Sera Sunday afternoon. “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat: a dystopian allegory. Working with confetti
At first glance, Georges-Pierre Seurat's enormous 1884 painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La La Grande Jatte appears to be an ordinary depiction of people enjoying a warm, sunny day in a beautiful park. But, if you take a closer look at the most famous work in the genre of pointillism or neo-impressionism, you will discover a number of interesting facts.
1. The picture consists of millions of dots
By creating a similar painting, Seurat became the father of pointillism and neo-impressionism. However, he himself preferred to call his technique “chrome-containing luminarism” - a term that seemed more suitable to the artist to focus on the play of light and color scheme.
2. It took more than two years to complete the painting.
Work on this pointillist masterpiece began in 1884 with a series of 60 sketches that were made by Seurat in a Parisian park. He then began to paint the painting itself using small horizontal strokes. After this, the artist until the spring of 1886 completed his creation by applying paint in tiny dots.
3. The artist's choice of color was based on a scientific approach
“Some people claim that they see poetry in my paintings,” Seurat once said. “I see only science in them.” The artist was fascinated by the color theories of scientists Chevreul and Ogden Rood. As a result, Seurat selected the colors for the painting based on their methods.
4.Inspiration from Parisian sketches
The Paris sketches were inspired by ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek and Phoenician art. Seurat sought to immortalize what Parisians looked like in his era, inspired by the study of ancient images of people.
5. Critics slammed the artist
Seurat's innovative methods became the reason for intense criticism at the Impressionist exhibition in 1886, where the painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" was first exhibited. The poses of the people in this picture were compared with Egyptian hieroglyphs, then with tin soldiers.
6. The painting was updated in 1889
Seurat freshened up the painting with sharper borders of red, orange and blue dots.
7. Seurat completed his most famous work at the age of just 26
He was one of the most promising and promising young artists. Unfortunately, illness ended his life in 1891, when Seurat was only 31 years old.
8. The painting was forgotten for 30 years after the artist’s death
After Seurat's death, the painting first appeared in public in 1924, when art lover Frederick Bartlett Clay purchased A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La La Grande Jatte and loaned the painting indefinitely to the Art Institute of Chicago.
9. An American philosopher helped change public opinion about the painting.
In 1950, Ernest Bloch, in his work The Principle of Hope, explored the socio-political interpretations of A Sunday on the Island of La La Grande Jatte, thereby renewing interest in the painting.
10. Today the painting looks the way Seurat wanted it.
After Seurat completed the borders of the painting, he placed it in a specially made white wooden frame. It is in this frame that the painting is exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago.
11. The colors of the painting have changed
Seurat used a new pigment in his painting, yellow zinc chromate, hoping that it could be used to more realistically convey the color of the park's grass. But over the years, this pigment underwent a chemical reaction that changed its color to brown.
12. The painting is larger than is commonly believed
"A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" is not only Seurat's most famous painting, but also his largest painting. Its size is 207 × 308 cm.
13. A scene from the park may have a hidden meaning.
Some researchers noticed a lady with a monkey in the painting. In French, a monkey sounds like "singesse", the same word in slang for a lady of easy virtue. They also refer to a lady standing on the shore with a fishing rod. She's too smartly dressed for fishing.
14. The painting almost died in a fire in New York
On April 15, 1958, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La La Grande Jatte was on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when a fire broke out at the nearby Whitney Museum. The fire damaged six canvases, injured 31 people and killed one worker. Seurat's painting was evacuated.
15. One of the most reproduced and parodied paintings in the world
"A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La La Grande Jatte" and her lines have appeared in many films, and was once even featured on the cover of Playboy. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine made a musical about its creation, called Sunday in the Park with George.
Very interesting and, which has been causing controversy among art lovers around the world for more than 500 years.
Georges-Pierre Seurat Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886 Un dimanche après-midi à l"Île de la Grande Jatte Oil on canvas. 207×308 cm Art Institute, Chicago
Analysis of the painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"
The artist worked on this work of art for exactly two years, coming to La Grande Jatte more than once and spending more than one morning on the shore, turning his back to the Courbevoie bridge, he painted a Sunday crowd of people walking in the shade of the trees. In order to better remember the terrain, poses and locations of the characters, and to clarify the choice of details, the master made a lot of sketches in order to then select more successful elements for his canvas. He analyzed everything: the dosage of local tones and light, the colors and effects that were obtained when exposed to them. And he sketched everyone around him, those who attracted his attention and those whose figures were inanimate.
As a result of the work, the painting receives the title “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” and in addition to the landscape, where there are trees and a river, the artist manages to place more than thirty characters. Among them are a standing lady with an umbrella, and a man in military uniform, and a woman with a fishing rod, and many children who are frolicking, and a monkey on a leash, and even a dog that sniffs the grass with its tail raised. Already working in the studio, the master compares the croquetones and decides which characters will be present on the canvas and which ones will need to be discarded or painted in the background. Seurat takes the choice seriously and includes images in the composition only after they have been perfectly combined.
The artist begins to work with a landscape without people walking, only with a river, with trees, with sunny and shady areas, with two ships and a sailboat. And only then proceeds to the characters in this picture. He embodies them in turn and gives them a dose of irony, emphasizing the funny features with cold slyness. Only Seurat, of all the impressionists, is not afraid to convey observations on canvas in which humor shines through (just look at an unexpected creature like a monkey held on a leash by a fashionably dressed lady).
In the painting we see how Seurat places figures using and adhering to compositional lines, geometric precision with precise horizontals, verticals and diagonals. The picture is visually divided vertically by a woman holding the girl’s hand and speaking here central figure. The composition is balanced by two groups of people on the right and left: on one side, three people are drawn in their poses, on the other, a standing couple.
The picture was drawn by him using a technique he invented, which is called pointillist, in simple words point. Thanks to which the work came out in such an unusual form. When creating a painting, the artist uses a special palette of colors: indigo blue, titanium white, ultramarine, raw umber, yellow ocher and cadmium, burnt sienna, Winsor yellow and red, and black paint.
