Georges-Pierre Seurat

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Georges-Pierre Seurat

(born Dec. 2, 1859, Paris, Fr. — died March 29, 1891, Paris) French painter. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and exhibited at the 1883 Salon, though he had already lost sympathy with its conservative policies. He studied scientific works in an effort to achieve scientifically the colour effects that the Impressionists had pursued, and developed Pointillism, the technique of juxtaposing tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours to portray the play of light. Employing this method, he created huge compositions, including his masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884 – 86). He and other artists working in this style became known as Neo-Impressionists. As an aesthetic theorist, he explored the effects that could be achieved with the three primary colours and their complements.

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Art Encyclopedia: Georges-Pierre Seurat

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(b Paris, 2 Dec 1859; d Paris, 29 March 1891). French painter and draughtsman. In his short career as a mature artist (c. 1882-91), he produced highly sophisticated drawings and invented the Divisionist technique of painting known as POINTILLISM, which was taken up by many of his contemporaries associated with Neo-Impressionism. His application of scientific principles to painting and his stress on the surface quality of his work have had lasting effects on 20th-century art.

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Biography: Georges Pierre Seurat

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The French painter Georges Pierre Seurat (1859-1891) was the leading figure in the neoimpressionist movement of the 1880s and in the development of the technique of pointillism.

The impressionist style, which marked a radical shift in the course of Western painting, blossomed for the most part in the 1870s. During the next 2 decades a number of young painters sought to work out the tenets of impressionism in terms of their personal styles. These artists are generally separated into two groups: the postimpressionists, which included Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne, and the neoimpressionists, which included Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. In particular, Seurat wished to carry the theories of impressionism to their logical conclusions and to establish an art with a truly scientific base.

Seurat was born in Paris on Dec. 2, 1859. As a student, he worked in the school of the sculptor Justin Lequien, and, for less than a year during 1878-1879, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. During these years Seurat developed a deep respect for antique sculpture and Renaissance painting. In terms of his own century, he particularly admired the painting of J. A. D. Ingres, and he made a careful study of the new landscape tradition that had begun with the Barbizon school and culminated in impressionism.

Development of Pointillism

But Seurat was interested in science as well as art, especially in scientific color theory. During the late 1870s and the early 1880s he read numerous treatises on this subject, including those by M. E. Chevreul, H. von Helmholtz, and O. N. Rood; he also studied Eugène Delacroix's writings on color.

Essentially, Seurat's aim was to separate each color into its component parts (this process is known as divisionism) and to apply each of the component colors individually on the canvas surface. In order to have the colors blend optically, each one had to be applied in the form of a small dot of pigment. The phenomenon whereby colors were allowed to blend optically instead of being mixed on the palette had been the discovery of the impressionists, but Seurat carried the process further. He analyzed it scientifically and developed a theory to explain it. The term "pointillism" refers to the actual application of these theories to painting.

His Paintings

Seurat's first major demonstration of pointillism was A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886). This is also his most celebrated painting. A large work, it is extremely complicated, consisting of numerous figures scattered both across and into pictorial space. The scene itself is typically impressionist in presenting an outdoor world. Yet the work departs radically from impressionism: it was painted entirely in the studio with each of its many elements being carefully calculated in terms of color, light, and composition. La Grande Jatte is thus a tour de force in revealing Seurat's painstaking method: like his academic predecessors, he made careful studies for each figure. As a result, each seems frozen in its position, but each scintillates because it is composed of a myriad of individual color spots. As a whole, the painting is at once both classical and modern.

Seurat, Signac, and Odilon Redon were instrumental in organizing the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which had its first exhibition in 1884. Like the impressionists before them, these artists originated their own shows because their radical art had been rejected by the juries of the official Salon. And although these shows contained a wide variety of individual styles, Seurat's ambitious demonstrations of pointillism clearly established him as the major figure of neoimpressionism. Between 1886 and 1890 his influence thus spread to numerous other painters, including Gauguin, Camille Pissarro, Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, all of whom went through pointillist periods in their own work.

