I am a fan of art of all kinds, genres, styles and eras. I have always had a love for museums and love to visit local art galleries to see what is new and different.
It is now exactly a century since Georges Seurat died of a brief but virulent illness only a few months after his 31st birthday. To this day, he is one of the most important, as well as one of the most puzzling, of modern artists.
Seurat was already an accomplished painter and a very original draughtsman by the time he was in his early20s. He made his public debut as a painter in the spring of 1884, when he joined forces with a group of artists whose work had been rejected by the official salon. Together they organized the first Salon des Artistes Indépendants, a jury-free exhibition that was to become the Parisian avant-garde’s main annual event for the next two decades, and to which Seurat remained loyal throughout his life. His large circus scene was hanging at the 1891 exhibition of the Indépendants the day he died.
To the first independent salon the 24 -year-old artist sent a single large painting, entitled "A Bathing Place, Asnières," which represented working-class men and boys lounging along a river bank in an industrial suburb of Paris. The picture combined an odd mixture of impressionist brush stroke, color, and light with a linear precision and geometry that recalled early Renaissance frescoes. It also clearly alluded - not without irony - to Puvis de Chavannes’s "Pleasant Land", a mural-like allegorical painting that had been shown at the 1882 Salon. Because of the unusual subject and rendering of Seurat’s painting and its unwieldy size, it was hung in the bar rather than in the regular galleries, and it attracted relatively little attention.
The press notices that it did get were not very encouraging. One critic listed it among the three most grotesque works shown and, recognizing its roots in Ecole des Beaux-Arts classicism, characterized it as “a fake Puvis de Chavannes.” Even Roger Marx, a determined advocate of avant-garde art, hedged his bet by referring to Seurat’s painting in a rather lukewarm way as an “impressionist painting” that revealed “indications of genuine qualities, the mark of a temperament.”
Two years later, however, when Seurat exhibited his equally large and even more ambitious "A Sunday on la Grande Jatte" at the eighth - and last - Impressionist group exhibition, his painting was prominently displayed and attracted much attention. Although the reviews were again mixed, even his critics recognized that this painting, and Seurat’s method of painting in general, embodied important innovations. Its style and composition were compared to Egyptian art and medieval tapestries, as well as to popular imagery - a distinct contrast to the generally ahistorical treatment of Impressionist painting. Some writers also remarked on the mechanical look of the painting, not only because its surface was made up of countless little dots of paint that resembled mechanically made reproductions, but because the figures looked like dolls or toy soldiers.
The painting was also understood to be socially provocative.
Seurat’s manner was described by one critic as a “necessary transformation of impressionism” which involved the “abandonment of pure sensation” and a return to linear and thereby more idea-oriented painting. This emphasis on ideas was an important element in the ways that Seurat’s art was received in advanced circles. It made him much admired by the emerging Symbolist writers, for what they perceived as a disavowal of naturalism; and it caused him to be deeply mistrusted by the Impressionists, who saw him as a threat to their own aesthetic of spontaneity and direct, intuitive expression.
Although Seurat had been initially associated with the Impressionists, they soon realized that he was not really part of that movement but rather the leader of a kind of fifth column within it. In fact, Camille Pissarro, his strongest advocate among the Impressionists, had had a difficult time persuading the other members of the group to allow Seurat to show with them in 1886. Both Monet and Renoir found excuses for not participating.
Eventually a compromise was worked out with the help of Degas. Seurat and his friend Paul Signac, along with Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien, were given a separate room where they could show whatever they pleased. But Degas, too, was less than enthusiastic about "La Grande Jatte". When Pissarro, a recent convert to Seurat’s methodical way of painting, pointed out what he believed to be the considerable merits of the picture, Degas replied with acid wit: “Oh, I would have noticed that myself, Pissarro, only it’s so big!”
From this point forward, Seurat’s kind of painting, which later that year was named “neo-impressionist”, was rightly seen as the antithesis of the movement out of which it grew. Whereas the Impressionists, such as Monet and Renoir, had aimed for a fluid kind of imagery which was based on what seemed to be a direct and intuitive response to nature - and which placed great importance on creating a sense of spontaneity in recording what was right before their eyes - Seurat’s painting was overtly synthetic and contrived. While Impressionist paintings seemed to capture a single moment in contemporary life, Seurat transposed the themes of the Impressionists into the kinds of timeless settings usually reserved for mythological subjects. And while the Impressionists purposely ignored the traditional distinctions between a sketch and a finished picture, Seurat made a clear differentiation between his small, loosely rendered studies done directly from nature and his large, carefully finished final paintings. In contrast to the Impressionists, Seurat developed a mechanical-looking technique in which he applied paint in regular little dots or dabs of contrasting color, and which he described as the “scientific” basis of his procedure. Instead of blending his colors or setting them down with fluid and varied brush strokes, he clearly divided each touch of paint from the others with distinct, regularly applied strokes that accentuated the interplay of colors.
Much has been made of the supposedly scientific aspect of Seurat’s method. The scientific aspect of Seurat’s work has been both misunderstood and overestimated. Seurat’s references to scientific texts seem to have served more as a justification for what he had already done, in order to lend it authority, rather than as a program that he actually followed when he created his paintings. In fact, on the evidence of Seurat’s paintings and writings, he seems to have had a rather tenuous understanding of some of the scientific principles on which he was supposed to be basing his art.
Seurat’s insistence on the scientific basis of his painting may also have been part of a strategy to draw attention away from just how subjective his paintings were, and to lend his rather idiosyncratic view of the world an air of authority at a time when there was a widespread interest in investigating perceptual and physio-psychological processes, and in the idea of painting as a progressive series of visual discoveries.
In Seurat’s case the fiction of objectivity may also be seen as a kind of mask, a means of diverting attention from the psychological self-exposure that is inherent in his work. For although Seurat’s works are frequently discussed primarily in terms of technique and color theory, and more recently as raising social issues, they are as psychologically troubling as any body of work produced in the 19th century - quite the opposite of what you might expect from someone simply applying his method.
His marvelously subtle drawings, with their rich layers of velvety black conté crayon or charcoal are especially revealing in this respect. Along with their impressive formal inventiveness, they have a moral, psychological, and spiritual gravity and an overriding sense of deep melancholy that are extraordinary. Even Seurat’s drawings of Parisian cafés, theaters, and music halls are like so many stifled cries. And almost without exception, the people in his pictures lack a sense of inner presence and are represented as detached from the world around them.
Seurat remains one of the most enigmatic artists of the late 19th century. Taciturn, pensive, and guarded, his stiff manner and somber dress provoked Degas to refer to him as “le notaire.” He was so intensely secretive that until just a few days before his death even his family and closest friends did not know that he had set up a household with one of his models and that they had a year-old son. Like the highly stylized, disconnected, and inscrutable characters represented in his works, Seurat seems to have kept his feelings to himself, masked from everyone around him by a forbidding formal courtesy.
In this respect, he was very much like his father, a self-made man who spent most of his time away from his family at a private villa he maintained in the suburb of Le Raincy. Like his son, the elder Seurat seems to have been almost pathologically secretive and closed off from the world around him. Seurat’s own steely sang-froid seems to have been tempered by the duel of wills and of wits he must constantly have been engaged in with his forbidding father.
The richness and originality of paintings like "A Bathing Place, Asnières" or "La Grande Jatte" would be remarkable no matter what the age of the artist who had produced them. That they were done by so young a man makes them even more so. And that someone so young could have produced works reflecting so acute an awareness of the historical situation of avant-garde painting at a crucial moment in the 1880s, and who invented such a strong and radical response to it, is no less than astonishing.
Seurat’s early style was a powerful act of synthesis, at once clearly rooted in a number of previous styles and surprisingly original. And he was able to achieve it, apparently, in large measure because of his capacity for concentration and dispassion.
In considering the future, Seurat seems to have been as cool-headed as he was when regarding the past. He built his new style upon a rather unlikely combination of the fixed, historically aware values of the dying classical tradition and the relativistic, essentially nonhistorical approach to contemporary life espoused by the Impressionists, who in the mid-1880s were themselves full of self-doubt about what they perceived as a lack of solidity in their art. Seurat’s large paintings not only combined and mediated between these two different ways of painting but did so in a fresh and provocative way.
During the less than five years left to him after he first exhibited "La Grande Jatte", Seurat was constantly developing and altering his method, pushing it as far as he could. Some might even say that he eventually pushed it too far, and that his last paintings are like grotesque caricatures of his earlier method. When he died in the spring of 1891 he left behind not only one of the most intriguing bodies of work in all European painting, but also the tantalizing question of what he would have done if he had lived longer, and how that work might have altered the history of modern painting.
Less than a year before he died, Seurat composed a letter in which he sought to set the record straight about his theory of art and the details of his development. In this unmailed letter, the artist lists his most important paintings, principally the large masterpieces: "A Bathing Place, Asnières", "A Sunday on la Grande Jatte", "Models", and "Chahut".
More than for most of his contemporaries, Seurat’s drawings were an integral part of his painting procedure. Even their technique is ultimately quite painterly in its emphasis on large tonal areas and in the way the artist uses the grain of the paper to produce an optical vibration similar to that created by the dotlike brushmarks in the paintings.
Seurat cannot be seen in a monolithic way, that he himself simultaneously embodied, and indeed seemed to cultivate, a number of opposing positions in both his art and his life. He was both a classicist and a modernist, a realist and a symbolist, a theorist and a pragmatist, a conservative and a radical. In fact, Seurat’s credo was based on his conviction that Art is Harmony, but with harmony conceived of as the analogy of opposites as well as of similarities.
These oppositions are seen to run throughout Seurat’s paintings, especially in the contrapuntal way they combine both cohesion and separateness - in form as well as in subject.
Seurat developed the characters in his painting almost as if they were characters in a novel - constantly refining, sharpening, and redefining them to give them as much presence, clarity, wit, and import as possible.
"La Grande Jatte" suggests that Seurat was a sharp observer of the contradictions within French society but had no prescriptions to make in relation to them. Seurat’s critique of society is that of a poet, not a politician.
By the end of the decade Seurat’s painting style was radically changing. His images became more linear and decorative, his application of paint became more accented, and the people represented became emptier and more cartoonlike. Late pictures have a dryness, a studied artificiality, and indeed an exaggeratedly mechanical look that many people have found puzzling and disagreeable. They also seem to be distinctly more pessimistic than the earlier paintings, and to imply a more cynical view of society.
In retrospect, these late works seem to be very forward-looking in the way that they anticipate different aspects of early 20th-century modernism. The eerily silent and vacant seascapes that Seurat did seem to anticipate certain aspects of surrealism and of the scuola metafisica, especially the enigmatic and melancholy paintings. Even some of Seurat’s earlier works contain illogical and dream-like imagery that might be generally characterized as surrealistic.
At the same time, the rhythmically repeated forms and depersonalized dynamism seem especially close to the spirit of Italian Futurist painting. And indeed, the Futurists were deeply indebted to the divided touch and divided color of the Neoimpressionists, which provided them with the basic methods upon which they developed their style. Similarly, Seurat was the discoverer of the simultaneous contrasts that formed the basis for Orphism. The Cubists were also keenly interested in Seurat’s late paintings, which they valued particularly for their abstract, premeditated quality, and for their daring use of popular imagery. The first cubist studios were hung with photographs of works by Ingres and Seurat. In fact, virtually every major early 20thg-century modernist went through at least a brief Neo-impressionist phase, for the style provided an essential element to the development of advanced painting after the turn of the century.
This variety of forward-looking characteristics in Seurat’s art makes all the more intriguing the question of what Seurat might have done had he lived into the next century. This is of course impossible to know, but I believe that in Seurat’s case speculation on the matter is not entirely idle, for it allows us better to situate the place that his work occupied within modernist painting in general at the time of his death.
On the evidence of Seurat’s late works, one possibility is that his style would have become increasingly rigid and formulaic, and that he would have become a dry and academic minor master.
Indeed, for many years Signac in particular assumed the mantle of Seurat and acted as a kind of surrogate for him. By the mid-1890s, most younger artists had lost interest in Neoimpressionism.
By the end of the 19th century, the arts of design were frequently and loosely conceived of as a type of language that could be said to have a kind of grammatical structure. But the parallel between pictures and language was not more than a very approximate general notion that had virtually no practical application.
The traditional relationship between brush strokes and the images they described was drastically changed by the Impressionists, whose conspicuous small dabs of paint created a new awareness of the distinction between the brush mark on the surface of the picture and what that mark was supposed to represent. From this point forward, it was possible to conceive of paintings as simultaneously employing two related but parallel pictorial systems: the one a network of highly visible surface marks, and the other a view into the illusionistic space that those marks described. For the first time, it was possible to conceive of paintings as actually having a kind of surface syntax of brush marks, which called inevitable attention to themselves as a potentially separate and discrete system of communication.
The Impressionists did not sufficiently systematize the way they divided their touch and their color; the invention of such a system was the great innovation of the Neoimpressionists.
And indeed the divisionism invented by Seurat was to have an important second life. From our present perspective, it seems that perhaps the greatest innovation that came out of Neoimpressionism was not so much the division of touch and color to provide maximum chromatic brilliance, as the notion of the divided touch as a constituent element of a gridlike system of small, somewhat repetitive brush marks that clearly and systematically distinguish themselves from what they are representing.
When you look at a Neoimpressionist painting, you are constantly aware of the fact that you are seeing the image through a kind of screen, and that this screen has something like an independent existence, virtually separate from what it represents.
Which if any of these various directions Seurat might have followed had he lived, or what else he might have accomplished, is of course impossible to say. But what was subsequently built upon the accomplishment of his brief career has had an incalculable effect upon the history of modern painting.
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