Looking at the picture in detail, you can see the so-called geometric transformation. The entire coast of La Grande Jatte and the space are populated not by personalities and animated characters, but by types that differ from each other only in their behavior and clothing. What catches your eye is a figure that is devoid of any individual characteristics and damn. The hat with ribbons makes it clear to us that this is a nurse, and her image drawn from the back is reduced to a gray geometric figure, topped with a red circle on the head and a dissected red stripe.
A woman with a fishing rod also attracts attention, standing out very sharply against the background of blue water thanks to her orange dress. Here the artist presents us with the double meaning of the verb “perher”, which in French means “to sin” and “to catch”. This is why we see the image of a prostitute who supposedly “catches” men.
If we look at a girl with hair flying in the wind, who is jumping, as well as a dog in the foreground, we see frozen figures. Their movements do not add the slightest bit of dynamics to the composition, and the butterflies that fly generally look pinned to the canvas.
In the foreground of the picture we can see a fashionable couple, there is a man smoking a cigar and holding his arm modern woman, the silhouette of which is distorted by the magnificent protrusions of the bustle. And again we notice how Seurat conveys to us everyday life and everyday life, drawing a leash with a monkey in his hand. It is she who acts as an obvious symbol, because at that time, in Parisian slang, prostitutes were very often called monkeys.
Seurat, when finishing the painting, painted an unusual frame with which he wanted to emphasize the intensity of the primary colors. Having made it from colored dots, he complemented the primary colors on the canvas, located near the very border of the picture.
Disagreement publishes a translation of an article by American art historian and critic Linda Knocklin, “Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La La Grande Jatte”: A Dystopian Allegory.” This text, in addition to its significance for art criticism, is also relevant for Russian urban studies: the desperate melancholy and mechanistic nature of urban leisure, which Knocklin writes about, is a powerful antithesis to the fashionable idea of the paramount importance of a comfortable entertainment environment in a modern city.
The idea that Georges Seurat’s masterpiece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” was a kind of dystopia came to me when I was reading the chapter “Imaginary landscape in painting, opera, literature” from the book “The Principle of Hope” - the main work of the great German Marxist Ernst Bloch. Here is what Bloch wrote in the first half of our century:
“The opposite of Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass,” or rather, its cheerfulness, is Seurat’s country scene “Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” The picture is an established mosaic of boredom, a masterful depiction of disappointed expectation of something and meaninglessness dolce far niente. The painting depicts an island on the Seine near Paris, where middle class spends Sunday morning ( sic!): that's all, and everything is shown with exceptional contempt. People with expressionless faces rest in the foreground; the rest of the characters are mostly placed between the vertical trees, like dolls in boxes, tensely pacing in place. Behind them you can see a pale river and yachts, a rowing kayak, excursion boats - a background, although recreational, but looking more like hell than like a Sunday afternoon. The setting, although it depicts a leisure space, is more suggestive of kingdom of the dead than about Sunday. Much of the picture’s joyless despondency is due to the bleached glow of its light-air environment and the inexpressive water of the Sunday Seine, contemplated just as inexpressively<…>Along with the world of everyday work, all other worlds disappear, everything plunges into a watery stupor. The result - without a huge boredom, a diabolical dream little man break the Sabbath and prolong it forever. His Sunday is just a tedious duty, and not a welcome touch to the Promised Land. A bourgeois Sunday afternoon like this is a landscape with a suicide that did not take place due to indecision. In short, this dolce far niente, if only it has consciousness, has the consciousness of the most perfect anti-resurrection on the remains of a resurrection utopia.”
The depiction of the dystopia that Bloch wrote about is not just a matter of iconography, not just a plot or social history reflected on the canvas. It is not enough to regard Seurat's painting as a passive reflection the new urban reality of the 1880s or as an extreme stage of alienation, which is associated with the capitalist restructuring of urban space and social hierarchies of that time. Rather, “Grande Jatte” is a canvas that is actively produces cultural meanings, inventing visual codes for contemporary artist experience of city life. This is where the allegory in the title of this article comes into play (“dystopian allegory"). It is the pictorial construction of La Grande Jatte - its formal techniques - that turns the dystopia into an allegory. This is what makes Seurat's works unique - and this painting in particular. Seurat is the only one of the post-impressionists who, in the very fabric and structure of his paintings, was able to reflect the new state of affairs: alienation, anomie, the existence of a spectacle in society, the subordination of life to a market economy, where exchange value replaced use value, and mass production replaced handicraft.
Landscape with a suicide that did not take place due to indecision.
In other words, if it were not for Cezanne, but for Seurat, who took the place of the key modernist artist, the art of the twentieth century would have been completely different. But this statement, of course, is in itself utopian - or at least historically untenable. After all, on turn of XIX-XX centuries, part of the historical paradigm of advanced art was the departure from the global, social and, above all, negative objective-critical position, which is reproduced in “Grande Jatte” (as well as in the paintings “Parade” and “Cancan” by the same author). The timeless, non-social, subjective and phenomenological - in other words, "pure" painting - was asserted as the basis of modernism. As we will see, the paradoxical belief that pure visibility and the flat surface of the canvas is modernity is absolutely the opposite of what Seurat shows in La Grande Jatte, as in his other works.
Since the High Renaissance, the ambitious goal of all Western art has been to create a pictorial structure that would build a rational narrative and, above all, an expressive connection between part and whole, as well as parts among themselves, and at the same time establish a semantic connection with the viewer. Painting was supposed to “express,” that is, to externalize some internal meaning through its structural coherence; that it functions as a visual manifestation of the inner content or depth that makes up the fabric of the image - but as a superficial manifestation, although of great significance. In a Renaissance work like Raphael's The School of Athens, characters react and interact in ways that suggest (and indeed assert) that there is some meaning beyond the pictorial surface, so as to convey some complex meaning that is instantly readable. and goes beyond the historical circumstances that gave rise to it.