After completing La Grande Jatte, Seurat consciously sought to expand the expressive range of his work. He became interested in motion and in the emotional quality of linear rhythms. Seurat's friend, the esthetician Charles Henry, encouraged and shared these interests, which are reflected in La Parade (1887-1888), La Chahut (1889-1890), and the Circus (unfinished). In contrast to the formality of La Grande Jatte, these works contain moving figures, sparkling lights, and a generally lyric atmosphere. In spite of this expanded content, however, Seurat did not relinquish his methodical, scientific technique. He continued to work slowly, carefully developing his theories and producing numerous drawings and oil studies for each painting.

His Drawings

Because of his painstaking working process, Seurat completed relatively few major paintings. Throughout his life, however, he was a tireless and consummate draftsman. As a student, he made drawings of classical sculpture, architectural motifs, and the human figure. Many of these are reminiscent of the touch and style of Ingres. But by the early 1880s Seurat began to evolve a more personal style, generally employing Conté crayon and an unusually high-grain paper. The range of feeling in these drawings is extraordinary - and occasionally surprising in comparison to the rather cool tenor of his paintings. The master delicately used his materials to suggest figures, spaces, and atmosphere; frequently he allowed the grain of the paper to show through the Conté crayon and achieved a sense of quiet intimacy that has few parallels in the history of the medium.

Early in 1891 Seurat contracted infectious angina. He died on March 29 at the height of his artistic powers.

Life

Seurat was born into a wealthy family in Paris. His father, Antoine Chrysostom Seurat, was a legal official and a native of Champagne; his mother, Ernestine Faivre, was Parisian. Georges Seurat first studied art with Justin Lequiene, a sculptor. Seurat attended the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. After a year of service at Brest Military Academy, he returned to Paris in 1880. He shared a small studio on the Left Bank with two student friends before moving to a studio of his own. For the next two years he devoted himself to mastering the art of black and white drawing. He spent 1883 on his first major painting — a huge canvas titled Bathers at Asnières.

After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat turned away from such establishments, instead allying himself with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884 he and other artists (including Maximilien Luce) formed the Société des Artistes Indépendants. There he met and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac. Seurat shared his new ideas about pointillism with Signac, who subsequently painted in the same idiom. In the summer of 1884 Seurat began work on his masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which took him two years to complete.

Later he moved from the Boulevard de Clichy to a quieter studio nearby, where he lived secretly with a young model, Madeleine Knobloch, whom he portrayed in his painting "Jeune femme se poudrant". In February 1890 she gave birth to his son, who was given the first name of Pierre Georges. It was not until two days before his death that he introduced his young family to his parents^{[citation needed]}. Shortly after his death, Madeleine gave birth to his second son, whose name is unknown, and who died at birth or soon after.

The cause of Seurat's death is uncertain, and has been attributed to a form of meningitis, pneumonia, infectious angina, and/or (most probably) diphtheria. His elder son died two weeks later from the same disease.^[2] His last ambitious work, The Circus, was left unfinished at the time of his death.

Detail from La Parade (1889) showing pointillism

Scientific background and influences

During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote treatises on colour, optical effects and perception. They were able to translate the scientific research of Helmholtz and Newton into a written form that was understandable by non-scientists. Chevreul was perhaps the most important influence on artists at the time; his great contribution was producing the colour wheel of primary and intermediary hues.

Chevreul was a French chemist who restored old tapestries. During his restorations of tapestries he noticed that the only way to restore a section properly was to take into account the influence of the colours around the missing wool; he could not produce the right hue unless he recognized the surrounding dyes. Chevreul discovered that two colours juxtaposed, slightly overlapping or very close together, would have the effect of another colour 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 colour is actually the opposing, or complementary, colour. For example: After looking at a red object, one may see a cyan echo/halo of the original object. This complementary colour (as an example, cyan for red) is due to retinal persistence. Neoimpressionist painters interested in the interplay of colours made extensive use of complementary colours in their paintings. In his works Chevreul advised artists that they should not just paint the colour of the object being depicted, but rather they should add colours and make appropriate adjustments to achieve a harmony. It seems that the harmony Chevreul wrote about is what Seurat came to call 'emotion'.

