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Georges-Pierre Seurat

(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

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.

Further Reading

The most authoritative treatment of Seurat's techniques and color theories is William Innes Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting (1964). Monographs on the artist include Daniel Catton Rich, ed., Seurat: Paintings and Drawings (1958), and John Russell, Seurat (1965). For Seurat's drawings see Robert L. Herbert, Seurat's Drawings (1962). For a general survey see John Rewald, Post-Impressionism, from Van Gogh to Gauguin (1956; 2d ed. 1962).

 
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.

For more information on Georges-Pierre Seurat, visit Britannica.com.

 
French Literature Companion: Georges Seurat

Seurat, Georges (1859-91). French painter. Rejecting what he considered the intuitive, subjective treatment of colour in Monet's work, Seurat sought to establish Impressionism on a more scientific basis. His technique, which he called divisionism, was based on his study of Delacroix, Chevreul's colour theories, and Charles Henry's chromatic circle. Small dots of colour, instead of being mixed on the palette, were juxtaposed on the canvas and mingled in the eye of the spectator standing at the appropriate distance. Fénéon defined the new style in Les Impressionnistes en 1886 and Kahn saw it as related to Symbolist experimentation with vers libre.

[James Kearns]

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Seurat, Georges
(zhôrzh sörä') , 1859–91, French neoimpressionist painter. He devised the pointillist technique of painting in tiny dots of pure color. His method, called divisionism, was a systematic refinement of the broken color of the impressionists. His major achievements are his Baignade (Tate Gall., London), shown in the Salon des Indépendants in 1884, and his masterpiece, Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte (Art Inst., Chicago), completed two years later. He died of pneumonia at 31. Seurat is recognized as one of the most intellectual artists of his time and was a great influence in restoring harmonious and deliberate design and a thorough understanding of color combination to painting at a time when sketching from nature had become the mode. Other examples of Seurat's work are in the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa., and in the Louvre.

Bibliography

See catalog (ed. by A. Blunt and R. Fry, 1965); drawings (ed. by R. L. Herbert, 1966); complete paintings, ed. by J. Rewald and H. Dorra (1988); biographies by J. Russell (1985) and P. Courthion (1988).

 
Wikipedia: Georges-Pierre Seurat
Le Chahut was painted by Seurat from 1889 to 1890.
Enlarge
Le Chahut was painted by Seurat from 1889 to 1890.

Georges-Pierre Seurat (December 2, 1859 – March 29,1891) was a French painter and the founder of Neo-impressionism. His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is one of the icons of 19th century painting[attribution needed].

Life

Seurat was born to a well-off family in Paris. His father was a legal official and a native of Champagne; his mother was Parisian. Seurat first studied art with Justin Lequien, 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 Bathing at Asnières (see Asnières-sur-Seine).

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. In February 1890 she gave birth to his son. 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.

Seurat died from a form of meningitis, and was buried in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. His last ambitious work, The Circus, was left unfinished at the time of his death.

Scientific background and influences

During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Michel Eugène Chevreul, Nicholas Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote treatises on color, 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 color 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 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 actually the opposing, or complementary, color. For example: After looking at a red object, one may see a green echo/halo of the original object. This complementary color (as an example, green for red) 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 that they should not just paint the color of the object being depicted, but rather they should add colors 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. Color 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 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 rather to consciously plan and understand the role of each hue.

Another important influence on the Neoimpressionists was Nicholas Ogden Rood, who also studied color 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 colors were red, green, and blue-violet. Like Chevreul, he stated that if two colors are placed next to each other, from a distance they look like a third distinctive color. Rood 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 by mixing paint. Rood advised that artists be aware of the difference between additive and subtractive qualities of color, 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'[2], 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 color. Henry's ideas were quickly adopted by the founder of Neoimpressionism.

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 variation in sound and tempo 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'[3].

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 downwards.

The crowning achievement

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte shows people of all different classes in a park. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi- colored paint allow the eye of the viewer 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, and he spent much time in the park sketching to prepare for the work (there are about 60 studies). It is now exhibited in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Endnotes

[1] Seurat, Georges. Letter to Maurice Beaubourg (1890), in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: Sources and Documents. L. Nochlin (ed.) Englewood Cliffs (NJ), 1966, p. 113

[2] Hunter, Sam. Georges Seurat, in S. Hunter and J. Jacobus, Modern Art (3rd ed.). New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1992, p. 27

Further Reading on Seurat and His Contemporaries

  • Cachin, Françoise, Seurat: Le rêve de l’art-science, Paris: Gallimard/Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991
  • Everdell, William R. (1998). 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(Sep87)
  • 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 U.P., 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 (U. of Chicago Press, 1935), NY: Greenwood Press, 1969
  • Russell, John, Seurat, (1965) London: Thames & Hudson, 1985
  • Seurat, Georges, Seurat: Correspondances, témoignages, notes inédites, critiques, ed., Hélène Seyrès, Paris: Acropole, 1991 (NYU ND 553.S5A3
  • Seurat, ed., Norma Broude, Seurat in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978

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