In a sense, Manet's Luncheon on the Grass affirms the end of the Western tradition of high art as expressive narrative: the shadow thickens, the primacy of the surface denies any transcendence, gestures no longer fulfill their mission of establishing dialogue. But even here, as Ernst Bloch notes in the same chapter of his book, utopian emanations remain. Indeed, Bloch considers Luncheon on the Grass the opposite of La Grande Jatte, describing it as “... a desirable scene of epicurean happiness” in the most lyrical terms: “A soft light, which only an impressionist could paint, flows between the trees, envelops two pairs of lovers, a naked woman, another one undressing before bathing, and dark male figures.” “What is depicted,” continues Bloch, “is an incredibly French situation, full of languor, innocence and complete lightness, unobtrusive enjoyment of life and carefree seriousness.” Bloch places Luncheon on the Grass in the same category as La Grande Jatte - it Sunday picture; its “plot is a temporary immersion in a world without everyday worries and needs. Although it was no longer easy to reproduce this plot in the 19th century, Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” became an exception due to its naivety and charm. This healthy Sunday of Manet would hardly have been possible [in 1863, when the picture was painted] if Manet had allowed petty-bourgeois subjects and characters into it; it turns out that it could not have existed if not for the painter and his models.” And then Bloch moves on to the description of La Grande Jatte given at the beginning of this essay: “The real, even depicted, bourgeois Sunday looks much less desirable and varied. This - wrong side“Breakfast on the Grass” by Manet; in other words, in Seurat carelessness turns into powerlessness - that's what it is “Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte”" It seems that the creation of a work that so accurately, completely and convincingly reflects the state of modernity did not become possible until the 1880s.
All system-forming factors in Seurat's project could ultimately serve the goals of democratization.
In Seurat's painting, the characters hardly interact; there is no sense of an articulate and unique human presence; Moreover, there is also no feeling that these painted people have some kind of deep inner core. Here the Western tradition of representation is, if not completely annulled, then seriously undermined by anti-expressive artistic language, which resolutely denies the existence of any internal meanings that the artist must reveal to the viewer. Rather, these mechanical outlines, these ordered dots, refer to modern science and industry with its mass production; to stores full of numerous and cheap mass-produced goods; mass printing with its endless reproductions. In short, it is a critical attitude towards modernity, embodied in a new artistic medium, ironic and decorative, and an emphasized (even overemphasized) modernity of costumes and household items. La Grande Jatte is resolutely historical, it makes no pretense of timelessness or generalization, and this also makes it dystopian. The objective existence of a painting within history is embodied, first of all, in the famous dotted brushstroke ( pointillé ) - a minimal and indivisible unit of a new vision of the world, which, of course, the audience paid attention to first of all. With this stroke, Seurat consciously and irrevocably eliminates his uniqueness, which the author’s unique handwriting was intended to project into the work. Seurat himself is not represented in any way in his brushstroke. There is no sense of existential choice suggested by Cézanne's constructive brushstroke, or deep personal anxiety like Van Gogh's, or a decorative, mystical dematerialization of form like Gauguin's. The application of paint becomes a dry, prosaic act - an almost mechanical reproduction of pigmented "dots". Meyer Shapiro, in what I consider his most insightful article on La Grande Jatte, views Seurat as a “modest, efficient and intelligent technologist” from “the lower middle class in Paris, from which people become industrial engineers, technicians and clerks.” He notes that “Seurat’s modern development of industry instilled in him the deepest respect for rationalized labor, scientific technology and inventions that drive progress.”
Before analyzing La Grande Jatte in detail for how dystopianism is developed in each aspect of its stylistic structure, I want to outline what was considered “utopian” in nineteenth-century visual production. Only by placing La Grande Jatte in the context of the utopian understanding of Seurat and his contemporaries can one fully realize how contrary the nature of his works is to this utopia.
Of course, there is the classic utopia of the flesh - Ingres's "Golden Age". Harmonious lines, smooth bodies without signs of aging, attractive symmetry of the composition, free grouping of unobtrusively naked or classically draped figures in an indefinite landscape “a la Poussin” - what is represented here is not so much utopia as nostalgia for a distant, never-existent past, “at -chrony". The social message that we typically associate with utopia is completely absent here. It is rather a utopia of idealized desire. The same, however, can be said about Gauguin’s later interpretation of the tropical paradise: for him, the catalyst for the utopian is not temporal, but geographical distance. Here, as in Ingres, the signifier of utopia is a naked body or slightly covered with outdated clothes - usually a woman's. Like Ingres's utopia, Gauguin's is apolitical: it refers to male desire, whose signifier is female flesh.
Musée d'Orsay
Dominique Papétie's 1843 painting "The Dream of Happiness" is a much better place to delve into the context of utopian representation that underscores Seurat's dystopian allegory. Utopian in both form and content, this painting openly glorifies Fourierism in its iconography and strives for classical idealization in a style not unlike Ingres, Papétie’s teacher at the French Academy in Rome. Yet the utopian concepts of Papétie and Ingres differ significantly. Although the Fourierists considered the present - the so-called civilized conditions - vicious and artificial, the past was little better for them. The real golden age for them was not in the past, but in the future: hence the name “ Dream about happiness." The openly Fourierist content of this utopian allegory is supported by the signature “Harmony” on the pedestal of the sculpture on the left side of the canvas, which refers to “Fourier’s state and the music of satyrs,” as well as the title of the book “Universal Society”, in which young scientists are immersed (a direct reference to the Fourierist doctrine , as well as to one of Fourier’s treatises). Some aspects of La Grande Jatte can be read as an open rejection of Fourier's utopia or, more precisely, of utopianism in general. In Papéti's painting, utopian ideals are personified by a poet "praising harmony", a group embodying "maternal tenderness", and another denoting bright childhood friendship, and around the edges - the different aspects of love between the sexes. All this is emphasized in La Grande Jatte - because it is omitted. Papety uses purely classical architecture, although the painting simultaneously suggested that these utopian visions were aimed at the future: it depicted a steamship and a telegraph (later removed by the artist). And again we see soft, harmonious figures in classical, or rather neoclassical, poses; the paint is applied in the usual way. At least in the version of the picture that has come down to us, the signs of modernity have dissolved in favor of a utopia, albeit Fourierist, but deeply rooted in the distant past and in an extremely traditional, if not conservative, method of representation.
On more material grounds than the vague utopian image of Papétit, the work of his older contemporary Pierre Puvis de Chavannes correlates with Seurat's dystopian project. Indeed, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” could have looked completely different or not happened at all if, in the very year when Seurat began work on this painting, he had not seen Puvis’s work “The Sacred Grove”, exhibited at the Salon of 1884 . From a certain point of view, La Grande Jatte can be seen as a parody of Puvis's Sacred Grove, which calls into question the foundations of this painting and its adequacy to modern times in both form and content. Puvis Seurat replaces timeless muses and classic settings with the freshest outfits, the most modern decorations and accessories. Seurat's women wear bustles, corsets and fashionable hats, and are not covered with classical draperies; his men hold not the flute of Pan, but a cigar and a cane; the background depicts a modern urban landscape rather than a pastoral antiquity.
