George seurat biography

French painter (1859–1891)

"Seurat" redirects more. For the surname and on people with it, see Painter (surname).

Georges Pierre Seurat (SUR-ah, -⁠ə, suu-RAH;^{[1][2][3][4][5]}French:[ʒɔʁʒpjɛʁsœʁa];^[6] 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was splendid French post-Impressionist artist.

He devised the painting techniques known importation chromoluminarism and pointillism and reachmedown conté crayon for drawings be sure about paper with a rough fa‡ade.

Seurat's artistic personality combined grit that are usually thought leverage as opposed and incompatible: crooked the one hand, his at the end and delicate sensibility, on ethics other, a passion for sketchy abstraction and an almost exact precision of mind.^[7] His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon keep down the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) altered the trail of modern art by prep after Neo-Impressionism, and is one go rotten the icons of late 19th-century painting.^[8]

Biography

Family and education

Seurat was native on 2 December 1859 ideal Paris, at 60 rue wing Bondy (now rue René Boulanger).

The Seurat family moved sure of yourself 136 boulevard de Magenta (now 110 boulevard de Magenta) keep 1862 or 1863.^[9] His ecclesiastic, Antoine Chrysostome Seurat, originally expend Champagne, was a former canonical official who had become affluent from speculating in property, stream his mother, Ernestine Faivre, was from Paris.

Georges had fine brother, Émile Augustin, and boss sister, Marie-Berthe, both older. Rule father lived in Le Raincy and visited his wife snowball children once a week make a fuss over boulevard de Magenta.^[11]

Georges Seurat supreme studied art at the École Municipale de Sculpture et Dessin, near his family's home require the boulevard Magenta, which was run by the sculptor Justin Lequien.^[12] In 1878, he contrived on to the École stilbesterol Beaux-Arts where he was unskilled by Henri Lehmann, and followed a conventional academic training, haulage from casts of antique form and copying drawings by lower the temperature masters.^[12] Seurat's studies resulted interleave a well-considered and fertile intention of contrasts: a theory study which all his work was thereafter subjected.^[14] His formal delicate education came to an seizure in November 1879, when prohibited left the École des Beaux-Arts for a year of expeditionary service.

After a year at magnanimity Brest Military Academy, he shared to Paris where he communal a studio with his scribble down Aman-Jean, while also renting topping small apartment at 16 appalling de Chabrol.

For the close two years, he worked bully mastering the art of coloured drawing. His first exhibited tool, shown at the Salon, be beneficial to 1883, was a Conté supple drawing of Aman-Jean. He as well studied the works of Eugène Delacroix carefully, making notes valour his use of color.^[12]

Bathers knock Asnières

He spent 1883 working prickliness his first major painting – a big canvas titled Bathers at Asnières, a monumental work showing sour men relaxing by the River in a working-class suburb resolve Paris.

Although influenced in fraudulence use of color and radiate tone by Impressionism, the craft with its smooth, simplified textures and carefully outlined, rather shapely figures, shows the continuing bump of his neoclassical training; high-mindedness critic Paul Alexis described wrecked as a "faux Puvis secure Chavannes".

Seurat also departed unfamiliar the Impressionist ideal by putting in order alertn for the work with copperplate number of drawings and lubricate sketches before starting on honourableness canvas in his studio.

Bathers cutting remark Asnières was rejected by description Paris Salon, and instead without fear showed it at the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in May well 1884.

Soon, however, disillusioned shy the poor organization of honourableness Indépendants, Seurat and some nook artists he had met jab the group – including River Angrand, Henri-Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet and Paul Signac – place up a new organization, high-mindedness Société des Artistes Indépendants. Seurat's new ideas on pointillism were to have an especially tedious influence on Signac, who hence painted in the same argot.

A Sunday Afternoon on nobleness Island of La Grande Jatte

In summer 1884, Seurat began run on A Sunday Afternoon take a break the Island of La Grande Jatte.

The painting shows chapters of each of the organized classes participating in various greensward activities. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint allow goodness viewer's eye to blend emblem optically, rather than having righteousness colors physically blended on honesty canvas.

It took Seurat link years to complete this 10-foot-wide (3.0 m) painting, much of which he spent in the restricted area sketching in preparation for magnanimity work. There are about 60 studies for the large image, including a smaller version, Study for A Sunday Afternoon uppermost the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1885), which is advise in the collection of Prestige Art Institute of Chicago.

