Seurat

By Sandra Forty

Georges Seurat was one of the most important Post-Impressionist painters to lead the way toward the modern era in art. He is best known for developing pointillism, an exacting and time-consuming technique whereby tiny dots of paint are combined to create a composition. His work is stylized and considered, in complete contrast to the impetuous spontaneity of his precursors and contemporaries, the Impressionists. Seurat had a life-long fascination with optical observations and experiments and taught himself to become a master of color theory and linear structures. On canvas this meant rather than just painting the apparent color or shade of an object, Seurat broke down the individual component colors and placed them in individual tiny dots or dashes so that the eye of the observer would see the overall color, but on closer inspection see each individual color component. His strangely stilted paintings have a quality of stillness about them and are almost photographic in their detail. By the time he died at the age of only 31, Seurat had produced several huge paintings, about 60 smaller ones, numerous studies for his larger paintings plus around 500 drawings. In later years the Surrealists hailed Seurat as an inspirational maverick and a spiritual father to them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TAJ Books International
• Release date: Jan 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781844062959

Sandra Forty

Sandra Forty is a graduate of London University where she studied medieval and early modern history, including a spell at the Courtauld Institute learning about Renaissance art from Professor Gombrich. Since then she has worked as a journalist in London, then as a book editor and writer. She is the author of a number of books, most on art and architecture. Sandra lives in south Devon with her husband, children and many cats.

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GEORGES SEURAT

1859–1891

Georges Seurat was one of the most important Post-Impressionist painters to lead the way toward the modern era in art. He is best known for developing pointillism, an exacting and time-consuming technique whereby tiny dots of paint are combined to create a composition. But Seurat was far more than just a pedantic painter, he wasn’t just interested in technique, he also wanted to portray contemporary life, especially scenes of bourgeois and working class urban leisure, all in a classical manner. The result of his work is stylized and considered, in complete contrast to the impetuous spontaneity of his precursors and contemporaries, the Impressionists.

In common with many other aspiring artists, Seurat was traditionally trained in the classical skills of composition, figure study, and methods of applying paint to canvas. He trained for a couple of years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris before leaving to explore his own artistic theories. But his academic training never left him; he adapted what he had been taught to encompass modern methods of approach, such as the Impressionists had pioneered.

With his innovative and imaginative exploration of modern painting techniques, Seurat soon found himself to be one of the leaders of the next generation of artists after the Impressionists. This select group of artists— Seurat, Paul Signac, and Camille Pissarro— were later identified as the Neo-Impressionists. Seurat achieved rapid fame—much of it fuelled by controversy about his style—and was making swift progress toward accomplishing his artistic ideas when he died suddenly at the age ofjust 31.

Seurat had a life-long fascination with optical observations and experiments and taught himself to become a master of color theory and linear structures. He applied these theories to his art in a method he originally called chromoluminism, which was later changed to pointillism, and also occasionally called divisionism. Chromoluminism exploits the fact that contrasting or complementary colors when mixed optically as dabs of pure color become much brighter than if they are actually mixed together. This belief was based on optical theories of color relationships that