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Georges Seurat

Paintings

A River Bank (The Seine at Asnières)

Study for 'Bathers at Asnières'

Study for 'La Grande Jatte'

Study for 'La Grande Jatte'

The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe

The Morning Walk

The Rainbow - Study for 'Bathers at Asnières'

The Seine seen from La Grande Jatte

On a meadow sitting boy


On a meadow sitting farmer girl


Bathers and white horse in the river


Bathers at Asnières


Bathers at Asnières , detail


Bathing place


Banlieue


Peasant with a hoe


Mowing (Le Faucheur )


Overgrown slope


Bridge and Port of Port-en-Bessin


Bridge of Courbevoie


Can- Can ( Le Chahut )


The Fort Samson in Grand Camp , sketch


The Channel of Gravelines


The Channel of Gravelines , Grand Fort-Philippe


The Channel of Gravelines , Petit- Fort-Philippe


The beach » Le Bas Butin " in Honfleur


The Circus


The two banks


The woman with the powder puff


The watering Can


The island of La Grande Jatte with excursionists


The models


La Rade de Grandcamp


The Seine at the Grand Jatte , Spring


The Seine at Courbevoie


An evening at the port of Gravelines


An Evening in Grand Camp


A house between trees


Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte


Entrance to the harbor of Port-en-Bessin


Embouchure de la Seine à Honfleur, soir


Esquisse d'ensemble


Femmes au bord de l' eau


Figures assises


Woman with a Parasol


Groupe de personnages


Harbor in Honfleur


Homme peignant son bateau


Boy with horse


La Charette Attelée


La Tour Eiffel


Le Chemin creux


Le Crotoy, downstream


Les Grues et la percée à Port-en- Bessin


Les Poseuses ensemble


Les Terrassiers


Marine


Paysage et personnages


Paysan au travail


Petite esquisse


Port-en- Bessin


Port-en- Bessin , The Outer harbor at low last tide


Seated man


Sunday at Port-en- Bessin


Standing model (Study for " Les Poseuses " )


Quarryman


Stone Breaker with wheelbarrow


Study on " La Grande Jatte "


Ville d' Avray , The white houses


Forest in Pontaubert


White and black horse in the river


Circus ( sketch)


Circus Parade

Drawings

» Place de la Concorde " in snow and darkness


À la Gaîté Rochechouart


On the balcony railing


Nurse


Angler


Antique statue : satyr with goat


Antique head


Artist


Leaning on a Balustrade


Trunks of trees , reflecting in the water


Embroidering ( Portrait of mother )


Looking through the balcony railing


Boats and Anchors


Bridge approach of the Pont de Courbevoie


Café- Concert


Clown and three figures


Lady with flowers , seen from the back


The leg


The steamship


The Child in White


The standing model


The Angler


The tree



The closed umbrella


The Lighthouse of Honfleur


The sleeper


The nurse


Bahnhofstrasse


The band cover



The Lady in Black



The cab



The haystack



The hood


The lamp


The mother of Seurat


The poplars


The Black Bow


The Bustle


Eden Concert



A Passerby



Family Home Evening



Figure studies



Figure studies



Figure studies



Figure studies



Woman on a bench



Woman, half lying



Woman in the car



Woman with child



Woman with basket



Woman with Muff



Five monkeys



Bell tower



Harbor entrance of Honfleur



Hand study ( The Hand of Poussin )



House on a Hill



In the " Concert Européen "



In the twilight



Young man on a bench



Condolences



Le Dineur ( Portrait of the Father )



woman Reading



Reading



Lying on a parapet



Reclining man



Reclining man



Locomotive



Girl with ' Chapeau Niniche '



Man with cape and cylinder



Man next to the tree



male Nude



Male back nude , leaning on a staff



Monsieur Loyal and Pony



Petit Fort Philippe



Place de la Concorde , Winter



Portrait of Paul Signac



Regatta (" La Grenouillière " )



Rider on a road



caller,



Seated Woman on a Bench



Seated Woman with umbrella



Seated woman seen from the back



Seated Boy with a straw hat



Sitting girl



Soldier on a folding chair



Walk



Standing woman



stone Breaker and others



stone Breakers



Stick woman



knitting



Study on the " Bathers "



Study sheet with figure of a grape pressing Satyrs (after Poussin ) and other figures



Study sheet with soldiers and hand and figure studies



Dancing Couple



edge of the woods



Clothes on the line



laundress



Female figure from behind , leaning forward


Female Nude


Two men on a field


Carriage and pair


Georges-Pierre Seurat (French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ søʁa]; 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was a French Post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. His large work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886), his most famous painting, altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of 19th century painting.[1]


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 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 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 Seurat's death that he introduced his young family to his parents.[citation needed]

Seurat died in Paris on 29 March 1891. 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 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 Circus Sideshow (or Parade de Cirque) (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 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 a 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 cyan echo/halo of the original object. This complementary color (as an example, cyan 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 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",[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 color. 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 10-foot-wide (3.0 m) 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.

Seurat made several studies for the large painting including a smaller version Study for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,, 1884–1885, that is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City.[5]

Notes

1. ^ Art Institute of Chicago
2. ^ Death of Seurat, CDC.
3. ^ Sam, Hunter (1992). "Georges Seurat". Modern Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams. pp. 27.
4. ^ Art of the 20th Century, Karl Ruhrberg
5. ^ Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Retrieved April, 25, 2010


References

Further reading

* 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 (87 September)
* 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 University Press, 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 (University of Chicago Press, 1935), NY: Greenwood Press, 1969
* Russell, John, Seurat, (1965) London: Thames & Hudson, 1985
* Seurat, Georges, Seurat: Correspondences, 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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