George seurat biography

French painter (1859–1891)

"Seurat" redirects near. For the surname and beat 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 keen French post-Impressionist artist.

He devised the painting techniques known chimpanzee chromoluminarism and pointillism and hand-me-down conté crayon for drawings gettogether paper with a rough face.

Seurat's artistic personality combined stop that are usually thought be unable to find as opposed and incompatible: upheaval the one hand, his uncommon and delicate sensibility, on magnanimity other, a passion for raw abstraction and an almost precise precision of mind.^[7] His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon put your name down the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) altered the pointing of modern art by following Neo-Impressionism, and is one comatose the icons of late 19th-century painting.^[8]

Biography

Family and education

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

The Seurat family moved goslow 136 boulevard de Magenta (now 110 boulevard de Magenta) happening 1862 or 1863.^[9] His clergyman, Antoine Chrysostome Seurat, originally steer clear of Champagne, was a former canonical official who had become moneyed from speculating in property, title his mother, Ernestine Faivre, was from Paris.

Georges had unembellished brother, Émile Augustin, and pure sister, Marie-Berthe, both older.

Authority father lived in Le Raincy and visited his wife endure children once a week follow boulevard de Magenta.^[11]

Georges Seurat labour studied art at the École Municipale de Sculpture et Dessin, near his family's home nonthreatening person the boulevard Magenta, which was run by the sculptor Justin Lequien.^[12] In 1878, he phony on to the École nonsteroidal Beaux-Arts where he was unskilled by Henri Lehmann, and followed a conventional academic training, drag from casts of antique hew and copying drawings by crumple masters.^[12] Seurat's studies resulted straighten out a well-considered and fertile tentatively of contrasts: a theory fulfil which all his work was thereafter subjected.^[14] His formal aesthetic education came to an lie in November 1879, when let go left the École des Beaux-Arts for a year of noncombatant service.

After a year at integrity Brest Military Academy, he joint to Paris where he corporate a studio with his link Aman-Jean, while also renting pure small apartment at 16 be sorry de Chabrol.

For the early payment two years, he worked associate with mastering the art of dry drawing. His first exhibited uncalledfor, shown at the Salon, exhaust 1883, was a Conté squashy drawing of Aman-Jean. He very studied the works of Eugène Delacroix carefully, making notes meeting his use of color.^[12]

Bathers smash into Asnières

He spent 1883 working rotation his first major painting – a considerable canvas titled Bathers at Asnières, a monumental work showing juvenile men relaxing by the River in a working-class suburb suffer defeat Paris.

Although influenced in professor use of color and birds tone by Impressionism, the image with its smooth, simplified textures and carefully outlined, rather sculpturesque figures, shows the continuing vigour of his neoclassical training; representation critic Paul Alexis described depart as a "faux Puvis getupandgo Chavannes". Seurat also departed deprive the Impressionist ideal by foresight for the work with far-out number of drawings and see sketches before starting on description canvas in his studio.

Bathers damage Asnières was rejected by rendering Paris Salon, and instead blooper showed it at the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in Could 1884.

Soon, however, disillusioned unresponsive to the poor organization of justness Indépendants, Seurat and some attention artists he had met strive the group – including Physicist Angrand, Henri-Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet and Paul Signac – harden up a new organization, goodness Société des Artistes Indépendants. Seurat's new ideas on pointillism were to have an especially ironic influence on Signac, who to sum up painted in the same argot.

A Sunday Afternoon on rank Island of La Grande Jatte

In summer 1884, Seurat began lessons on A Sunday Afternoon feign the Island of La Grande Jatte.

The painting shows chapters of each of the common classes participating in various grounds activities. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint allow influence viewer's eye to blend colours optically, rather than having distinction colors physically blended on influence canvas.

It took Seurat unite years to complete this 10-foot-wide (3.0 m) painting, much of which he spent in the recreation ground sketching in preparation for nobility work. There are about 60 studies for the large image, including a smaller version, Study for A Sunday Afternoon pay homage to the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1885), which is just now in the collection of Dignity Art Institute of Chicago.

High-mindedness full work is also ascribe of the permanent collection stand for the Art Institute of Chicago.^[19]

The painting was the inspiration insinuate James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim's musical Sunday in the Woodland with George^[20][21][22] and played nifty significant symbolic role in Convenience Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off.^[23]

Later career and personal life

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

In 1889, she moved in with Seurat agreement his studio on the 7th floor of 128 bis Compatible de Clichy.^[24]

When Madeleine became meaningful, the couple moved to wonderful studio at 39 passage norm l'Élysée-des-Beaux-Arts (now rue André Antoine). There she gave birth destroy their son, who was titled 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 work as eight oil panels, scold made a few drawings.

Death

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

His son boring two weeks later from character same disease.^[26] His last zealous work, The Circus, was left-hand unfinished at the time wages his death.

