Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French Post-Impressionist painter and draftsman.
He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the painting techniques
known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. His large-scale work, A Sunday Afternoon on
the Island of La Grande Jatte, altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism,
and is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.
Biography
Family and education Seurat was born 2 December 1859 in Paris,
at 60 rue de Bondy. The Seurat family moved to 136 boulevard de Magenta in 1862 or 1863.
His father, Antoine Chrysostome Seurat, originally from Champagne, was a former legal official
who had become wealthy from speculating in property, and his mother, Ernestine Faivre,
was from Paris. Georges had a brother, Émile Augustin, and a sister, Marie-Berthe, both
older. His father lived in Le Raincy and visited his wife and children once a week at boulevard
de Magenta. Georges Seurat first studied art at the Ecole
Municipale de Sculpture et Dessin, near his family's home in the boulevard Magenta, which
was run by the sculptor Justin Lequien. In 1878 he moved on to the École des Beaux-Arts
where he was taught by Henri Lehmann, and followed a conventional academic training,
drawing from casts of antique sculpture and copying drawings by old masters. Seurat's
studies resulted in a well-considered and fertile theory of contrasts: a theory to which
all his work was thereafter subjected. His formal artistic education came to an end in
November 1879, when he left the École des Beaux-Arts for a year of military service.
After a year at the Brest Military Academy, he returned to Paris where he shared a studio
with his friend Aman-Jean, while also renting a small apartment at 16 rue de Chabrol. For
the next two years, he worked at mastering the art of monochrome drawing. His first exhibited
work, shown at the Salon, of 1883, was a Conté crayon drawing of Aman-Jean. He also studied
the works of Delacroix carefully, making notes on his use of color.
Bathers at Asnières He spent 1883 working on his first major painting—a
large canvas titled Bathers at Asnières, a monumental work showing young men relaxing
by the Seine in a working-class suburb of Paris. Although influenced in its use of color
and light tone by Impressionism, the painting with its smooth, simplified textures and carefully
outlined, rather sculptural figures, shows the continuing impact of his neoclassical
training; the critic Paul Alexis described it as a "faux Puvis de Chavannes". Seurat
also departed from the Impressionist ideal by preparing for the work with a number of
drawings and oil sketches before starting on the canvas in his studio.
Bathers at Asnières was rejected by the Paris Salon, and instead he showed it at the Groupe
des Artistes Indépendants in May 1884. Soon, however, disillusioned by the poor organisation
of the Indépendants, Seurat and some other artists he had met through the group – including
Charles Angrand, Henri-Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet and Paul Signac – set up a
new organisation, the Société des Artistes Indépendants. Seurat's new ideas on pointillism
were to have an especially strong influence on Signac, who subsequently painted in the
same idiom. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
Jatte
In the summer of 1884, Seurat began work on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
Jatte, which took him two years to complete. The painting shows members of each of the
social classes participating in various park activities. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored
paint allow the viewer's eye to blend colors optically, rather than having the colors physically
blended on the canvas. It took Seurat two years to complete this 10-foot-wide painting,
much of which he spent in the park sketching in preparation for the work. It is now in
the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Seurat made several studies for the large painting including a smaller version, Study
for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, now in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. The painting was the inspiration for Stephen
Sondheim's musical, Sunday in the Park with George.
Later career
Seurat concealed his relationship with Madeleine Knobloch, an artist's model whom he portrayed
in his painting "Jeune femme se poudrant". In 1889 she moved in with Seurat in his studio
on the 7th floor of 128bis Boulevard de Clichy. When Madeleine became pregnant, the couple
moved to a studio at 39 passage de l'Élysée-des-Beaux-Arts. There she gave birth to their son, who was
named Pierre-Georges, 16 February 1890. Seurat spent the summer of 1890 on the coast
at Gravelines, where he painted four canvases including The Channel of Gravelines, Petit
Fort Philippe, as well as eight oil panels and made a few drawings.
Death Seurat died in Paris in his parents home on
29 March 1891 at the age of 31. The cause of his death is uncertain, and has been variously
attributed to a form of meningitis, pneumonia, infectious angina, and diphtheria. His son
died two weeks later from the same disease. His last ambitious work, The Circus, was left
unfinished at the time of his death. 30 March 1891 a commemorative service was
held in the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. Seurat was interred 31 March 1891 at Cimetière
du Père-Lachaise. At the time of Seurat's death Madeleine was
pregnant with a second child who died during or shortly after birth.