Puvis's work such as "Summer" of 1873, created two years after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War and the terrible events surrounding the Commune and its consequences that split society, represents one of the purest examples of utopia. As Claudine Mitchell points out in her recent article, despite the recognizable image of the distant past, the imagery of "Summer" assumes a more general, even universal time scale - the idea of some generalized truth human society. As the critic and writer Théophile Gautier, who reflected a lot on the work of Puvis, put it, he “seeks an ideal outside of time, space, costume or detail. He strives to paint primitive humanity because it [ sic! ] performs one of the tasks that we can call sacred - to maintain closeness to Nature." Gautier praised Puvis for moving away from the optional and random and noted that his compositions always have an abstract and common name: “Peace”, “War”, “Rest”, “Work”, “Sleep” - or “Summer”. Gautier believed that for Puvis, the signifiers of the distant past, simpler and purer, set a more universal order - the order of Nature itself.
So, before us is a classic pictorial version of the 19th century utopia, identifying u- topos(lack of space) and u- chronos(lack of time) s foggy time and the space of antiquity. The picturesque world of Puvis is located outside of time and space - while Seurat's La Grande Jatte is definitely and even aggressively located within his own time. It is difficult to say whether the temporally and geographically specific, emphatically secular titles of Seurat's paintings (Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884)) imply a dystopian critique of the vague, idealized titles of Puvis and other classicists who worked with allegory. One way or another, in his paintings Seurat most seriously struggles with the utopian harmony of Puvis’s constructions. Although Puvis could place characters in separate groups, this did not imply social fragmentation or psychological alienation. Rather, in his paintings he extols family values and teamwork, during which representatives of all professions, age groups and genders carry out their assigned tasks. Puvis's works are ideologically aimed at creating aesthetic harmony precisely where disharmony, conflicts and contradictions are concentrated in modern society, be it the situation of workers, class struggle or the status of women. Thus, for example, in the formal structure of "Summer" the value of motherhood for a woman and work for a man is presented as an - essentially inseparable - component of the natural order, and not as a changeable and controversial issue. In Seurat, as we will see, classical elements lose their harmony: they are hypertrophied in their deliberate artificiality, conservatism and isolation. This emphasis on contradictions is part of his dystopian strategy.
Gauguin's utopia is apolitical: it refers to male desire, whose signifier is female flesh.
Not only the classical and fairly traditional works of Puvis contrast with Seurat’s dystopia. The more progressive artist Renoir also created a semi-utopian system of images of contemporary reality, everyday urban existence, which is based on the joys of healthy sensuality and youth. joie de vivre(the joys of life) - for example, in works such as “Ball at the Moulin de la Galette” of 1876, where a scattering of multi-colored brushstrokes and a circular dynamic rhythm in their joyful mixing of everything and everyone play out at the level of form the erasure of class and gender divisions in an idealized leisure modern Paris. This work by Renoir is the clearest counterpoint to Seurat's caustic view of the "new leisure". Renoir strives to present the everyday life of a large modern city as natural, that is, naturalizes her; Seurat, on the contrary, defamiliarizes it and denies any naturalization.
Paradoxically, it is the painting of the neo-impressionist Paul Signac, a follower and friend of Seurat, that gives the most vivid idea of the context of utopian images against which La Grande Jatte rebels. Signac was fully aware social significance work created by his friend. In June 1891, in an anarchist newspaper La Revolt("Insurrection") he published an article in which he argued that by depicting scenes from the life of the working class "or, better still, the entertainments of decadents<…>like Seurat, who understood with such clarity the degradation of our transitional era, they [the artists] will present their evidence at the great public trial that is unfolding between the workers and Capital."
Signac's painting "In the Time of Harmony", painted around 1893-1895 (an oil sketch for a mural of the Montreuil City Hall), seems to be a response to the specifically capitalist condition of anomie and absurdity - in other words, to the "time of disharmony" represented in the most famous mature work his friend. In lithograph for the newspaper by Jean Grave Les Tempes noveux("Modern Times") Signac presented his anarcho-socialist version of a classless utopia, in which general carefreeness and human interaction replace the static and isolated figures of "La Grande Jatte"; Unlike Seurat, Signac emphasizes family values rather than glossing over them, and replaces urban settings with more pastoral, rural ones, in keeping with the utopian nature of his project. The characters, despite the fact that they are dressed relatively modernly, are rather softly idealized, like Puvis, than fashionable, like Seurat. The curvilinear composition with its decorative repetitions insinuates the theme of community - a couple or a community - in a utopian future. Even the hen and rooster in the foreground represent the mutual aid and cooperation that the entire work calls for and which Seurat’s gaze so decisively excludes from the world.
However, I came to the dystopian interpretation of Seurat’s painting not only because of the clear differences from the utopian imagery of his time. The critical reaction of contemporaries also confirms that the picture was read as a scathing critique of the modern state of affairs. As Martha Ward put it in a recent article for the exhibition catalogue, “observers considered the expressionless faces, isolated positions of bodies and rigid poses to be more or less subtle parodies of the banality and pretentiousness of modern leisure[emphasis mine]." For example, one of the critics, Henri Febvre, noted that, looking at the picture, “you come to understand the rigidity of Parisian leisure, tired and stuffy, where people continue to pose even during rest.” Another critic, Paul Adam, identified rigid contours and deliberate poses with the modern state of affairs itself: “Even the immobility of these stamped figures seems to give voice to modernity; I immediately remember our poorly tailored suits, tight fitting bodies, stock of gestures, British slang, which we all imitate. We pose like people from a Memling painting." Another critic, Alfred Pohle, argued that “the artist created characters with the automatic gestures of soldiers who trample on the parade ground. Maids, clerks and cavalrymen walk at a slow, banal, identical pace, which accurately conveys the character of the scene ... "
The idea of the monotony and inhuman enslavement of modern urban life, this fundamental trope of La Grande Jatte, permeates even the analysis of the painting's most significant critic, Félix Fénéon, an analysis that aspires to an inflexible formalism: Fénéon describes the uniformity of Seurat's technique as "monotonous and patient weaving” is a touching mistake that hits back at criticism. Yes, he describes a painterly manner, but he attributes “monotony” and “patience” to the technique of pointillism, thus allegorizing it as a metaphor for the fundamental properties of urban life. That is, in this figure of Feneon’s speech, Seurat’s formal language is masterfully absorbed by both the existential state and the technique of working with the material.
