Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (1886) remains a landmark painting. It established the Parisian artist as one of the figures who would push Impressionism towards its logical conclusion. And push he did, in the...
[more]Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (1886) remains a landmark painting. It established the Parisian artist as one of the figures who would push Impressionism towards its logical conclusion. And push he did, in the direction of abstraction and a radically scientific approach to color.
The painting's parade of French bourgeoisie along a lawn, the women with parasols and long skirts, the men looking out at the adjacent water, replays the subject matter of the earlier Impressionists. But its dotted brushwork revolutionizes the mode of presentation. Understanding reality as a shifting apparition rather than a static external fact, Seurat developed a technique of dividing color into its components and arraying them for the eye to recapture. The result is a sort of luminosity emanating from the canvas, a haziness that makes the figures seem half substance, half shadow. At the same time, the flatness of the image abstracts the figures into almost geometric forms.
Seurat's technique was influenced by new developments in the science of optics. With an increased appreciation for the way the eye apprehends light, Seurat created a formula for optical painting. Known as "Pointillism," his method involved applying paint in minute dots of basic colors like blue or yellow, which, combined by the eye, form mixed hues like brown or mauve.
Seurat fused this new way of organizing color with a classical sense of composition: he carefully arranged figures on his canvases "as if on friezes' (so he said). He strenuously emphasized lines of movement and the balance of abstract forms. In "Le Chahut"
(1889-90), for example, a row of dancers performs a high kick: their legs, frozen in mid-air, form a perfect diagonal across the plane of the canvas. Again, an almost poster-like flatness prevails, anticipating the look of Toulouse-Lautrec and signaling the way toward Futurism.
Seurat intellectualized the Impressionist movement, introducing scientific methods to the tired plein-air rebellion and giving art a new sense of control over nature. He aimed to bring art into accord with scientific truths, to assert order, to reveal abstract principles. To his friend Charles Angrand, he reportedly said: "They see poetry in what I do. No. I apply my method and that is all."
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