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Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte

by Robert L. Herbert, with an essay by Neil Harris and contributions by Douglas W. Druick and Gloria Groom, Frank Zuccari and Allison Langley, Inge Fiedler, and Roy S. Berns
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL, in association with University of California Press, Berkeley CA, 2004
288 pp., illus. 64 b/w, 307 col. Paper, $34.95
ISBN: 0-520-24211-4.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, USA


ballast@netins.net

It is largely because of one painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-86), that French Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat is among history's best-known artists. That picture is surely a jewel in the crown of the Art Institute of Chicago, along with American Gothic by Grant Wood and the exquisite dream-like boxes of Joseph Cornell. In the summer of 2004, in part to mark the 80th year since the painting's acquisition, the museum mounted an exhibition called Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte, which included along with that artwork a parade of historical artifacts that, in one way or another, contributed to La Grand Jatte. This large, impressive volume——a 288-page exhibition catalog, illustrated by hundreds of images (including recent parodies) and enhanced by a medley of scholarly talks that touch on a wide range of issues (from aesthetic considerations to historiography)——was produced to accompany that showing.

How wonderful to have at hand such diverse and detailed essays on one particular painter, and even more to learn so much about a single painting (by adjusting scans of the painting, for example, it is now possible to digitally "unage" its surface without physically "restoring" it, by making prints that are all but identical to its original condition). This approach is especially helpful in the case of Seurat, who does not easily fit in with the stereotype of a "Modern artist," whose aims are so often purported to be self-expression and unbridled spontaneity. Seurat, on the contrary, claimed to be as much a scientist as an artist (he relied on "the science of color," he said), with the result that the bulk of his paintings (like those, for example, of M.C. Escher or Victor Vasarely) are often dismissed as too static, as lacking in gestural freshness. As we learn from this volume, Seurat's creative process (and it was creative) was informed by an extraordinary discipline, as when he decided (based on the "scientific aesthetics" of Charles Blanc, Charles Henry and others) that certain angles are inherently related to certain emotions (upward angles, for example, are perceived as more cheerful than downward), and that a comparable "aesthetic protractor" might as readily be devised for color, intensity, value, and other attributes of form.

During his lifetime, people such as French novelist Victor Hugo (who often toyed with painting) were experimenting with chance and accidental strokes. But Seurat wavered rarely in his quest for an objective process, as shown by his marks that are visible now through infrared photography, X-radiography, and other scientific ways to examine what exists beneath an opaque painted surface. We now have evidence of his use of grids, and of the countless revisions he made. A particularly wonderful part of this book is its account of the cultural contexts of La Grande Jatte (the island pictured by Seurat) and La Grande Jatte (the painting itself). Almost as if by sleight of hand——or would it be better to think of it as literary Pointillism——this book partly functions as a social history of the Art Institute of Chicago in the years since the painting was purchased in 1924.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, Autumn 2004.)

 

 




Updated 1st December 2004


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