The figure of the girl is Hope: the utopian impulse buried at the core of its opposite.
What is Seurat's formal language in La Grande Jatte? How does he mediate and construct the painful symptoms of the society of his time and how does he create, in a sense, their allegory? Daniel Rich was quite right when, in his 1935 study, he emphasized the paramount importance of Seurat's innovation at the level of form in what he calls the "transcendent" achievement of La Grande Jatte. To do this, Rich uses two diagrams that simplify Seurat’s already schematic composition: “Organization of La Grande Jatte in curves” and “Organization of La Grande Jatte in straight lines” - a typical method of formal, “scientific” art historical analysis of the time. But, as Meyer Shapiro points out in his brilliant refutation of this study, Rich erred in failing to take into account, because of his staunch formalism, the overriding social and critical significance of Seurat's practice. According to Shapiro, Rich's attempts to offer a classicizing, traditional and harmonizing reading of Seurat in order to fit his innovative ideas into the legitimate "mainstream" of the painting tradition (how similar to art historians!) are equally misguided.
In order to separate Seurat from the mainstream and recognize his formal innovation, one must use the modernist-specific concept of "system", which can be understood in at least two modalities: (1) as the systematic application of a certain theory of color, scientific or pseudoscientific ( depending on whether we believe the artist) in his “chromoluminaristic” technique;
or (2) as a related system of pointillism - applying paint to the canvas in small, regular dots. In both cases, Seurat's method becomes an allegory of mass production in the era of modernity and therefore moves away from both the impressionist and expressionist signifiers of subjectivity and personal involvement in artistic production or from the harmonious generalization of surface characteristic of classical methods representations. As Norma Brud noted in her recent article, Seurat may have borrowed his paint application system from the current technique of mass reproduction of visual media of his time - the so-called chromotypographic print. Seurat's mechanical technique allows him to criticize the reified spectacle modern life. Thus, as Brood puts it, "it is clearly provocative not only of the audience at large, but also of several generations of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists: the impersonal approach of Seurat and his followers to painting threatened their attachment to the Romantic concept of authenticity and spontaneous expression." As Brud notes, it is “the mechanistic nature of technology, alien to the ideas of Seurat’s contemporaries about good taste and “high art” may have become attractive to him as his radical political views and “democratic” taste for popular art forms became important shaping factors in the evolution of his approach to his own art.” We can go even further and say that All The system-forming factors in Seurat's project - from pseudoscientific color theory to mechanized technology and the later adaptation of Charles Henri's "scientifically" based "aesthetic protractor" to achieve a balance of composition and expression - may ultimately serve the goals of democratization. Seurat found an elementary method for creating successful art, in theory accessible to everyone; he came up with a kind of democratically oriented dot painting that completely excluded the role of genius as an exceptional creative person from the act of producing art, even “great art” (although this very concept was superfluous in the regime of Total Systematization). From a radical point of view, this is a utopian project, while from a more elitist point of view, it is completely simplistic and dystopian.
Nothing speaks more of Seurat's complete abandonment of the charm of spontaneity in favor of fundamental detachment than a comparison of the details of the large preliminary sketch of La Grande Jatte (Metropolitan Museum in New York) with the details of the finished painting. What could be more alien to the generalizing tendencies of classicism than the summative schematic and modern manner manifested in the way Seurat constructs, say, a couple in the foreground - this image is so laconic that its referent is read as instantly as the referent of an advertising sign. What could be more alien to the soft idealization of late neoclassical artists such as Puvis than the sharply critical modeling of the hand holding a cigar and the mechanical curve of the cane? Both of these forms aggressively signify class-coded masculinity, constructing a schema of a man contrasted with his equally socially marked companion: her figure, with its characteristically rounded outlines due to the costume, resembles, in the way everything unnecessary is cut off from it, the bushes trimmed in the shape of balls in a regular park. Gender differences are portrayed and structured through apparently artificial means.
Using the figure of the nurse as an example, I would like to show how Seurat, with his sardonic view of the frozen leisure of the bourgeois, works on types, simplifying the image to the simplest signifier, reducing the vitality and charming spontaneity of the original sketch to a visual hieroglyph. In a verbal description as delightfully precise as the painting itself, Martha Ward characterized the final version of the painting as “a featureless geometric configuration: an irregular quadrangle, divided into two parts by a triangle wedged in the middle, and closed circles on top of them.” The Nurse, better known as Nounou, is a stock character who appeared in connection with rapid development visual typification in the popular press second half of the 19th century century. Seurat, of course, avoided the pitfalls of vulgar caricature, just as he did not seek to give a naturalistic description of the profession of a nurse - a theme that was relatively popular in the art exhibited at the Salons of this time. Unlike Berthe Morisot, who, in her depiction of her daughter Julia with her wet nurse (1879), creates a representation of breastfeeding as such - Morisot’s figure is frontal, facing the viewer, vividly written and, although simplified to a single volume, creates a keen sense of vital spontaneity - Sulfur erases all signs professional activity the nurse and her relationship with the infant, presenting us with a simplified sign instead of a biological process.