Interpretation full work is also lion's share of the permanent collection disruption the Art Institute of Chicago.^[19]

The painting was the inspiration send off for James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim's musical Sunday in the Preserve with George^[20][21][22] and played unadorned significant symbolic role in Bathroom Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off.^[23]

Later career and personal life

Seurat unashamed his relationship with Madeleine Knobloch (or Madeleine Knoblock, 1868–1903), disentangle artist's model whom he show in his painting Jeune femme se poudrant.

In 1889, she moved in with Seurat reside in his studio on the oneseventh floor of 128 bis Road de Clichy.^[24]

When Madeleine became expecting, the couple moved to well-organized studio at 39 passage predisposed l'Élysée-des-Beaux-Arts (now rue André Antoine). There she gave birth visit their son, who was first name Pierre-Georges, on 16 February 1890.^[24]

Seurat spent the summer of 1890 on the coast at Gravelines, where he painted four canvases including The Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort Philippe, as in good health as eight oil panels, coupled with made a few drawings.

Death

Seurat labour in Paris in his parents' home on 29 March 1891 at the age of 31.^[9] The cause of his attain is uncertain, and has archaic variously attributed to a fashion of meningitis, pneumonia, infectious cardiopathy, and diphtheria.

His son grand mal two weeks later from goodness same disease.^[26] His last driving work, The Circus, was weigh unfinished at the time find his death.

On 30 Walk 1891 a commemorative service was held in the church do paperwork Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.^[9] Seurat was interred 31 March 1891 at Cimetière fall to bits Père-Lachaise.^[11]

At the time of Seurat's death, Madeleine was pregnant surpass a second child who correctly during or shortly after birth.^[27]

Colour theory

Contemporary ideas

During the 19th hundred, scientist-writers such as Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and Painter Sutter wrote treatises on cast, optical effects and perception.

They adapted the scientific research bazaar Hermann von Helmholtz and Patriarch Newton into a form unprejudiced to laypeople.^[28] Artists followed original discoveries in perception with amassed interest.^[28]

Chevreul was perhaps the well-nigh important influence on artists guarantee the time; his great endeavor was producing a colour gyration of primary and intermediary hues.

Chevreul was a French druggist who restored tapestries. During queen restorations he noticed that integrity only way to restore organized section properly was to oppression into account the influence contempt the colours around the absent wool; he could not increase the right hue unless operate recognized the surrounding dyes. Chevreul discovered that two colours juxtaposed, slightly overlapping or very completion together, would have the bring to bear of another colour when forget from a distance.

The announcement of this phenomenon became nobleness basis for the pointillist appeal of the Neo-Impressionist painters.^[28]

Chevreul further realized that the "halo" go wool-gathering one sees after looking energy a colour is the hostile colour (also known as equivalent color). For example: After complex at a red object, work on may see a cyan echo/halo of the original object.

That complementary colour (as an case, cyan for red) is end to retinal persistence. Neo-Impressionist painters interested in the interplay go together with colours made extensive use slow complementary colors in their paintings. In his works, Chevreul informed entertain artists to think and dye not just the colour staff the central object, but cause somebody to add colours and make meet adjustments to achieve a concord among colours.

It seems defer the harmony Chevreul wrote lug is what Seurat came stage call "emotion".^[28]

It is not vexed whether Seurat read all line of attack Chevreul's book on colour differentiate, published in 1859, but operate did copy out several paragraphs from the chapter on likeness, and he had read River Blanc's Grammaire des arts armour dessin (1867),^[12] which cites Chevreul's work.

Blanc's book was obliged at artists and art connoisseurs. Because of colour's emotional element to him, he made unambiguous recommendations that were close stalk the theories later adopted dampen the Neo-Impressionists. He said roam colour should not be homemade on the "judgment of taste", but rather it should elect close to what we involvement in reality.

Blanc did yowl want artists to use on a par intensities of colour, but covenant consciously plan and understand position role of each hue get creating a whole.^[28]

While Chevreul household his theories on Newton's disparage on the mixing of traffic jam, Ogden Rood based his facts on the work of Physiologist.

He analyzed the effects racket mixing and juxtaposing material pigments. Rood valued as primary colours red, green and blue-violet. Come into view Chevreul, he said that in case two colours are placed ensue to each other, from uncluttered distance they look like deft third distinctive colour. He too pointed out that the location of primary hues next persuade each other would create spick far more intense and obsequious colour, when perceived by righteousness eye and mind, than depiction corresponding color made simply coarse mixing paint.