Color theory Contemporary ideas
During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood
and David Sutter wrote treatises on color, optical effects and perception. They adapted
the scientific research of Hermann von Helmholtz and Isaac Newton into a form accessible to
laypeople. Artists followed new discoveries in perception with great interest.
Chevreul was perhaps the most important influence on artists at the time; his great contribution
was producing a color wheel of primary and intermediary hues. Chevreul was a French chemist
who restored tapestries. During his restorations he noticed that the only way to restore a
section properly was to take into account the influence of the colors around the missing
wool ; he could not produce the right hue unless he recognized the surrounding dyes.
Chevreul discovered that two colors juxtaposed, slightly overlapping or very close together,
would have the effect of another color when seen from a distance. The discovery of this
phenomenon became the basis for the pointillist technique of the Neoimpressionist painters.
Chevreul also realized that the 'halo' that one sees after looking at a color is the opposing
color. For example: After looking at a red object, one may see a cyan echo/halo of the
original object. This complementary color is due to retinal persistence. Neoimpressionist
painters interested in the interplay of colors made extensive use of complementary colors
in their paintings. In his works, Chevreul advised artists to think and paint not just
the color of the central object, but to add colors and make appropriate adjustments to
achieve a harmony among colors. It seems that the harmony Chevreul wrote about is what Seurat
came to call "emotion". It is not clear whether Seurat read all of
Chevreul's book on colour contrast, published in 1859, but he did copy out several paragraphs
from the chapter on painting, and he had read Charles Blanc's Grammaire des arts du dessin,
which cites Chevreul's work. Blanc's book was directed at artists and art connoisseurs.
Because of color's emotional significance to him, he made explicit recommendations that
were close to the theories later adopted by the Neoimpressionists. He said that color
should not be based on the "judgment of taste", but rather it should be close to what we experience
in reality. Blanc did not want artists to use equal intensities of color, but to consciously
plan and understand the role of each hue in creating a whole.
While Chevreul based his theories on Newton's thoughts on the mixing of light, Ogden Rood
based his writings on the work of Helmholtz. He analyzed the effects of mixing and juxtaposing
material pigments. Rood valued as primary colors red, green, and blue-violet. Like Chevreul,
he said that if two colors are placed next to each other, from a distance they look like
a third distinctive color. He also pointed out that the juxtaposition of primary hues
next to each other would create a far more intense and pleasing color, when perceived
by the eye and mind, than the corresponding color made simply by mixing paint. Rood advised
artists to be aware of the difference between additive and subtractive qualities of color,
since material pigments and optical pigments do not mix in the same way:
Material pigments: Red + Yellow + Blue = Black Optical / Light : Red + Green + Blue = White
Seurat was also influenced by Sutter's Phenomena of Vision, in which he wrote that "the laws
of harmony can be learned as one learns the laws of harmony and music". He heard lectures
in the 1880s by the mathematician Charles Henry at the Sorbonne, who discussed the emotional
properties and symbolic meaning of lines and color. Henry's ideas were quickly adopted
by Seurat. Science and emotion
Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting.
He believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the
same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music.
He theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and
he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and
optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics
and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat
called this language Chromoluminarism. In a letter to Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 he
wrote "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of
tone, of color and of line, considered according to their dominance and under the influence
of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations". Seurat's theories can be summarized as follows:
The emotion of gaiety can be achieved by the domination of luminous hues, by the predominance
of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed upward. Calm is achieved through an equivalence/balance
of the use of the light and the dark, by the balance of warm and cold colors, and by lines
that are horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark and cold colors and by lines pointing
downward. Influence
Where the dialectic nature of Paul Cézanne's work had been greatly influential during the
highly expressionistic phase of proto-Cubism, between 1908 and 1910, the work of Seurat,
with its flatter, more linear structures, would capture the attention of the Cubists
from 1911. "With the advent of monochromatic Cubism in
1910-1911," writes art historian Robert Herbert, "questions of form displaced color in the
artists' attention, and for these Seurat was more relevant. Thanks to several exhibitions,
his paintings and drawings were easily seen in Paris, and reproductions of his major compositions
circulated widely among the Cubists. The Chahut [Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo] was
called by André Salmon "one of the great icons of the new devotion", and both it and
the Cirque, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, according to Guillaume Apollinaire, "almost belong to
Synthetic Cubism". The concept was well established among the
French artists that painting could be expressed mathematically, in terms of both color and
form; and this mathematical expression resulted in an independent and compelling 'objective
truth,' perhaps more so than the objective truth of the object represented.