Seurat put a lot of work into this character; we can observe the process of its simplification in a series of pencil drawings by Conte - from several quite heartfelt sketches from life (in the Goodyear collection) to a monumental view of the nurse from behind ("Cap and Ribbons", in the Thaw collection). Although the woman’s figure is made up here of several black and white rectangular and curved shapes, united by a vertical ribbon that is faintly distinguished in tone, such as that worn by nurses (and as if duplicating the vertebral axis), she maintains a connection with her charge, pushing a baby stroller. In another sketch (in the Rosenberg collection), although the child is present, she turns into an unindividualized geometric echo of the nurse's round cap, and her figure gradually acquires the symmetrical trapezoidal shape that we see in the final version of La Grande Jatte. The series concludes with a drawing (Albright-Knox collection) relating to final version wet nurse groups. In connection with this drawing, Robert Herbert noted that “the nanny, whom we see from the back, is bulky as a stone. Only the cap and the ribbon, flattened to the vertical axis, make us understand that this is really a seated woman.” In short, Seurat reduced the figure of the nurse to a minimal function. In the final version of the picture, nothing reminds us of the role of the nurse who nourishes the child, or of the tender relationship between the infant and his “second mother,” as nurses were then considered. The attributes of her occupation - a cap, a ribbon and a cape - are her reality: as if in mass society there is no longer anything to represent the social position of the individual. It turns out that Seurat reduced the form not in order to generalize the images and give them classicality, as Rich explains, but in order to dehumanize human individuality, reducing it to a critical designation of social vices. Types are no longer depicted in a loosely pictorial manner, as in the old codes of caricature, but are reduced to laconic visual emblems of their social and economic roles - a process akin to the development of capitalism itself, as Signac might have put it.
I will end, as I began, with a pessimistic interpretation of La Grande Jatte, in whose compositional statics and formal simplification I see an allegorical negation of the promises of modernity - in short, a dystopian allegory. For me, as for Roger Fry in 1926, La Grande Jatte represents “a world from which life and movement have been banished and everything is forever frozen in its place, fixed in a rigid geometric frame.”
Depiction of class oppression in a style borrowed from capitalist tables and charts.
And yet there is one detail that contradicts this interpretation - a small one, but one that brings dialectical complexity to the meaning of the picture, placed at the very core of La Grande Jatte: a little girl skipping. This character was hardly conceived in his final, apparently contradictory form, which he has in the large sketch. In the earlier version, it is almost impossible to tell if it is running at all. The figure is less diagonal and blends more into the surrounding brushstrokes; it seems that she is connected with the white and brown dog, which in the final version is already in a different place in the composition. The little girl is the only one dynamic figure, her dynamism is emphasized by her diagonal pose, flowing hair and flying ribbon. She is in complete contrast to the little girl to her left, a figure built like a vertical cylinder, passive and conforming, subordinate and as if isomorphic to her mother, who stands in the shadow of the umbrella in the center of the picture. The running girl, on the other hand, is free and active, purposeful and chasing something that lies beyond our field of vision. Together with the dog in the foreground and the red butterfly hovering slightly to the left, they form the vertices of an invisible triangle. The figure of the girl can be said to be Hope, to speak in Bloch's terms: the utopian impulse buried at the core of its dialectical opposite; the antithesis to the thesis of the picture. How different is Seurat's dynamic depiction of hope - not so much an allegorical figure as a figure that can only become an allegory - from the rigid and conventional allegory of Puvis, created after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune! Puvis's hope can be said to be hopeless, if by hope we mean the possibility of change, of an unknown but optimistic future, and not of a rigid, unchanging essence formulated in the classical language of bashful nudity and chaste drapery.
Gustave Courbet. Artist's workshop. 1855 Paris, Musée d'Orsay
The figure of the child as a symbol of hope in Seurat is an active character in the midst of an ocean of frozen passivity, reminding us of another image: the young artist immersed in work, hidden in Courbet’s painting “The Artist’s Studio” (1855), the subtitle of which is “a real allegory.” From works of the XIX century, it is closest to Seurat: in that it presents utopia as a problem rather than a ready-made solution, as well as in a decidedly modern setting and, oddly enough, in that it is organized as a static, frozen composition. Like La Grande Jatte, The Artist's Studio is a work of enormous power and complexity, in which utopian and non- or dystopian elements are inextricably intertwined and in which the utopian and the dystopian are truly shown as mutually reflected dialectical opposites. In the dark, cavernous studio, the small artist, half-hidden on the floor on the right side of the painting, is the only active figure besides the artist himself at work. The artist's alter ego, the boy admiring Courbet's work, occupying a central place corresponding to that of the master, personifies the admiration of future generations; like Seurat's girl, this child can be considered an image of hope - hope inherent in an unknown future.
Yet Seurat's works are dominated by a negative understanding of modernity, especially urban modernity. Throughout his short but impressive career, he was busy with the project of social criticism, which consisted of constructing a new, partly mass, methodologically formal language. In Models (in the Barnes Collection), a sardonically tongue-in-cheek manifesto of contradictions modern society in relation to "life" and "art", modern models they take off their clothes in the studio, revealing their reality against the background of a painting - a fragment of La Grande Jatte, which looks more “modern”, more socially expressive than themselves. What detail represents art here? The traditional nudity of the “three graces”, who are always depicted from three angles - frontal, side and back, or the great canvas of modern life that serves as their background? In Cabaret, 1889-1890 (Kröller-Müller Museum), commodified entertainment, the crude product of the emerging mass culture industry, is shown in all its emptiness and artificiality; these are not fleeting pleasures that Renoir could depict, and not spontaneous sexual energy in the spirit of Toulouse-Lautrec. The transformation of a man's nose into a pig-like snout openly hints at greed for pleasure. The dancers are standard types, decorative pictograms, high-class advertisements for slightly dangerous leisure activities.
Georges Seurat. Circus. 1891 Paris, Musée d'Orsay
In the film “Circus” (1891) we're talking about about the modern phenomenon of performance and the passive contemplation that accompanies it. The painting parodies artistic production, allegorically depicted as a public performance - dazzling in technique, but dead in movement, acrobatics for the needs of a frozen public. Even the participants in the performance seem frozen in their dynamic poses, reduced to typified curves, ethereal pictograms of movement. There are also darker interpretations of the relationship between the viewer and the performance in the film “Circus”. This public, frozen in a state close to hypnosis, denotes not only a crowd of art consumers, but can be understood as the state of a mass spectator in front of someone who masterfully manipulates them. One thinks of Thomas Mann's sinister Mario and the Wizard, or Hitler in front of a crowd at Nuremberg, or, more recently, the American electorate and the clown candidates who voice slogans and gesture on television with practiced artistry. In addition to the fact that "Circus" depicts contemporary social issues, as an allegorical dystopia, it also contains prophetic potential.
