By the artistic perspective, or context, we mean an analysis of the practice of painting (or any art) at a particular point in time. In this case, we are going to look at what was going on in the field of painting in France in the 1880's, the time frame and place which includes Georges Seurat. Specifically, we will be looking at 1) a "school" or genre of painting in which the Grande Jatte is included and 2) the scientific and cultural underpinnings of Seurat's development of pointillism. (Below are some sites with interesting information on pointillism.)


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Pointillism Exhibit

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Representations of Leisure

Georges Seurat was certainly not the only painter to portray people at leisure. In fact, by the time he painted the Grande Jatte, the theme of popular urban entertainment had become well established. As John House tells us--


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Salon paintings contemporary with the Grande Jatte deploy a consistent repertory of devices to convey their messages, formulating a set of interrelated structures presented as a tableau of contemporary life, of the "real world" (117).


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What follows is a list of representative examples of paintings which, like Seurat's, make public outdoor recreation the setting for the work. Some of these images are on the large size and will take a little time to load. But it is important to take the time to view them and to get a feel both for the style of the painting and the ways in which other artists chose to represent the people who populate the pictures. It is in this way that we can come a little closer to understanding just what made Seurat's painting so unique--and so controversial at the time.


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Albert Edelfelt-- The Luxembourg Garden-- 1887

Berthe Morisot-- In a Park--1873

Auguste Renoir--Luncheon of the Boating Party-- 1881

Auguste Renoir-- In the Meadow--1878

Edouard Manet-- Luncheon on the Grass -- 1863

Edouard Manet-- On the Beach-- 1873

Gustave Caillebotte-- Paris: A Rainy Day -- 1877

Gustave Caillebotte-- Sculls-- 1878

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Before we come back to a discussion of these other paintings, let us take a quick look at at what was behind Seurat's interest in pointillism.

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The Art of Science and the Science of Art

Seurat and several of his friends and fellow artists made extensive studies of various scientific writers of the 1800s. Among them was Charles Blanc who held that color could be taught like music because of its fixed laws. But it was the color theorist Eugene Chevreul who had the most influence on this group of painters. Chevruel established that the appearance of any color could be changed depending upon what other color was placed next to it. "He also noted that colors appear to be at their most intense when positioned directly next to their complementaries and called his theory the the law of simultaneous contrast" (Wiggins 14).

Two colors are complementary if they combine to complete the spectrum. So the complementary of each primary color --red, blue and yellow--is the color created by combining the other two primaries. For example, the complementary color to red is green, which is the color produced by combining blue and yellow. The basic pairs are--red and green; blue and orange; and yellow and violet. Note that the pairs are directly across from one another in the color wheel.

What Seurat was attempting to do, then, was to enhance the main colors of a figure by placing dots or points of the contrasting colors next to them. The idea was that the two (or three) colors would "mix" in the eye of the viewer, creating a more vibrant, shimmering appearance. (For an interesting discussion of the "color wheel" as applied to computer graphics, check out the Basic Color Theory website. The author also discusses the effect color has in our daily lives.)

The following is from the article "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte" by Roy McMullen. In it, the author discusses Seurat's definite scientific bent.

 

In fact, [Seurat] was a rationalist in emotionalist territory, a puritan in pleasureland, a cold fish in warm water. He was also, ostensibly, at least, a scientist who scorned the evocativeness of painting, his own included. When studio visitors became unsuitably enthusiastic over La Grande Jatte, his reaction was like a school master's rap for an end to nonsense. "They see poetry," he remarked to a friend, "in what I've done. No, I apply my method and that is all there is to it." He was the first such [scientist/artist] of any importance since the mathematical-perspective enthusiasts of fifteenth-century Tuscany, and like them, he was possessed by a naive ambition to render by strictly scientific means what earlier painters had achieved only by intuition and rule of thumb. He studied the optics of Helmholtz and Clerk Maxwell and the optical-aesthetic treatises of some less reliable theorists who are now largely forgotten. He pondered with a thirst close to Faustian, such dark matters as "the law of simultaneous contrasts," the nature of color, and the psychological and spiritual effects of geometry.  His dots, the petits points of pointillism, were the most spectacular results of his research. In La Grande Jatte,.....they made him a celebrity. After their systemization in Les Poseuses they became the symbols of his scientism, the aiming points of his enemies, and the rallying points of his followers. Fortunately again, the dots were far from being the only result of his research. Although much of the geometric , aesthetic, and psychological theory he consumed was about as scientific as astrology, it did nourish him with the "laws" his Cartesian temperament yearned for, and it did stiffen a sensibility that could easily have become academic. By one of those devious processes that are common in the history of artistic doctrines, he extracted from his pseudo science a workable set of rules for managing the proportions, the dominant lines, and the masses of light and shade in a painting. Eventually he had an architectural system of contrasts and harmonies that really did make him a cousin of Poussin. In brief, he reinvented the classicism that the Impressionists had dismissed as obsolete. Why he did not take the logical step of reinventing at the same time the subject matter of classicism is not clear. He was certainly aware of the possibility; referring to La Grande Jatte, he once observed: "I could just as well have painted, in another harmony, the struggle between the Horatii and the Curiatii." ...... Perhaps, as even some of his supporters alleged, he lacked the power to imagine a scene.

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Regardless of whether Seurat lacked the imagination to create a scene of his own or whether he purposefully chose to bring new techniques to a theme so prevalent in his day, the outcome was the same. When he presented his painting at the Salon of 1886, it created quite a stir.

As you have seen from looking at the other paintings from this era, the subject matter may have been similar, but the style and technique where a radical departure from the work of Renoir, Manet, and the others. There is also a quite obvious difference in the way the people are portrayed. Many are faceless; others have features barely hinted at. And all but a few come across as stiff and posed in comparison to the other paintings. One simply could not help but "read into" this painting a critique of the modern Parisian. Whether Seurat intended it or not, the figures are cold, distant, and impersonal. As McMullen concludes--


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Perhaps the resulting message of loneliness and dehumanization was predictable. The method was partly the man himself, a revolutionary in the cause of tonal values and geometry, but oddly deficient in openness and love. It was also a scientific method, in spirit at least, and as such it fostered a tendency to objectify everything and to indulge in what we now call reductionism. Finally, it was a classical method, a way of organizing landscapes, people, dogs, monkeys, hats and parasols as structural and decorative elements. All this, applied to the Horatii and the Curiatii might have yielded a familiar message about Roman fortitude. Applied coldly and incongruously to an impressionist genre subject, it yielded, as the boulivardiers at the Maison Doree may have noticed, a deflating comment on nineteenth-century society.

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There are also some sites with biographical information. Although this is important information, remember that we do not want the painting to become a footnote to the life of Seurat. All the different perspectives we are looking at come together in the painting, not in Seurat.