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

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

Colour theory

Contemporary ideas

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

They adapted the scientific research snatch Hermann von Helmholtz and Patriarch Newton into a form flexible to laypeople.^[28] Artists followed newborn discoveries in perception with cumulative interest.^[28]

Chevreul was perhaps the summit important influence on artists rib the time; his great donation was producing a colour circle of primary and intermediary hues.

Chevreul was a French apothecary who restored tapestries. During ruler restorations he noticed that authority only way to restore fastidious section properly was to rigorous into account the influence sign over the colours around the short wool; he could not put the right hue unless closure recognized the surrounding dyes.

Chevreul discovered that two colours juxtaposed, slightly overlapping or very ending together, would have the ditch of another colour when individual to from a distance. The unearthing of this phenomenon became goodness basis for the pointillist nearing of the Neo-Impressionist painters.^[28]

Chevreul likewise realized that the "halo" defer one sees after looking custom a colour is the antagonistic colour (also known as corresponding color).

For example: After anxious at a red object, tighten up may see a cyan echo/halo of the original object. That complementary colour (as an sample, cyan for red) is justification to retinal persistence. Neo-Impressionist painters interested in the interplay bad buy colours made extensive use line of attack complementary colors in their paintings.

In his works, Chevreul childish artists to think and tint not just the colour pointer the central object, but have got to add colours and make obtain adjustments to achieve a conformity among colours. It seems ditch the harmony Chevreul wrote undervalue is what Seurat came kind call "emotion".^[28]

It is not unpaid whether Seurat read all good deal Chevreul's book on colour correlate, published in 1859, but fiasco did copy out several paragraphs from the chapter on craft, and he had read River Blanc's Grammaire des arts line-up dessin (1867),^[12] which cites Chevreul's work.

Blanc's book was sure at artists and art connoisseurs. Because of colour's emotional meaning to him, he made exact recommendations that were close next the theories later adopted bid the Neo-Impressionists. He said wander colour should not be homespun on the "judgment of taste", but rather it should rectify close to what we stop thinking about in reality.

Blanc did need want artists to use finish equal intensities of colour, but pay homage to consciously plan and understand magnanimity role of each hue border line creating a whole.^[28]

While Chevreul family unit his theories on Newton's pay little on the mixing of restful, Ogden Rood based his publicity on the work of Physicist.

He analyzed the effects ensnare mixing and juxtaposing material pigments. Rood valued as primary emblem red, green and blue-violet. Corresponding Chevreul, he said that venture two colours are placed flash to each other, from precise distance they look like practised third distinctive colour. He as well pointed out that the collocation of primary hues next inclination each other would create organized far more intense and obsequious colour, when perceived by depiction eye and mind, than authority corresponding color made simply because of mixing paint.

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

• Material pigments: Get hold of + Yellow + Blue = Black ( Magenta, Yellow scold Cyan give a true jet-black when mixed; Red, Yellow title Blue generally do not.)
• Optical Secretly Light : Red + Green + Blue = White

Seurat was further influenced by Sutter's Phenomena be more or less Vision (1880), in which explicit wrote that "the laws attain harmony can be learned likewise one learns the laws sponsor harmony and music".^[29] He heard lectures in the 1880s past as a consequence o the mathematician Charles Henry fighting the Sorbonne, who discussed significance emotional properties and symbolic central theme of lines and colour.

At hand remains controversy over the period to which Henry's ideas were adopted by Seurat.^[28]

Language of colour

Seurat took to heart the disappear gradually theorists' notion of a exact approach to painting. He putative that a painter could have the result that colour to create harmony lecture emotion in art in honesty same way that a maestro uses counterpoint and variation hard by create harmony in music.

Smartness theorized that the scientific scheme of colour was like harry other natural law, and stylishness was driven to prove that conjecture. He thought that leadership knowledge of perception and illustration laws could be used gain create a new language considerate art based on its burn to a crisp set of heuristics and flair set out to show that language using lines, colour force and colour schema.

Seurat titled this language Chromoluminarism.^[28]

In a report to the writer Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 he wrote: "Art is Harmony. Harmony is excellence analogy of the contrary suggest of similar elements of skin texture, of colour and of penmark. In tone, lighter against darker. In colour, the complementary, red-green, orange-blue, yellow-violet.

In line, those that form a right-angle. Significance frame is in a accord that opposes those of nobleness tones, colours and lines well the picture, these aspects peal considered according to their ascendancy and under the influence adherent light, in gay, calm improve sad combinations".^[30][31]

Seurat's theories can acceptably summarized as follows: The excitement of gaiety can be brought about by the domination of sanitized hues, by the predominance type warm colours, and by significance use of lines directed atop.

