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Georges
Seurat, born in Paris in 1859 began is official art training
at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he studied painting. He, along
with fellow painter Paul Signac are considered to be the pioneers
of the influential theory and practice of neoimpressionism. As a departure
from Impressionism, he favored the art of pointilism, where small
dots of color were applied to a white canvas that would blend together
when viewed from a distance to form new colors. |
By
nature as much a scientist as an artist, Seurat could not accept Monet's
instinctive application of visual perception in the use of light.
Using as a guide The Law of Contrasts and Similarities, a text on
color by the chemist Chevreul, Seurat applied his earlier studies
of black and white drawings to the use of color. He developed a specific
color wheel based on the fragmentation of light and limited himself
to the colors of the spectrum, working out careful compositions that
fused design and color. His painting La Grande Jatte (1885), the first
of his great Divisionist works, required twenty-three preliminary
drawings and thirty-eight painting sessions, a far cry from the canvases
the Impressionists completed in one sitting.
Shortly after concretely formulating his ideas in 1890, Seurat was
stricken with a septic sore throat and died in 1891, at the age of
thirty-one. He left behind over four hundred drawings, six completed
sketchbooks, and about sixty canvases, five of them several meters
square in size. He had gathered about him a small group of artists
who continued to apply his theories to their works. In addition to
his principal follower, Signac, Seurat's Divisionist style was adopted
by Camille Pissarro
(who eventually abandoned the method
as too precise for his temperament), Cross, Angrand, Dubois-Pillet,
and the Belgians van de Velde and van Rysselberghe. His theories of
construction through solidity of light were also highly important
to later artists.
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