Seurat, Georges

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SEURAT, GEORGES

la grande jatte
seurat's science and craft
the debut of neo-impressionism
seurat after la grande jatte
seurat's legacy
bibliography

SEURAT, GEORGES (1859–1891), French neo-impressionist painter.

The outline of Georges-Pierre Seurat's short life can be recounted quickly. Born to a middle-class family in Paris on 2 December 1859, in 1878 Seurat enrolled at the École des beaux-arts, and in 1882 he began to submit works to the annual state-sponsored Salon. The Salon jury admitted a drawing in 1883, but the next year rejected Seurat's more ambitious entry, Une Baignade, Asnières (1883–1884; Bathers at Asnières). In this canvas—exhibited at an alternative venue, the Salon des Indépendants—Seurat referred to academic tradition, naturalist observation, and impressionist light effects. Yet he also hinted at something new, depicting his subjects, modern working-class or lower-middle-class men, as idealized, monumental forms.

la grande jatte

"The subject: the island beneath a scorching sky, at four o'clock, boats slipping along its flanks, stirring with a fortuitous Sunday population enjoying fresh air among the trees" ("VIIIe exposition impressioniste," p. 261). The young critic Félix Fénéon thus described Seurat's painting with a specificity that echoes the artist's title: Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte—1884 (Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte—1884). This tiny island in the Seine, a popular weekend destination just beyond Paris's city limits, was the focus of Seurat's attention for two years (1884–1886). Extant studies (twenty-six drawings, twenty-six panels, and three canvases) reveal much about the artist's evolving aims and methods. In keeping with impressionist practice, he produced numerous painted sketches on small wooden panels measuring 16 by 25 centimeters (6 ¼ by 9 ? inches). Records of light effects at different times of day, experiments with alternate positions for shadows, trees, figures, boats—these on-site sketches served as research notes when Seurat entered the studio to work on his 2-by-3-meter (81-by-120-inch) canvas, which would synthesize many moments of observation and aspire to a new classicism.

Seurat explained to the critic Gustave Kahn in 1888: "I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those [Greek] friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color, by directions of the tones in harmony with the lines, and by the directions of the lines" (Kahn, pp. 142–143). Ostensibly describing his method, he also defined his subject. Seurat's figures are numerous but not diverse, most of them recognizably members of the lower-middle to middle class, perhaps including some artisans. While some have contended that the scene is a sociological sampling of Paris or an anarchist manifesto, it can also be interpreted as an allegorical ideal in which the artist presented many contrasts, but no conflicts.

seurat's science and craft

Seurat's innovative technique is usually described as "scientific," in keeping with the vocabulary used by the artist and his contemporaries, who lived in an age greatly enamored of science. Pissarro, for example, drew a distinction between "romantic" and "scientific" impressionism, implying a welcome eclipse of the former by the latter. But reference to science can mask the elements of intuition and craft so central to Seurat's achievement. The shimmering effect of his paintings results from careful juxtapositions of light and dark shades and of warm and cool colors, hence his own coinage, chromo-luminarisme. It is a myth that Seurat restricted himself to the three primary colors, pairing dots of blue and yellow (for instance) to form green. Seurat studied the principles governing solar or prismatic light as explained by scientists Michel-Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood, but he adapted their theories to his own particular goals and materials.

Another myth about Seurat's technique claims that his surfaces are regular patterns of tiny dots or points. (In fact, the term pointillism comes from the language of craft, point being French for "stitch.") In some cases, a coarsely woven canvas support lends a texture to thin paint layers, but the individual marks vary widely from small dabs to long streaks, angled in all directions: Seurat once described his brushwork as bayalé (broom-swept). Only in comparison with the loose, gestural brushwork of his immediate predecessors, the impressionists, could Seurat's hand appear mechanical.

the debut of neo-impressionism

La Grande Jatte was shown in the eighth and last impressionist exhibition, which opened on 15 May 1886. Among the best known of the seventeen participating artists were Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, and Berthe Morisot. Camille Pissarro had argued strenuously for the inclusion of Seurat, a newcomer. The relegation of Seurat's works to a separate gallery within the exhibition only emphasized his difference—and his influence. Paul Signac, Pissarro, and Pissarro's son Lucien

each declared their affinity for the new style, which Fénéon dubbed neo-impressionism, in major works of their own.

La Grande Jatte established Seurat's celebrity, drawing positive and negative attention from commentators who made comparisons with early Renaissance art, Egyptian art, wooden toys, puppets, tapestries, broadsides, and illustrations by the English artist Kate Greenaway (best known for her children's book drawings). Undeniably, Seurat's quest to renovate impressionism struck a chord among a younger generation of artists, especially those who would become known as the symbolists. These painters and writers admired Seurat for going beyond the optical surface, eliminating haphazard contingency, and giving form to timeless ideals. "To synthesize a landscape in a definitive aspect which perpetuates its sensation, that is what the Neo-Impressionists try to do," summarized Fénéon in 1887 ("Le néo-impressionisme," p. 140). Many subsequent modernist movements embraced this same goal.

seurat after la grande jatte

Seurat's third major canvas, Les Poseuses (1887–1888; The models), self-consciously features its predecessor, La Grande Jatte, as a picture within the picture, hanging on the wall behind three young women. Alluding to the mythological Three Graces, Poseuses takes on the traditional art-historical subject of the nude, but these are not the voluptuous goddesses of Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) or Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Instead, they are modern girls who have briefly discarded their fashionable clothes. The French title, like its English cognate, refers to the models' task of posing for the artist, but also to the women parading fully dressed in the painting behind them. La Parade (1887–1888), Le Chahut (1889–1890), and Le Cirque (1890–1891) amplify this theme. Rather than emphasizing the provocative aspects of these popular urban entertainments, Seurat instead revealed the commercialization underlying the apparently uninhibited performance—just as he had pointed out the regimentation of leisure in La Grande Jatte.

seurat's legacy

On 29 March 1891 Seurat died of an acute respiratory infection at the age of thirty-one. His contemporaries immediately began to ponder his legacy; Signac, for example, did so both in his own painting and in the influential book From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism (1899). This text encouraged artists such as Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, and Pablo Picasso to view Seurat as a pioneer who had liberated color from its descriptive role. In subject and form, Seurat's art embraces both contrast and harmony. He addressed his contemporaries, but cast an eye to the past and the future. In less than a decade, he changed the course of modern art, prompting critics to devise new vocabularies, painters to experiment with new techniques, and viewers to learn new ways of looking. Seurat's wholly original mode of aesthetic innovation draws upon the positivist, naturalist convictions of the nineteenth century while pointing toward the abstract, ironic attitudes of the twentieth.

See alsoImpressionism; Romanticism; Turner, J. M. W.