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Georges-Pierre Seurat
1859 - 1891
Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French painter and the founder of Neo-impressionism. He built upon a dying classic tradition and upon the Impressionists. His large work "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" is one of the icons of 19th century painting.
Georges Seurat was born in Paris on December 2, 1859 and educated at the Ecole des Beaux-arts. After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat allied himself with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884 he took part in forming the Société des Artistes Indépendants. There he met and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac.
Seurat's early paintings were small Impressionist landscapes, but he quickly rejected the soft, irregular brushstroke in favor of pointillism, a technique he developed where the forms are constructed by the application of small dots of unmixed color to a white background. This method of painting was applied to every canvas. He 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". It 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.
So whether you like the "fuzziness" of pointillist paintings or not, note the concentration that a pointillist artist would have to have to create a piece that would have to be pleasing to the eye as well as scientifically stimulating.
During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Eugène Chevreul, Nicholas Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote treatises on color, optical effects and perception and translated 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. 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 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.
Seurat died from a form of meningitis. His last ambitious work, "The Circus", was left unfinished at the time of his death.
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