It seems to me that La Grande Jatte and other works by Seurat have been too often included in the “great tradition” of Western art, marching vigorously from Pierrot to Poussin and Puvis, and too rarely connected with the more critical strategies characteristic of the radical art of the future. For example, in the work of a little-known group of political radicals working in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s - the so-called Cologne Progressives - Seurat's radical formulation of the experience of modernity finds its followers: it is not an influence or continuation of his work - in their dystopianism the Progressives went further than Seurat. As political activists, they equally rejected art for art's sake and the modern expressionist identification of social morbidity with agitated painterliness and expressionist distortion, which for them was little more than individualistic overexposure. The Progressives - including Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Heinrich Herle, Gerd Arntz, Peter Alma and the photographer August Sander - resorted to dispassionate pictographic depictions of social injustice and class oppression in a style borrowed from capitalist charts and diagrams, awakening revolutionary consciousness.
Dystopians par excellence, they, like Seurat, used the codes of modernity to question the legitimacy of the existing social order. Unlike Seurat, they questioned the very legitimacy of high art, but it can be said that this too was inherent in certain aspects of his work. The emphasis he placed on anti-heroism rather than gesture; to “patient weaving,” implying mechanical repetition rather than the impatient strokes and strokes of the brush, which Feneon called “virtuoso painting”; to social criticism instead of transcendental individualism - all this allows us to speak of Seurat as the forerunner of those artists who deny the heroism and apolitical sublimity of modernist art, preferring critical visual practice. From this point of view, the photomontage of the Berlin Dadaists or the collages of Barbara Kruger have more in common with the neo-impressionist heritage than the safe paintings of artists who used pointille to create otherwise traditional landscapes and marines and who called themselves followers of Seurat. The dystopian impulse is contained at the very heart of Seurat's achievements - in what Bloch called “the established mosaic of boredom,” “expressive faces,” “the expressionless water of the Sunday Seine”; in short, “a landscape with a suicide that did not take place due to indecision.” It is this legacy that Seurat left to his contemporaries and those who followed in his footsteps.
Translation from English: Sasha Moroz, Gleb Napreenko
This text was first read in October 1988 at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Norma W. Lifton Memorial Lecture Series. Linda Nochlin. The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-century Art and Society. Westview Press, 1989. - Note lane).
Seurat himself, when exhibiting this painting for the first time in 1886 at the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition, did not indicate the time of day.
Bloch E. The Principle of Hope. - Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986, II. P. 815. Per. in English. language - Neville Ples, Stephen Ples and Paul Knight. This passage was also cited in a different context in Seurat's latest catalogue, ed. Erich Franz and Bernd Grou « Georges Seurat: Zeichnungen» (Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden- Baden, 1983-1984), p. 82-83. For ease of reading, minor changes have been made to the translation. (Only a fragment of the book has been translated into Russian: E. Bloch. The Principle of Hope. // Utopia and Utopian Thinking. M., 1991. - Note lane
“The Sacred Grove” at the Art Institute of Chicago is a smaller copy of a huge canvas that is kept in the Lyon Museum of Fine Arts.GautierT h. Moniteur universel . June 3, 1867 Quote. By: Mitchell Cl. Time and the Ideal of Patriarchy in the Pastorals of Puvis de Chavannes // Art History
, 10, No. 2 (June 1987). P. 189. Anon. Impressionists et revolutionaires // La Revolte. - , June 13-19, 1891, p. 4. Cited. By: Thomson R. Seurat
Oxford: Phaidon Press; Salem, N.H.: Salem House
, 1985. P. 207. The very use of the concept of “harmony” in the title refers to the Fourierist and, later, more generalized socialist and anarchist designation of a social utopia. The famous utopian colony founded in the USA in the 19th century was called New Harmony (“New Harmony”). Indeed, if we look at the criticism of this time, it becomes clear that it is the expressive-formal structure of the canvas, and not the social differences that mark the selection of characters - or, more precisely, the unprecedented juxtaposition of working-class figures with middle-class figures, which T.J. so emphasized. Clark in his last note about this picture (. Clark. T J The Painting of: Modern Life Paris in The the Art Manet and. - His. Followers.: N Y. Alfred A T Knopf J: , 1985. pp. 265-267), - made the greatest impression on viewers of the 1880s and made them consider La Grande Jatte a caustic social criticism. As Martha Ward recently noted, contemporaries “recognized the heterogeneity of the characters, but did not pay attention to its possible meanings. Most critics were much more inclined to explain why all the figures were frozen in staged poses, dumbfounded and expressionless..." ( New
Impressionism, 1874-1886, exhibition catalogue, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts and National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1986, p. 435).
Ward M. New Painting Impressionism. C. 435. Impressionists et revolutionaires // La Revolte Quote By: . P. 435. Thomson quotes the same fragment, but translates it differently: “Little by little we look closely, we guess something and then we see and admire a large yellow spot of sun-eaten grass, clouds of golden dust in the treetops, the details of which the retina blinded by light cannot see; then we feel that the Parisian promenade is as if starched - rationed and empty, that even relaxation becomes deliberate there.” Quote By:. C. 115, p. 229. Thomson quotes Henri Febvre:
Adam P. Peintres impressionistes // Revue contemporaine litteraire, politique et philosophique 4 (April-May 1886). P. 550. Quote. By: Ward M. Knopf J, 1874-1886, exhibition catalogue, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts and National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1986, p. 435).
This fragment of the Field in its entirety looks like this: “This picture is an attempt to show the bustle of a banal promenade, which is carried out by people in Sunday clothes, without pleasure, in places where it is customary that it is proper to walk on Sundays. The artist gave his characters the automatic gestures of soldiers trampling on the parade ground. Maids, clerks and cavalrymen walk with the same slow, banal, identical step, which accurately conveys the character of the scene, but does it too insistently. Paulet A. Les Impressionistes // Paris, June 5, 1886 Quoted. By: Thomson. Seurat. C. 115.