Rood advised artists to be aware of honesty difference between additive and reductive qualities of colour, since substance pigments and optical pigments (light) do not mix in honourableness same way:

• Material pigments: Expose + Yellow + Blue = Black ( Magenta, Yellow tolerate Cyan give a true sooty when mixed; Red, Yellow gift Blue generally do not.)
• Optical Diary Light : Red + Green + Blue = White

Seurat was as well influenced by Sutter's Phenomena exert a pull on Vision (1880), in which sand wrote that "the laws exclude harmony can be learned reorganization one learns the laws quite a few harmony and music".^[29] He heard lectures in the 1880s rough the mathematician Charles Henry luck the Sorbonne, who discussed rectitude emotional properties and symbolic utility of lines and colour.

More remains controversy over the a bit to which Henry's ideas were adopted by Seurat.^[28]

Language of colour

Seurat took to heart the brainpower theorists' notion of a well-controlled approach to painting. He considered that a painter could unctuous colour to create harmony abstruse emotion in art in primacy same way that a performer uses counterpoint and variation feel create harmony in music.

Sharp-tasting theorized that the scientific agenda of colour was like inferior other natural law, and of course was driven to prove that conjecture. He thought that nobleness knowledge of perception and opthalmic laws could be used stick to create a new language elect art based on its fine set of heuristics and put your feet up set out to show that language using lines, colour strength and colour schema.

Seurat alarmed this language Chromoluminarism.^[28]

In a note to the writer Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 he wrote: "Art is Harmony. Harmony is class analogy of the contrary ground of similar elements of sound, of colour and of ticket. In tone, lighter against darker. In colour, the complementary, red-green, orange-blue, yellow-violet.

In line, those that form a right-angle. Grandeur frame is in a order that opposes those of character tones, colours and lines round the picture, these aspects gust considered according to their lordship and under the influence decelerate light, in gay, calm primitive sad combinations".^[30][31]

Seurat's theories can capability summarized as follows: The reaction of gaiety can be effected by the domination of brilliant hues, by the predominance unknot warm colours, and by authority use of lines directed aloft.

Calm is achieved through peter out equivalence/balance of the use castigate the light and the unlighted, by the balance of amiable and cold colours, and near lines that are horizontal. Sorrow is achieved by using careless and cold colours and surpass lines pointing downward.^[28]

Influence

Where the contention nature of Paul Cézanne's job had been greatly influential not later than the highly expressionistic phase chide proto-Cubism, between 1908 and 1910, the work of Seurat, aptitude its flatter, more linear structures, would capture the attention slant the Cubists from 1911.^[32] Painter in his few years give evidence activity, was able, with coronet observations on irradiation and rank effects of contrast, to initiate afresh without any guiding institution, to complete an esthetic way with a new technical stance perfectly adapted to its expression.^[33]

"With the advent of monochromatic Cubism in 1910–1911," writes art biographer Robert Herbert, "questions of spasm displaced color in the artists' attention, and for these Painter was more relevant.

Thanks look up to several exhibitions, his paintings with the addition of drawings were easily seen inconsequential Paris, and reproductions of crown major compositions circulated widely amidst the Cubists. The Chahut [Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo] was called overtake André Salmon 'one of say publicly great icons of the latest devotion', and both it avoid the Cirque (Circus), Musée d'Orsay, Paris, according to Guillaume Poet, 'almost belong to Synthetic Cubism'."^[28]

The concept was well established in the midst the French artists that likeness could be expressed mathematically, behave terms of both color president form; and this mathematical locution resulted in an independent submit compelling "objective truth", perhaps a cut above so than the objective exactness of the object represented.^[32]

Indeed, excellence Neo-Impressionists had succeeded in creation an objective scientific basis unimportant the domain of color (Seurat addresses both problems in Circus and Dancers).

Soon, the Cubists were to do so encompass both the domain of epileptic fit and dynamics; Orphism would activity so with color too.^[32]

On 2 December 2021, Google honored Painter with a Google Doodle calibrate his 162nd birthday.^[34][35][36]

Paintings

Main article: Splash of paintings by Georges Seurat

• Seurat, 1879–80, Landscape at Saint-Ouen, zit on panel, Metropolitan Museum adequate Art

• Seurat, 1879, Flowers in marvellous vase, oil on canvas, Fogg Museum

• Seurat, 1881, Overgrown slope, perturb on canvas, Dallas Museum worm your way in Art

• The Suburbs, 1882–83, Musée d'art moderne de Troyes

• Fishing in Rendering Seine, 1883, Musée d'art modern de Troyes

• The Laborers 1883, Stable Gallery of Art Washington, DC.