Indeed, the Neo-Impressionists had succeeded in establishing an objective scientific basis
in the domain of color. Soon, the Cubists were to do so in both the domain of form and
dynamics, Orphism would do so with color too. Gallery
Exhibitions
From 1883 until his death, Seurat exhibited his work at the Salon, the Salon des Indépendants,
Les XX in Brussels, the eighth Impressionist exhibition, and various other exhibitions
in France and abroad. Salon, Paris, 1 May–20 June 1883
The Salon showed Seurat's drawing of Edmond Aman-Jean.
Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 15 May–30 June 1884
Seurat showed Une Baignade, Asnières, after the official Salon had rejected it. Seurat's
debut as a painter. Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 10 December
1884–17 January 1885 Works in Oil and Pastel by the Impressionists
of Paris, American Art Association, New York, April and May 1886.
Organised by Paul Durand-Ruel. Impressionist exhibition, Paris, 15 May–15
June 1886Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte shown for the first time.
Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 21 August–21 September 1886
Les impressionnistes, Palais du Cours Saint-André, Nantes, 10 October 1886–15 January 1887
Galerie Martinet, Paris, December 1886–January 1887
Les XX, Brussels, February 1887 Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 26 March–3
May 1887 Théâtre Libre, Paris, November 1887–January
1888 Works by Seurat, Signac and van Gogh.
Exposition de Janvier, La Revue indépendante, Paris, January 1888
Exposition de Février, La Revue indépendante, Paris, February 1888
Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 1–3 March 1888 Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 22 March–3
May 1888 Tweede Jaarlijksche Tentoonstelling der Nederlandsche
Etsclub, Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, June 1888
Drawing Au café concert, lent by Theo van Gogh.
Les XX, Brussels, February 1889 Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 3 September–4
October 1889 Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 20 March–27
April 1890 Showed Le Chahut, Jeune femme se poudrant
and 9 other works. Les XX, Brussels, 7 February–8 March 1891
Showed Le Chahut and 6 other paintings. Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 20 March–27
April 1891 Showed Le Cirque and four paintings from Gravelines.
Source See also
History of painting References
Notes
Sources Georges Seurat, 1859-1891. New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art. 1991. ISBN 9780870996184. Jooren, Marieke; Veldink, Suzanne; Berger,
Helewise. Seurat. Kröller-Müller Museum. ISBN 9789073313286.
Further reading Cachin, Françoise, Seurat: Le rêve de l’art-science,
Paris: Gallimard/Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991
Everdell, William R.. The First Moderns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-22480-5.
Fénéon, Félix, Oeuvres-plus-que-complètes, ed.,
J. U. Halperin, 2v, Geneva: Droz, 1970 Gage, John T., “The Technique of Seurat:
A Reappraisal,” Art Bulletin 69:3 Halperin, Joan Ungersma, Félix Fénéon:
Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, New Haven, CT: Yale U.P., 1988
Homer, William Innes, Seurat and the Science of Painting, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964
Lövgren, Sven, The Genesis of Modernism: Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh & French Symbolism
in the 1880s, 2nd ed., Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1971
Rewald, John, Cézanne, new ed., NY: Abrams, 1986
Rewald, Seurat, NY: Abrams, 1990 Rewald, Studies in Impressionism, NY: Harry
N. Abrams, 1986 Rewald, Post-Impressionism, 3rd ed., revised,
NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1978 Rewald, Studies in Post-Impressionism, NY:
Harry N. Abrams, 1986 Rich, Daniel Catton, Seurat and the Evolution
of La Grande Jatte, NY: Greenwood Press, 1969 Russell, John, Seurat, London: Thames & Hudson,
1985 Seurat, Georges, Seurat: Correspondences,
témoignages, notes inédites, critiques, ed., Hélène Seyrès, Paris: Acropole, 1991
Seurat, ed., Norma Broude, Seurat in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978
External links Georges Seurat - Biography, style and artworks
106 works by Georges-Pierre Seurat Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor in
the MoMA Online Collection George Seurat: The Drawings in the MoMA Online
Collection