How art was transformed by Seurat’s science
Sunday in the Park with George was a Stephen Sondheim musical inspired by an iconic George Seurat painting. The production opened on Broadway in 1984, exactly 100 years after the artist started work on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte; the show went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and many other notable awards.
The Seurat picture has also featured on the cover of Playboy, in the film comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, TV shows Modern Family, The Simpsons, and Family Guy, Looney Tunes cartoons, and has even been recreated in topiary.
When Seurat began this now ubiquitous work, his single ambition was that it might be accepted for exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants. He had no notion of the immense popular appeal that his painting would one day achieve.
The mile-long La Grande Jatte, an island on the Seine between Neuilly and Levallois-perret, was once a rural retreat for the bourgeoisie, a bucolic area that was also renowned as a venue for prostitutes. Seurat spent numerous hours at the park simply observing potential subjects, and completed many preparatory studies – 30 oil sketches, 28 drawings and three large canvases.
Seurat was born into a comparatively wealthy family, and grew up in a widely creative environment that few artists are lucky enough to enjoy. Encouraged to paint from his early teens, his formal training began at his local municipal art school in Paris, followed by studies at the École des Beaux-arts. He spent all of his free time visiting the museums and libraries throughout the city. Captivated by the works of both the old masters and the inspiring artists of the preceding generations, he was eager to begin work on a painting that he felt could stand alongside the greats.
His vast canvas features three dogs, eight boats, a monkey and 48 people gathered together on a sunny afternoon. He wanted his figures to carry the solemnity of the sculptures of the Friars of the Parthenon – structured and formally arranged across the canvas. Seurat was enthralled by optical illusion and of perception explored by colour theorists Michel Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood. He aimed to incorporate a scientific process and effect within his work. Seurat explained: “Some say they see poetry in my paintings, I see only science.”
Seurat’s view was that if two different-coloured dots overlapped, a third colour would emerge, allowing the viewer’s eyes to optically merge the pattern from a distance. He never again felt the need to blend hues in the way artists routinely did – the benefit being that colours remained as vibrant as when they were first squeezed from the tube. He was seeking a new language, a vision that would create a startling purity and harmony in his work, not dissimilar to classical music.
Although his technique had its detractors, who described his paintings as “fuzzy”, the highly regarded critic Meyer Schapiro wrote: “If we can isolate a single major influence on the art of the younger painters in Paris in the late 1880s, it is the work of Seurat. Van Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouselautrec were all affected by it.” He adapted his research, dividing colour into distinct components, seeking to create a luminous effect within the work. Soon to be known as Pointillism, this technique consists of small distinct dots of paint applied in patterns so that they form an image, or are perceived as a single hue or shade. “I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on friezes, and place them on canvases organised by harmonies of colour,” said Seurat.
A few of his characters are reflected unconventionally, leading some art historians to believe that he portrayed them as sex workers. Specifically, a woman on the left of the painting is seen fishing, but it is thought that it was not fish that she was hoping to hook. The same interpretation was applied to the statuesque woman on the right with a monkey on a leash.
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was eventually exhibited at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in May 1886. Seurat was immediately recognised as the leader of a new movement – Neo-impressionism. He was 26 years old at the time. Not everyone admired Seurat’s approach. The German Marxist philosopher Ernest Bloch addressed the social significance of the painting, criticising Seurat’s mechanical, almost robotic interpretation of French society, depicting Paris in such a mathematical and scientific manner.
At the age of 31, Seurat suddenly fell violently ill, and three days later died of an unknown disease, primarily related to a combination of meningitis, pneumonia and diphtheria. La Grande Jatte went virtually unseen for 30 years following his death. Artist and collector Frederic Clay Bartlett purchased it for $24,000 in 1924, after much urging from his wife and the curatorial staff of the Art Institute of Chicago, and lent it indefinitely to the museum.
In 1958, the painting was loaned to another venue for the first, and probably the last time. It was borrowed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where a fire broke out, destroying six artworks and injuring more than 30 people. The painting was located on the floor above the fire, and was removed quickly through an emergency elevator. Although the picture was left undamaged, no loans have been approved since.
If you wish to share Seurat’s impression of 19th-century Parisians enjoying their park, in one of the most admired and reproduced paintings in art history, you will find a visit to the splendid Art Institute of Chicago a memorably thrilling experience. It is blessed with the finest examples of works by many of our greatest artists: Van Gogh’s The Bedroom, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Pablo Picasso’s Mother and Child – and an extraordinary number of other seminal works. However, Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is, to most eyes, its greatest single masterpiece.
© Charles Saatchi