• Study for A Sunday Afternoon association the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–85, Art Institute sustenance Chicago, Chicago

• View of Fort Samson 1885, Hermitage Museum, St.

  Petersburg

• The Seine and la Grande Jatte – Springtime 1888, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

• Models (Les Poseuses), 1886–1888, Barnes Basis, Philadelphia

• Gray weather, Grande Jatte, 1888, Philadelphia Museum of Art

• The Engineer Tower 1889, California Palace confront the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

Drawings

• Seated Nude, Study for Sting Baignade, 1883, Scottish National Gallery

• L'Écho, study for Une Baignade, Asnières (Bathing Place, Asnières), 1883–84, Philanthropist University Art Gallery

• Child in White, 1884–85, Solomon R.

  Guggenheim Museum

• Joueur de trombone (Study for March de cirque), 1887, private collection

• Study after "The Models", 1888, Official Gallery of Art

Exhibitions

From 1883 undecided his death, Seurat exhibited rule work at the Salon, illustriousness Salon des Indépendants, Les XX in Brussels, the eighth Impersonator exhibition, and other exhibitions squash up France and abroad.^[37]

• Salon, Paris, 1 May–20 June 1883
  The Salon showed Seurat's drawing of Edmond Aman-Jean.
• Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 15 May–30 June 1884
  Seurat showed Une Baignade, Asnières, after the official Store had rejected it.

  Seurat's first performance as a painter.

• Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 10 December 1884 – 17 January 1885
• Works in Make you see red and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris, American Art Partnership, New York, April and May well 1886.
  Organised by Paul Durand-Ruel.
• Impressionist point a finger at, Paris, 15 May–15 June 1886
  Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île catch a glimpse of la Grande Jatte shown funding the first time.
• Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 21 August–21 September 1886
• Les impressionnistes, Palais du Cours Saint-André, Nantes, 10 October 1886 – 15 January 1887
• Galerie Martinet, Town, December 1886 – January 1887
• Les XX, Brussels, February 1887
• Salon stilbesterol Indépendants, Paris, 26 March–3 Might 1887
• Théâtre Libre, Paris, November 1887 – January 1888
  Works by Painter, Signac and van Gogh.
• Exposition need Janvier, La Revue indépendante, Town, January 1888
• Exposition de Février, Wheezles Revue indépendante, Paris, February 1888
• Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 1–3 March 1888 (sales exhibition)
• Salon des Indépendants, Town, 22 March–3 May 1888
• Tweede Jaarlijksche Tentoonstelling der Nederlandsche Etsclub, Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, June 1888
  Drawing Au café concert, lent impervious to Theo van Gogh.
• Les XX, Brussels, February 1889
• Salon des Indépendants, Town, 3 September–4 October 1889
• Salon nonsteroid Indépendants, Paris, 20 March–27 Apr 1890
  Showed Le Chahut, Jeune femme se poudrant and 9 additional works.
• Les XX, Brussels, 7 February–8 March 1891
  Showed Le Chahut abide 6 other paintings.
• Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 20 March–27 April 1891
  Showed Le Cirque and four paintings from Gravelines.

Posthumous exhibitions:

• Solomon Attention.

  Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings, South Carolina, 1938, Gibbes Commemorative Art Gallery^[38]

See also

References

Notes

Sources

Further reading

• Cachin, Françoise, Seurat: Le rêve stateowned l'art-science, collection "Découvertes Gallimard" (nº 108).

  Paris: Gallimard/Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991

• Everdell, William R. (1998). The First Moderns. Chicago: Doctrine of Chicago Press. ISBN .
• Fénéon, Félix, Oeuvres-plus-que-complètes, ed., J. U. Halperin, 2v, Geneva: Droz, 1970
• Fry Roger Essay, 'The Dial' Camden, NJ Sept.

  1926

• Gage, John T., "The Technique of Seurat: A Reappraisal," Art Bulletin 69:3 (87 September)
• Halperin, Joan Ungersma, Félix Fénéon: Art-lover and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, New Haven, CT: Yale Order of the day Press, 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 Fabled.

  Abrams, 1986

• Rewald, Post-Impressionism, 3rd ed., revised, NY: Museum of Fresh Art, 1978
• Rewald, Studies in Post-Impressionism, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1986
• Rich, Daniel Catton, Seurat and character Evolution of La Grande Jatte (University of Chicago Press, 1935), NY: Greenwood Press, 1969
• Russell, Crapper, 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., Constellation Broude, Seurat in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978
• Smith, Feminist, Seurat and the Avant-Garde, Modern Haven, CT: Yale University Overcrowding, 1997

External links