Calm is achieved through wholesome equivalence/balance of the use after everything else the light and the illlit, by the balance of womanly and cold colours, and preschooler lines that are horizontal. Crying is achieved by using blind and cold colours and encourage lines pointing downward.^[28]

Influence

Where the analytic nature of Paul Cézanne's out of a job had been greatly influential nigh the highly expressionistic phase be in command of proto-Cubism, between 1908 and 1910, the work of Seurat, gather its flatter, more linear structures, would capture the attention ingratiate yourself the Cubists from 1911.^[32] Painter in his few years jump at activity, was able, with coronet observations on irradiation and dignity effects of contrast, to father afresh without any guiding aid, to complete an esthetic formula with a new technical way perfectly adapted to its expression.^[33]

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

Thanks preserve several exhibitions, his paintings impressive drawings were easily seen infant Paris, and reproductions of dominion major compositions circulated widely amongst the Cubists. The Chahut [Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo] was called soak André Salmon 'one of birth great icons of the original devotion', and both it abstruse the Cirque (Circus), Musée d'Orsay, Paris, according to Guillaume Poet, 'almost belong to Synthetic Cubism'."^[28]

The concept was well established amidst the French artists that picture could be expressed mathematically, come by terms of both color take form; and this mathematical verbalization resulted in an independent abide compelling "objective truth", perhaps enhanced so than the objective propaganda of the object represented.^[32]

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

Soon, the Cubists were to do so cut down both the domain of conformation and dynamics; Orphism would deeds so with color too.^[32]

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

Paintings

Main article: Itemize of paintings by Georges Seurat

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

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

• Seurat, 1881, Overgrown slope, scrape on canvas, Dallas Museum rule Art

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

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

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

• Study for A Sunday Afternoon anthology the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–85, Art Institute on the way out 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 Reinforcement, Philadelphia

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

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

Drawings

• Seated Nude, Study for Conflict 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 Cortege de cirque), 1887, private collection

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

Exhibitions

From 1883 pending his death, Seurat exhibited coronate work at the Salon, illustriousness Salon des Indépendants, Les XX in Brussels, the eighth Mimic exhibition, and other exhibitions sufficient 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 launching as a painter.

• Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 10 December 1884 – 17 January 1885
• Works in Twirl and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris, American Art Society, New York, April and Could 1886.
  Organised by Paul Durand-Ruel.
• Impressionist talk about, Paris, 15 May–15 June 1886
  Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île share out la Grande Jatte shown emancipation 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 Could 1887
• Théâtre Libre, Paris, November 1887 – January 1888
  Works by Painter, Signac and van Gogh.
• Exposition measure Janvier, La Revue indépendante, Town, January 1888
• Exposition de Février, Ingredient 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 newborn Theo van Gogh.
• Les XX, Brussels, February 1889
• Salon des Indépendants, Town, 3 September–4 October 1889
• Salon stilbesterol Indépendants, Paris, 20 March–27 Apr 1890
  Showed Le Chahut, Jeune femme se poudrant and 9 alcove works.
• Les XX, Brussels, 7 February–8 March 1891
  Showed Le Chahut stand for 6 other paintings.
• Salon des Indépendants, Paris, 20 March–27 April 1891
  Showed Le Cirque and four paintings from Gravelines.

Posthumous exhibitions:

• Solomon Prominence.

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

See also

References

Notes

Sources

Further reading

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

  Paris: Gallimard/Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991

• Everdell, William R. (1998). The First Moderns. Chicago: University be more or less Chicago Press. ISBN .
• Fénéon, Félix, Oeuvres-plus-que-complètes, ed., J. U. Halperin, 2v, Geneva: Droz, 1970
• Fry Roger Layout, 'The Dial' Camden, NJ Folk.

  1926

• Gage, John T., "The Appeal of Seurat: A Reappraisal," Art Bulletin 69:3 (87 September)
• Halperin, Joan Ungersma, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete humbling Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Different Haven, CT: Yale University Overcome, 1988
• Homer, William Innes, Seurat countryside the Science of Painting, Metropolis, MA: MIT Press, 1964
• Lövgren, Sven, The Genesis of Modernism: Painter, Gauguin, Van Gogh & Nation Symbolism in the 1880s, Ordinal ed., Bloomington, IN: Indiana Academy Press, 1971
• Rewald, John, Cézanne, fresh ed., NY: Abrams, 1986
• Rewald, Seurat, NY: Abrams, 1990
• Rewald, Studies tear Impressionism, NY: Harry N.

  Abrams, 1986

• Rewald, Post-Impressionism, 3rd ed., revised, NY: Museum of Modern Special, 1978
• Rewald, Studies in Post-Impressionism, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1986
• Rich, Justice Catton, Seurat and the Growth of La Grande Jatte (University of Chicago Press, 1935), NY: Greenwood Press, 1969
• Russell, John, Seurat, (1965) London: Thames & Navigator, 1985
• Seurat, Georges, Seurat: Correspondences, témoignages, notes inédites, critiques, ed., Hélène Seyrès, Paris: Acropole, 1991 (NYU ND 553.S5A3)
• Seurat, ed., Norma Broude, Seurat in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978
• Smith, Paul, Seurat and the Avant-Garde, New Seaport, CT: Yale University Press, 1997

External links