Georges Seurat

Life

Style & Innovation

What Seurat did 'first' was to mix colors not on the palette but in the eye of the viewer. Where the Impressionists captured the impression of light through intuition and improvisation, Seurat sought to rebuild that Impressionism on a foundation of science. Drawing on Chevreul's law of simultaneous contrast (adjacent complementary colors make each other appear more intense) and Rood's optical theory, he countered the fact that mixing pigments turns them muddy (subtractive mixing) by juxtaposing tiny dots of pure color on the canvas. At a certain distance these dots blend optically in the eye, coming alive not as grayish tones but as 'vibrating,' luminous color. He called this 'divisionism' or 'chromoluminarism,' though it became more widely known by the name critics gave it, pointillism. In this exhibition's seven-section narrative, Seurat is placed in section (3), Post-Impressionism — where van Gogh pushed color as a 'tool of emotion' and Cézanne pushed nature toward 'structure,' Seurat broke through the same limits of Impressionism in the opposite direction, that of 'reason and optical law.' His revolution lies in two things. First, by drawing painting into the domain of measurable visual science and constructing the picture out of the pure visual element of the 'dot,' he paved the way toward abstraction. Second, by rejecting the fleeting quality of Impressionism and freezing figures and landscapes into a geometric, monumental stillness, he restored a 'rigor of composition' to modern painting. In his final years he embraced Charles Henry's theories, seeking to assign emotion even to the direction of line and color — rising lines for lightness, descending lines for sorrow ('Le Chahut,' 'The Circus'). Signac, Pissarro for a time, Delaunay, and later Matisse's liberation of color and the whole of abstract art all owe a debt to his experiments.

Technique

The first thing to do in front of the canvas is to look twice — step back at a distance, then move in close again. Seen from afar, form and color coalesce into a single, sharply defined scene; up close, those fields of color scatter into countless independent little dots — this 'optical magic' that depends on distance is the heart of Seurat's technique. Look closely at each individual dot and you will see that within a single area of color he placed not one hue but several pure colors (for grass, say, dots of yellow, green, orange, blue, and purple). Notice that in the shadows he used complementary dots (purple, blue) instead of black, making 'even the darkness out of color.' Another detail: the dots do not cover the entire canvas — between them the color of the ground layer often shows through, giving the surface a subtle vibration and breath. There is almost no impasto (thick paint); the surface is relatively flat and matte. In late works such as the DIA's own 'View of Le Crotoy from Upstream,' the centerpiece of this exhibition, be sure to look at the 'painted border' Seurat applied himself — he surrounded the edge of the picture with a band of complementary dots, softening the tonal transition into the dark wooden frame beside it and making the painting 'glow' even more against the frame. He even designed the frame itself so it would not jar the eye (the edge and the frame are well worth examining together). Note also his other domain, drawing: Seurat rubbed greasy Conté crayon onto the coarse-grained surface of Michallet (Ingres) paper, modeling his forms not with lines but with 'planes' of light and dark — black powder catching on the paper's bumpy grain while the white paper remained in the valleys, creating gradations of tone as if forms were emerging out of a fog. In terms of conservation science, analysis has shown that the zinc yellow (zinc chromate) pigment Seurat used in 'La Grande Jatte' has browned and faded through a chemical reaction, darkening the originally vivid yellows and greens (the discoloration had already begun in his lifetime) — the fact that the colors we see today may differ from the optical effect he calculated is always worth bearing in mind when looking at his paintings.

Key Works

Behind the Canvas

Connections

In this exhibition's Post-Impressionism section (section 3), Seurat is placed alongside van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin, and it is fascinating how each broke through the same 'after Impressionism' moment from opposite directions — where van Gogh pushed color as 'emotion,' Cézanne nature as 'structure,' and Gauguin color as 'symbol,' Seurat reduced color to 'optical science.' Founding the Indépendants in 1884, he met Paul Signac and gained an ally in Pointillism, and for a time he even drew Camille Pissarro (an artist in this exhibition's Impressionism section) briefly into divisionism. Seurat's 'juxtaposition of pure colors' is the starting point of the great modern current of 'color as an autonomous formal element' that leads, a generation later, to Matisse's liberation of color (section 5, Fauvism) and Delaunay's Orphism, and on to Kandinsky (section 7, the rise of abstraction). Chevreul's theory of simultaneous contrast had already been used intuitively by Delacroix and developed by the Impressionists, but Seurat perfected it into a systematic methodology. Above all, the key link in this exhibition is Robert Hudson Tannahill's 1970 bequest, which greatly strengthened the DIA's modern collection — together with Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Degas, Matisse, and Modigliani, Seurat's 'Le Crotoy' also entered the DIA through this bequest, tying it directly to the collection narrative of the exhibition as a whole.

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