1859 - 1891 • French • Painter • Neo-Impressionist
"They see poetry in what I have done. No, I apply my method, and that is all there is to it." - Georges Seurat
Seurat insisted that his art was a "formula for optical painting" based on repeated, systematic observation of the activity of color and light. It was not the temporary, fugitive effect sought by IMPRESSIONISTS th at he was after. Instead, Seurat wished to systematize the techniques Impressionists and other artists used to represent what is seen, and to arrive at a rational, methodical way to capture natural light and color. In short, Seurat was after a permanent truth. He did not need to work outdoors- quickly, by natural light, as Impressionists did-rather, using his quasi-scientific approach, he could work by artificial light, long into the night. The process was one Seurat himself called DIVISIONISM: colors divided, or broken down, into their component parts. The technique is more widely known as POINTILLISM, referring to the application of pigment in minute dots. Instead of blending paint before daubing it on the canvas, Seurat achieved the effects of color modulation by juxtaposing unmixed colors, or hues. To represent water, for example, he applied dots of blues, greens, and whites directly on to the canvas, shading, lightening, and changing the look of the water according to the arrangement of dots. The mind's eye of the viewer blends the dots and "sees" the wide range and variety of color as unified. How is it, then, that Seurat is so highly regarded as an artist, as Arthur Danto writes, "a chilly geometrist, a chromatic engineer, a scientific placer of bitsy dots ... as obsessed by the logic of color as Paolo Uccello is legended to have been possessed by, almost drunk on, the logic of linear perspective"? As did UCCELLO's paintings, Seurat's paintings transcend the technique he used to create them. What was said of VELAZQUEZ's Las Meninas (1656) might also be said of Seurat's masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884 {1884-86): It is also a "Theology of Painting." But it is a 19th-20th century theology with different goals and problems: a portrait of an age, rather than of individuals, inhabited by the middle classes, not royalty. And the tradition of painting, the artist's role, concepts of vision and reflection, of illumination, PERSPECTIVE, and COLOR, have been updated to show a world in which machine-made goods are mass produced. Yet while the women wear corsets and bustles, they also mysteriously call to mind sculptures from ancient Mesopotamia and from Egypt. So, too, did Seurat's glimpses of contemporary, popular Parisian entertainment- musicians, the circus, the cancan dancers of Le Chahut (1889-90), as well as the geometric, empty stillness of a coastline. Seurat died before he was 32, but he seems to have forecast the major art movements to come, including CUBISM, PRECISIONISM, SURREALISM, and even MINIMALISM.