Feneon F. Les Impressionistes en 1886 (VIIIe Exposition impressioniste) // La Vogue, June 13-20, 1886, pp. 261-75b per. - Nochlin L. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904,Source and Documents in the History of Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966). P. 110. Feneon's striking figure of speech, which links the idea of patience and weaving, is of course reminiscent of the gendered image of Penelope patiently embroidering and a whole host of stories and metaphors involving women and textiles - not least Freud's famous quote about women and sewing ; in his essay "On Womanhood" he writes that sewing is the only contribution of women to civilization ( Freud S. Femininity // Freud S. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Trans. J. Strachey. - N.Y.: Norton, 1965, p. 131). For a detailed discussion of gendered tropes and narratives associated with sewing, weaving and dressmaking, see: Miller N.K. Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic // Miller N.K. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. - N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 77-101. Fénéon's "Patient Weaving" can also be read as the antithesis of the more familiar metaphors of modernist creativity, metaphorizing the imperious force, spontaneity and emotionality of the creative practices of the (male) artist by likening his brush to an assertive or questing phallus and emphasizing, respectively, either the crushing passion of the application of paint, or, on the contrary, his delicacy and sensitivity. Within this discursive context, Feneon's phraseology can be considered a deconstruction of the main image of the avant-garde production of modernity - in short, a crisis figure of speech.
Rich D.C. Seurat and the Evolution of "La Grande Jatte". - Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935. P. 2.
One need only think, for example, of the famous diagrams of Cézanne’s paintings in Erle Laurent’s book: Laurent E. Cezanne Composition: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1943). These diagrams were later used by Roy Lichtenstein in works such as 1962's Portrait of Madame Cézanne. Part of the book was published in 1930 in The Arts. Cm.: Rewald J. The History of Impressionism, rev.ed. - N.Y.: Museum of Modern Art, 1961. P. 624.
Schapiro M. Seurat and “La Grande Jatte”. pp. 11-13.
For the latest analysis of Seurat's "scientific" color theories, see: Lee Y. Seurat Art Science // in History 10, No. 2 (June 1987: 203-26). Lee concludes unequivocally: “His “chromoluminaristic” method, which had no scientific basis, was pseudoscientific: it was deceptive in its theoretical formulations and applied with indifference to any critical assessment of its empirical validity” (p. 203).
Seurat in Perspective, ed. Norma Broude (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978). C. 173.
It's funny that Seurat quite fiercely defended his primacy in the invention of neo-impressionism and tried to prevent Signac and other artists from developing “his” technique. For a discussion of the contradictions within the Neo-Impressionist group, see: Thomson, With. 130, 185-187. Here I am talking about the possibilities of Neo-Impressionism as a practice, and not about the personal integrity of Seurat as the leader of the movement. Of course, there was a contradiction between the potential of neo-impressionism and its concrete incarnations by Seurat and his followers.
Georges Seurat's painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" was painted in 1886 in the style of pointillism. For this time, such a writing technique was completely unexpected. Each color is applied by the artist in separate small strokes; merging into a single whole upon examination, they turn into a meaningful image.
Presented at the exhibition, the painting evoked very controversial responses. The audience was also puzzled by the fact that people’s faces were not drawn... It seemed that mannequins were depicted... But the artist explained this by saying that for the purpose of conveying spiritual meaning everything earthly is not so important. The main thing is for Parisians to relax in their favorite place: someone is having a picnic, someone is admiring the river, someone is walking along the lawn, picking flowers... The artist emphasizes the idleness of Sunday, the opportunity to enjoy “doing nothing.”
Thanks to the use various shades the picture turned out to be very rich.
You can buy a reproduction of this painting in our online store.
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Painting by Georges Seurat Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte: description, biography of the artist, customer reviews, other works of the author. Large catalog of paintings by Georges Seurat on the website of the BigArtShop online store.
The BigArtShop online store presents a large catalog of paintings by the artist Georges Seurat. You can choose and buy your favorite reproductions of paintings by Georges Seurat on natural canvas.
Georges Seurat was born in 1859 in Paris in the family of a bailiff.
Painting originally studied in a small municipal school under the leadership of Justine Lequin, where he entered in 1875. From March 1878 to November 1879 he studied at the School of Fine Arts in the class of Henri Lehmann, a student of Ingres.
From November 1879 he served in the army for a year.
In 1880 he returned to Paris and continued his painting studies, moving from cultural and historical subjects to images Everyday life cities.
The fourth exhibition of the Impressionists made a strong impression on the aspiring artist. Initially fascinated by their style, Seurat sought to develop his own. Experimenting with color and light, he invented pointillism (the technique of transmitting shades and colors by individual color points), counting on the optical effect of merging small details when viewing a picture from a distance.
In 1883, Seurat created his first outstanding work, “Bathers at Asnieres.”
After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat preferred individual creativity and alliances with independent artists in Paris.
The most famous painting was “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”
Seurat died in Paris at the age of 32 in 1891 from a severe infection.
In his short life Seurat created only seven large canvases: the technique he created was labor-intensive and complex.
The texture of the canvas, high-quality paints and large-format printing allow our reproductions of paintings by Georges Seurat to be as good as the original. The canvas will be stretched on a special stretcher, after which the painting can be framed in the baguette of your choice.
“Sunday Day on the Island of La Grande Jatte” is one of the most famous paintings of the great French artist Georges-Pierre Seurat. Georges Seurat (1859-1891) - famous painter, bright representative post-impressionism, one of the founders of neo-impressionism.
Georges Seurat. Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte
Georges Seurat also became famous for creating a painting method known as pointillism - drawing with dots. The painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte", which is also known as "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte", is a prime example of pointillism, which was invented by Georges Seurat. This work is not only an excellent example, but is considered one of best paintings this direction post-impressionism. The art of pointillism here represents the true perfection of beauty and splendor. Perhaps it was thanks to this painting that pointillism took a strong position in world art and is still used by artists on all continents.
The painting “Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte” was painted in 1886, oil on canvas. 207 × 308 cm. Currently located at the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting is a summer sunny landscape with people enjoying nature. The picture looks very harmonious, self-possessed, calm, rich. Following his technique, Georges Seurat does not mix paints, but applies them in dots in a certain order.
The painting aroused mixed opinions among viewers and art critics, but received its place in the history of art, the history of post-impressionism, and became one of the most striking examples of the beauty of the pointillist style.
Georges-Pierre Seurat(December 2, 1859, Paris - March 29, 1891, Paris) - French post-impressionist artist, founder of neo-impressionism, creator of the original painting method called "divisionism" or "pointillism".