According to Professor Anne Beauchemin from McGill University, most Neoimpressionist painters probably did not read Chevreul's books, but instead they read Grammaire des arts du dessin, written in 1867 by Charles Blanc, who cited Chevreul's works. Blanc's book was targeted at artists and art connoisseurs. colour had an emotional significance for him, and he made explicit recommendations to artists which were close to the theories later adopted by the Neoimpressionists. He said that colour 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 colour, but rather to consciously plan and understand the role of each hue.

Another important influence on the Neoimpressionists was Ogden Rood, who also studied colour and optical effects. Whereas the theories of Chevreul are based on Newton's thoughts on the mixing of light, Rood's writings are based on the work of Helmholtz, and as such he analyzed the effects of mixing together and juxtaposing material pigments. For Rood, the primary colours were red, green, and blue-violet. Like Chevreul, he stated that if two colours are placed next to each other, from a distance they look like a third distinctive colour. Rood also pointed out that the juxtaposition of primary hues next to each other would create a far more intense and pleasing colour when perceived by the eye and mind than the corresponding colour made by mixing paint. Rood advised that artists be aware of the difference between additive and subtractive qualities of colour, since material pigments and optical pigments (light) do not mix together in the same way:

Material pigments: Red + Yellow + Blue = Black
Optical / Light : Red + Green + Blue = White

Other influences on Seurat included Sutter's Phenomena of Vision (1880) in which he wrote that "the laws of harmony can be learned as one learns the laws of harmony and music"^[3], as well as mathematician Charles Henry who in the 1880s delivered monologues at the Sorbonne about the emotional properties and symbolic meaning of lines and colour. Henry's ideas were quickly adopted by the founder of Neoimpressionism.

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Seurat's melding of science and emotion

Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting. Seurat 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. Seurat 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.

His letter to Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 captures his feelings about the scientific approach to emotion and harmony. He says "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".^[4]

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.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte 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 blended on the canvas or pre-blended as a material pigment. It took Seurat two years to complete this ten foot wide painting, much of which he spent in the park sketching in preparation for the work (there are about 60 studies). It is now in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Gallery

Bathers at Asnières, 1884, National Gallery, London

The Models, 1888, Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA

Gray weather, Grande Jatte, 1888, Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Circus, 1891, Musée d'Orsay Paris

Notes

[p] - The name Georges Seurat is pronounced as "Zhorzh Soo-rah".^[5]

^ Art Institute of Chicago
^ Death of Seurat, CDC.
^ Sam, Hunter (1992). "Georges Seurat". Modern Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams. pp. 27.
^ Art of the 20th Century, Karl Ruhrberg
^ "C.U.S.D. Art Masterpiece Manual", Mary Lynne Lasure, p.38, web: CUSD-artm-PDF.

References

External links

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www.GeorgesSeurat.org - 106 works by Georges-Pierre Seurat
“Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor in the MoMA Online Collection

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19th-century movements	Neo-impressionism · Divisionism · Pointillism · Cloisonnism · Les Nabis · Synthetism · Symbolism · Art Nouveau · Jugendstil

Artists	Henri Rousseau · Paul Cézanne · Paul Gauguin · Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Odilon Redon · Georges Seurat · Paul Signac · Vincent van Gogh

20th-century movements	Fauvism · Die Brücke · Der Blaue Reiter · Expressionism · Cubism

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Georges-Pierre Seurat
Georges Seurat, 1888
Born	2 December 1859(1859-12-02) Paris, France
Died	29 March 1891 (aged 31)
Nationality	French
Field	painting
Movement	Neo-impressionism, modern art
Works	Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte