Georges Seurat

French painter

• Born: December 2, 1859
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: March 29, 1891
• Place of death: Paris, France

Seurat was one of the most perceptive imagists of the modern city during the late nineteenth century. His great curiosity about new developments in technology and the sciences transformed his art into one based increasingly upon scientific and pseudoscientific theories, something valued highly by twentieth century modern movements. His work may be seen also as a prophecy of surface abstraction and grand decoration.

Early Life

Georges Seurat (sew-rah) was the son of Chrysostome-Antoine Seurat, a legal official who retired at the age of forty-two and lived apart from his wife, Ernestine, and their three children. Seurat saw his father each week at dinner at his mother’s apartment on the boulevard de Magenta in Paris. His parents’ marriage has been described as advantageous, respectably bourgeois, and comfortable but dreary.

Seurat shared his mother’s strong and regular features as well as the precision and diligence with which she applied herself undemonstratively to tasks at hand. With his father, Seurat shared a quiet, serious, even distant mien. Very little is known of Seurat’s childhood, and he was difficult to get to know as a man. Most reminiscences from his friends or colleagues are consistent in their inability to penetrate the artist’s personality. It is debatable, however, whether Seurat’s private nature was abnormal. In his dedication to work, he was serious to the point of humorlessness, touchy, and even irritable.

Seurat, who drew well as a child, was encouraged in art especially by a maternal uncle, Paul Hausmonte-Faivre. The novice artist drew objects from his environment that caught his interest; by age fifteen, Seurat’s interest in art had become an obsession, and he withdrew from a regular school to enroll in a local drawing school. At this municipal school from 1875 to 1877, he moved through a demanding and classically based curriculum, which stressed endless hours of drawing human anatomy from engravings, from casts of antique sculpture, and from live models. Seurat’s academy drawings reveal that he apparently preferred disciplined and sober images from symmetrically ordered compositions with a minimum of gesture and dramatic movement. He thus studied the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Hans Holbein the Younger.

Seurat’s next stage of training came on entering the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in 1878; he was admitted to the painting class of Henri Lehmann, a disciple of Ingres. Seurat may have appreciated Lehmann’s disciplined drawings more than his paintings, and Seurat’s academic training may have failed to stimulate a healthy interest in color. The years 1875-1879 witnessed Seurat’s growth primarily in draftsmanship, careful techniques, sophisticated design, and an identification with imagery carrying moral overtones, all lessons carried over into his mature work.

Life’s Work

Following a year of compulsory military service, Seurat returned to Paris in November of 1880 and in a short time settled into a studio not far from the site where he had studied with Lehmann. Seurat left the École des Beaux-Arts after barely a year for reasons still unclear, but by 1880-1883 he was again submitting work to the Salon. During this same period, Seurat devoted himself to challenges in drawing and in so doing developed a mature style. His drawing and painting methods became parallel manifestations of a desire to regularize Impressionist painting methods and record everyday urban life with the nobility of classical art in the museums.

With Impressionism as a starting point, Seurat restricted himself to drawing in black and white, usually with charcoal, chalk, or conte crayons, moving away from an emphasis on line and contour toward softer, broader marks that acknowledged mass, the subtleties of atmosphere, and a concentration upon light. This approach yielded effects both academic and vanguard. The drawings reveal by 1883 a strong traditional handling of form through tonal contrast. However, the regularized all-over treatment, the neutral stance toward imagery, and the increasing concern with scientific theory had little in common with accepted academic practices at the time.

A masterful approach was evident by 1883 in Seurat’s drawings; at that time, he felt sufficiently confident to develop a major painting, one upon which he hoped to establish a reputation. His confidence was based upon intense practice in drawing over three years plus much exploration in painting methods and in color theory. A thorough familiarity with Eugène Chevreul’s theories of simultaneous complementary contrasts of colors and a reading of Ogden Rood’s Modern Chromatics (1879) helped him immeasurably to realize optical mixing in both painting studies and finished drawings.

The first painting to benefit from this theoretical and technical input was the large work A Bathing Place, Asnieres (1883-1884). In the preparatory works and the final painting, French citizens swim, go boating, or rest as they enjoy a noon-hour break from work in the industries of a northern Paris suburb. Here the artist calculated and toiled to synthesize the variables and immediacy of Impressionist works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others.

The Salon jury of 1884 did not find A Bathing Place, Asnieres museum-worthy, but fortunately for Seurat a number of other rejected artists that year formed the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which sponsored uncensored, unjuried shows and accepted Seurat’s painting. Seurat was encouraged but remained frustrated and threw himself into an even more ambitious painting, A Sunday on the Grand Jatte , painted 1884-1886, and with dimensions nearly the same as A Bathing Place, Asnieres.

The monumental painting depicts nearly life-size middle-class Parisians enjoying a work-free day on a slender island in the river Seine, where, dressed in current fashions, many promenade or sit quietly. Compositionally speaking, the lengthening shadows of mid-afternoon help unify the complex placement of figures. Many of the strollers are arranged in silhouetted profile, and almost no figures venture a spontaneous movement. Thus, there is a sense of the illogical leisure of mannequins instead of humans occupying a charmed environment. This mechanical aesthetic was no accident. In A Sunday on the Grande Jatte, Seurat methodically constructed a painting that extends the Impressionist treatment of subject but does not emulate the Impressionists’ pursuit of transitory effects. It became a landmark work because it necessitated a new critical language and, as it happened, a new movement. Upon viewing the painting at the last Impressionist group show in 1886, art critic and friend to Seurat Félix Fénéon proposed the term Neo-Impressionism.

Furthermore, A Sunday on the Grande Jattepossessed a radical appearance, composed as it was of thousands and perhaps millions of tiny dots painted with impressive control and evenness. The technique employed became known as pointillism because of the use of points or dots of unmixed pigments. However, pointillism, arresting in its own right, was not the most important part of Seurat’s program. The artist was investigating new quasi-scientific painting theories devised by critics Chevreul, Charles Blanc, and John Ruskin, as well as developments in commercial printing.

That intense study resulted in the concept of divisionism, a theory that advocated breaking down colors into separate components and applying them almost mechanically to a primed canvas in almost microscopic amounts, whereupon an optical mix occurred for spectators. The resultant optical mix was thought to be superior in luminosity to effects possible from traditional palettes wherein colors were mixed as tints or hues before application to a canvas. The immediate difference for Seurat was a painted approximation of the vibrating subtleties of reflected light, for example, as found in the partial tones of shadows in nature.

Not to be overlooked too was a concurrent advancement in color printings—the chromotypogravure, which intrigued Seurat, already fascinated by technology. The chromotypogravure replicated colors via screens or regular systems of dots and, as in Seurat’s pointillism, produced an atmospheric mass and subtle gradations instead of lines or sharp contrasts of form.

Pointillism and divisionism, which regularized the painted effects of Impressionism, would have been satisfying accomplishments in themselves for some progressive painters of the 1880’s, but not for Seurat. Upon finishing A Sunday on the Grande Jatte, which was also rejected at the Paris Salon, he took up a different challenge, that of systematizing the means of expressing emotional effects in paintings through carefully predetermined amounts of colors and types of light. Regularizing emotions in paintings was not new in France. There were plenty of precedents from Nicolas Poussin in the seventeenth century to Jacques-Louis David during the late eighteenth century. Seurat’s new preoccupation, though, was based mostly on the publications of Charles Henry, a contemporary psychologist and aesthetician. Henry sought a scientific way to regularize connections between the formal elements of painting—colors, tones, or lines—and their impact upon viewers’ emotional responses.

Such formulas appeared in Seurat’s next well-planned painting, Une Parade de cirque of 1888. Known generally as La Parade (the side show), it focused on the midway of an urban circus. The scene, lit by gas jets, may be a nocturne, but more is dark in La Parade than the atmosphere. This entertainment scene is not joyous, despite a milling crowd and performing musicians. Solemnity and dutiful actions seem the rule and are reinforced by a muted surface system of dark blue and red dots. The painting is a balanced geometrical artifice underscored by the application of the ancient Greek guide, called the golden section, believed to establish beautiful proportions.

A number of marine subjects painted at or near Honfleur, Grandcamp, Port-en-Bessin, and Gravelines represent the artist’s other painting interests from 1885 to 1891. These paintings parallel the works discussed in this essay technically and compositionally, and, though perhaps less provocative, they are no less brilliant in conception or execution.

Only days before the Salon des Indépendants opened in 1891, Seurat became ill, possibly from infectious angina or acute meningitis. Quickly moved from inadequate lodging to his mother’s apartment, also in Paris, he lapsed into delirium and died there on March 29.

Significance

Precocious as a youth, Georges Seurat was the master of his intentions for art by 1880. He could not know it at the time, but his career would be over in only eleven years. Deliberate in technique and a theoretician besides, his mature oeuvre included fewer than twenty major paintings, yet Seurat is considered one of the most influential of the late nineteenth century painters in France.

Seurat modernized classical configurations and exhausted orthodox formulas, after which he ventured into uncharted waters and speculated upon radical approaches to picture-making. Indeed, art viewers during his life and since usually imagine that technique or process was his dominant concern. Much of Seurat’s conceptual direction was governed by careful reading of art theory, literature, physics, and pioneering works in psychology. Furthermore, despite the appearance of Cartesian order and asymmetrical balance invoked through the golden section of the ancient Greeks, Seurat’s paintings by 1886 reflect an exploration of the new Symbolist movement, a movement decidedly subjective.

Seurat’s primary subject, interwoven among fields of dots, was the modern city and the activities of its various classes of people, in particular the middle class at its leisure. In so doing, he transformed pedestrian information into a dignified and clarified expression, befitting the traditional art of the museums while simultaneously reflecting an enthusiasm for science and technology.

Bibliography

Broude, Norma. “New Light on Seurat’s ’Dot’: Its Relation to Photomechanical Color Printing in France in the 1880’s.” Art Bulletin 56 (December, 1974): 581-589. In a valuable piece of scholarship, Broude explores the parameters of the pointillist technique. In doing so, she draws quite helpful connections between Seurat’s method, begun about 1885, and a new commercial printing technique involving chromotypogravure. There are also connections to an equally new attempt at color photography called the autochrome process. Those technologies fascinated Seurat because he was searching for an optically induced half-tone value system.

Dorra, Henri, and John Rewald. Seurat. Paris: Les Beaux-arts, 1959. Noteworthy are letters between Seurat and the Symbolist art theorist Fénéon, a perceptive and well-documented chapter titled “The Evolution of Seurat’s Style,” a chronological list of exhibitions in which Seurat’s paintings have been shown, a lengthy bibliography, plus indexes of patrons and collectors as well as Seurat’s art listed by title and subject.

Düchting, Hajo. Georges Seurat, 1859-1891: The Master of Pointillism. English translation by Michael Hulse. Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2000. A survey of Seurat’s life and work.

Goldwater, Robert J. “Some Aspects of the Development of Seurat’s Style.” Art Bulletin 23 (March, 1941): 117-130. Concentrates upon stylistic developments in the last five years of the artist’s career, plus relationships between Seurat’s career and those of his contemporaries. Goldwater emphasizes that Seurat was highly interested in various currents of his time, both in art and in other professions, to the degree that he was as much influenced by contemporary developments as he influenced others.

Herbert, Robert L. Seurat: Drawings and Paintings. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Examines the full range of Seurat’s work, concentrating on the personal and social meaning of his individual paintings and drawings.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte.” Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago in association with University of California Press, 2004. Describes the genesis, creation, artistic technique, reception, and other information about Seurat’s well-known painting A Sunday on the Grande Jatte. The book accompanied an exhibition of the painting and related drawings and oil paintings.

Prak, Niels Luning. “Seurat’s Surface Pattern and Subject Matter.” Art Bulletin 53 (September, 1971): 367-378. This fine article addresses some of Seurat’s intentions for the surface characteristics of his mature style, chief among which were the transformation of observed fact into rigorous abstract pattern. That, according to Prak, was achieved eventually by the painter through continual simplification of figures, continuity of forms (either defined or suggested), and the application of Blanc’s theories to painting.

Thomson, Richard. Seurat. Salem, N.H.: Salem House, 1985. A good monograph that benefits from international research. Its standard chronological approach is enriched by rarely seen drawings and painted studies and a penetrating text, which correctly explores Seurat’s absorption in current art and scientific theory.