories of Michel-Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood, and Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86) became its manifesto. Seen close, the surface breaks into flecks; from a distance, figures and light cohere.
In Italy, Giovanni Segantini and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo adapted the approach with longer, thread-like strokes, and Pellizza's The Fourth Estate (1901) applied it to a monumental social subject. Umberto Boccioni and other future Futurists passed through a divisionist phase before 1910. The principle survives wherever an image is assembled from discrete units, as in Chuck Close's later portraits made of small painted cells in a grid. Look for colours that stay separate on the canvas.