plague painting :: Article Creator The National Gallery Succumbs To The Plague Of Pointillism Radical Harmony is the title of this demanding exhibition, the first at the National Gallery to examine those avant-garde artists, known as the Neo-Impressionists, who succeeded Claude Monet & Co. Since we associate radicalism with disruption and dissonance, it's an oxymoron – the mental gymnastics of which suits their highbrow, austere art movement, in thrall to the science of colour and optics. A reproduction of a 19th-century colour wheel appears at the start, words such as "rigour", "geometry" and "theory" crop up in the labels; the show hardly has the ardent appeal of last year's autumn extravaganza, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, the most popular ticketed exhibition in the gallery's history. Yet, it is flecked, here and there, with flashes of poetry. Boil it down, and Neo-Impressionism was a painterly obs...