Encyclopedia

pointillism

Also found in: Dictionary, Wikipedia.
(redirected from pointillistic)

pointillism

the technique of painting elaborated from impressionism, in which dots of unmixed colour are juxtaposed on a white ground so that from a distance they fuse in the viewer's eye into appropriate intermediate tones
www.artcyclopedia.com/history/pointillism.html
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Pointillism

 

(1) In painting, one of the names for a method used by the neo-impressionists in which tiny points of color are methodically applied. A synonym is divisionism.

(2) In 20th-century music, a type of notation characterized by the prevalence of individual sounds-dots over melodic motifs or chords. It is encountered in works by A. von Webern, P. Boulez, K. Stockhausen, and other avant-garde composers. Pointillism often results in the destruction of the melodic line.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Mentioned in
References in periodicals archive
In 1886, Seurat reshaped the dresses of several of the characters, notably enlarging the bustle of the foreground woman with the umbrella, and added pointillistic touches of colors throughout the canvas.
In a pointillistic painting, uniform areas such as the ocean or sky can be described with a limited color palette.
The result is a mixed success: there is some repetition, some of the surveys of contemporary developments are insubstantial, and the biographical approach is pointillistic, though each section is introduced by the editor in an attempt to draw out major themes.
Here's why: The dance is composed from a finely transient palette of human gestures summoning up vanishing states of mind and elapsed moments, as if offering a pointillistic reminiscence with an ever-shifting subject.
We finally learn that it is most notably to do with the creation of long lines (as opposed to 'pointillistic' textures) and articulated sectional breaks reflecting stanza breaks (pp.
To rule out relational properties and changes as unreal would leave us with a type of history that is no more than an atomistic or pointillistic chronicle of events devoid of all reference to eras, movements, revolutions, wars, and even killings where there is a temporal interval between the shooting and the death of the victim.
220-1], pointillistic focus on the individual unit risks drawing attention away from the central task of economics, which is to explain how individual units interact in the whole economic cosmos.
So you just brush edge against edge, creating a brilliance for a second, very pointillistic, and yet it is more explicit than ever.
With its insertion of poetry and song, impressionistic (even pointillistic) interior monologue, mythological framework, verbal play, and shifting point of view, it stretches the bounds of realism to breaking point.
Readers of The Current of Romantic Passion may find it difficult to overlook its rather pointillistic organization into fifty-two small chapters, some bewilderingly cryptic.
Copyright © 2003-2025 Farlex, Inc Disclaimer
All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional.