© Copyright 2005 Paul van Rensburg.
IMPRESSIONISM:
BIOGRAPHIES:
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM:
Georges Seurat's powerful presence as the leader of Neo-Impressionism resounded among artists for decades and the enticement of Neo-Impressionism spread far and wide, over generations and national boundaries. Camille Pissarro (View from My Window) was among the first to embrace Seurat's system of colour harmony, recognizing it as "a new phase in the logical march of Impressionism." In Belgium, where French Neo-Impressionism debuted at the exhibition of Les XX in 1887, Théo Van Rysselberghe
adopted Seurat's distinguishing technique, as did other avant-garde artists. Some years later, even Henri Matisse ventured into Neo-Impressionism when he joined Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross in Saint-Tropez in the summer of 1904, and painted "Luxe, calme et volupté", an imaginary figural landscape painted in divided brush marks of glowing colour.
Charles Angrand's self-portrait bears a striking resemblance to Seurat's shadowy sheets drawn in black crayon, while Henri-Edmond Cross and Hippolyte Petitjean adapted the Divisionist technique to watercolour painting. In Saint-Clair, a village on the Côte d'Azur near Saint-Tropez, Cross painted radiant landscapes in watercolour, using a vivid palette of saturated colour in mosaic-like brush marks, while Petitjean's watercolours mastered the art of Pointillism to decorative perfection. In the early twentieth century, Fauve artists turned to Seurat's technique for purity of colour and even abstract painters Mondrian and Kandinsky practiced Pointillism.
Were it not for Paul Signac, Neo-Impressionism might have lost all momentum following the early death of Seurat in 1891. Signac inherited the Divisionist banner and lobbied tirelessly on its behalf. It was Signac who introduced Seurat's system of colour harmony to the vanguard critics and writers who would champion it, and it was he who published the influential treatise "D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionisme" (1899), an argument for Neo-Impressionism as the logical and legitimate successor to Impressionism. In Signac's own work, the rigor and restraint of his early paintings gave way to a bold and luxuriant palette in later years (Grand Canal, Venice) and his marine watercolours, in particular, enabled him to explore the purity and clarity of colour, with no more than a pencil and a box of watercolours in his itinerant pocket.
If Neo-Impressionism ultimately marked only a brief passage from the plein-air painting of Impressionism in the nineteenth century to radiant Fauvism and the geometry of Cubism in the twentieth, it assigned a language essential to modernism and brought with it a new text of independent form and colour.
Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859-1891)
Georges-Pierre Seurat is regarded as the father of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism and the master of Pointillism, which is the technique of using dots of paint, straight out of the tube, unblended, to create solid forms on a canvas. He created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour, too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work, but which made his paintings shimmer with utmost brilliance. The separation of colour through individual strokes of pigment came to be known as Divisionism, while the application of precise dots of paint came to be called Pointillism.
Led by Seurat, the artists of the Neo-Impressionist circle renounced the random spontaneity of Impressionism in favour of this new measured painting technique, also known as mélange optique (optical mixture). The technique itself, was grounded in science and the study of optics and was encouraged by contemporary treatises on colour theory by Charles Henry, Eugène Chevreul, and Odgen Rood. Neo-Impressionists came to believe that the separate touches of interwoven pigment resulted in a far greater vibrancy of colour in the observer's eye than was achieved by the conventional mixing of pigments on the palette.
Seurat was born on 2 December 1859 in Paris into a relatively wealthy family. His father, Chrysostome-Antoine Seurat, was a legal official in La Villette and his mother, Ernestine Faivre, a quiet and unassuming woman who came from a prosperous middle-class Parisian family. While his father was a solitary and unexpressive person who only saw his family once a week, it was his mother who gave some warmth and continuity to his childhood.
During his schooldays, Seurat was introduced to painting by an uncle on his mother's side, the textile dealer Paul Haumonté-Faivre, also an amateur painter. In 1875 he started to attend a drawing class taught by the sculptor Justin Lequien at a night school in the city and in 1878, he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. Here he joined the painting class of Henri Lehmann, a pupil of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The students of the class studied and copied the old masters in the Louvre and the young Seurat was strongly influenced by Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya.
As a young man Seurat was tall and handsome with soulful eyes and a quiet, gentle voice. He was always quite reserved and dignified in dress and manner, so much so, that one friend described him as looking like a floor-walker in a department store, while Edgar Degas nicknamed him "the notary". He was serious and intense and preferred to spend his money on books rather than on food or drink. Like his father Chrysostome-Antoine, however, his most outstanding characteristic was his secretiveness.
Despite many of the qualities of the perfect student, Seurat did not particularly excel at school or at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but thanks to a regular allowance, he never had any need to sell his work for a living, nor to produce work that was saleable.
In 1879, Seurat was drafted for military service and sent to the great military port of Brest on the western coast of Brittany. Here he fitted in easily to barracks discipline and used his spare time to begin sketching figures and ships.
On returning to Paris in 1880, the young artist initially shared a cramped studio on the Left Bank with two student friends Aman-Jean and Ernest Laurent. He later moved to a studio of his own, closer to his parent's home on the Right Bank, where he painted his most important works up till 1886. For the first two years, he devoted himself to mastering the art of black and white drawing. Then, in the year 1883, most of his time was spent on a huge canvas, "Bathing at Asnieres", which was his first major painting and also the first of the six large canvasses that would constitute the bulk of his life's work.
In 1883 for the first and only time, Seurat’s work, a drawing of Aman-Jean, was allowed in the official Salon. The next year, his first large painting, "Bathers at Asnières", was rejected by the Salon, but it was, however, shown in the exhibition held by the Société des Artistes Indépendants which was founded by Seurat and several other artists. It was there that Seurat became acquainted with Paul Signac, with whom he became close friends. Signac was four years younger, and a largely self-taught painter who was influenced by the Impressionists and very receptive to Seurat's theoretical ideas.
The rejection of Seurat's work by the Salon caused a major change to the direction of his career, as from that year on, he scorned the academic art of the Salon and allied himself with the young independent painters, of whom the extrovert and enthusiastic Signac provided him with moral support as he set about making his mark within the avant-garde.
Scientific theories on colour and vision continued to deeply interest him and Seurat read the colour theories of Ogden N. Rood and studied the paintings of Eugène Delacroix while he continued to perfect his precise application of paint to suggest volume and depth. An instinctively gifted painter, Seurat also had extraordinary powers of concentration and perseverance, and took a dogged and single-minded approach to his work. He was convinced of the rightness of his own opinions, and of the importance of the "pointillist" method he was developing. Although other painters turned to him as a leader, he seemed to have inspired admiration rather than affection. He, in turn, however,looked upon this admiration as naturally befitting his superior intellect, hard work and achievement.
After Bathers at Asnières, Seurat started working on another large canvas, "A Sunday Afternoon on the island La Grande Jatte", in which he was to perfect the new style which founded the avant-garde art movement of Neo-Impressionism. As usual, before beginning the final variant, he made an endless series of preliminary sketches and studies and with characteristic single-mindedness, he devoted his time entirely to the composition. Every day for months he traveled to his chosen spot, where he would work all morning, and each afternoon, he continued painting the giant canvas in his studio. After two years of concentrated, systematic work, Seurat completed the painting in 1886, and exhibited it with the Impressionist group in May of that year. The large picture, measuring more than two meters by three, and executed in the entirely new technique of using dots, created quite a stir, just like the first Impressionist exhibition twelve years before. "La Grand Jatte" proved to be the main talking point of the exhibition and although it was precisely the picture's technique that aroused the most displeasure amongst the public, critics and artists, it was later hailed as offering the most significant way forward from Impressionism.
The one art critic, who showed some insight was Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), who subsequently wrote an informed analysis of Seurat’s technique and style in the newly-launched Vogue magazine. Fénéon was the first to use the term "Neo-Impressionism" to describe the paintings of Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro, and his son Lucien Pissarro, at the last Impressionist exhibition.
In the autumn of 1886, Seurat started working on his new project Les Poseuses (The Models).
At this stage, Seurat occupied a studio next to Signac's on the Boulevard de Clichy in Montmartre, where he was surrounded by artists ranging from the conservative decorator Puvis de Chavannes, whom he greatly admired, to more progressive contemporaries, including Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. Seurat found that he had become the most controversial figure on the artistic scene in Paris. However, although he was at the center of artistic debates, he remained aloof from them. Seurat's relative financial ease meant that he was unused to dealing with potential clients, and his demands remained modest despite his new fame. His attitude to his work was down-to-earth and unromantic and he had no pretensions to the status of genius. For instance, when some critics tried to describe his work as poetic, he contradicted them by stating that he merely applied his method and that was all. He was, however, very concerned not to lose any credit for the originality of his technique and guarded the details obsessively.
By this time Seurat's life had begun to assume a regular pattern. During the winter months, he would lock himself away in his studio, working on a big figure picture to exhibit in the spring, then he would spend the summer months in one of the Normandy ports such as Honfleur, working on smaller, less complex, marine paintings.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/seurat/
library.thinkquest.org/C0118063/time/seurat.htm
http://wwar.com/masters/s/seurat-georges.html
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/seni/hd_seni.htm
http://www.angelo.edu/faculty/rprestia/1301/definitions/seurat.htm
http://www.abcgallery.com/S/seurat/seuratbio.html
http://www.wetcanvas.com/Museum/Artists/s/Georges_Seurat/
In February of 1889 Seurat once again took part in the exhibition held by “Les Vingt” in Brussels, but irritated by internal disagreements, he started to withdraw from his friends. That year he met Madeleine Knobloch, a young uneducated woman from working family, and late in 1889, when he was approaching 30, he moved away from the bustling Boulevard de Clichy to a studio in a quieter street nearby, where, unbeknown to his family and friends, he lived with the young model. Their son Pierre George was born in the studio on 16 February 1890. The same year Seurat exhibited "Le Chahut" and "Young Woman Powdering Herself", a portrait of Madeleine Knobloch, at the Indépendants. The unfinished "Circus" was demonstrated in March 1891 in the Salon des Indépendants.
He kept his private life very secret, and not until his sudden death in Paris on March 29, 1891, did his friends learn of his mistress, while it was not until two days before his death that he introduced his young family to his mother.
On 29 March 1891, at the age of 31, Seurat died unexpectedly of either an infectious angina or a form of meningitis. His son died shortly afterwards of the same infection. Following quarrels Madeleine Knobloch cut off all contact with Seurat’s family and disappeared from history. Signac sadly concluded that their poor friend had killed himself by overwork.
In his short life Seurat produced seven monumental paintings and 60 smaller ones, as well as several drawings and sketchbooks. Whether in Paris or at the coast, Seurat was never a great socializer and in the last year of his life he virtually cut himself off from friends. He could warm up in a one-on-one situation, but by all accounts his conversation centered on his own artistic concerns.
In February 1887 Seurat, with Signac, by the invitation of the avant-garde group “Les Vingt” took part in their exhibition in Brussels, where he showed seven paintings, including La Grande Jatte. At Signac’s instigation, those artists using the pointillist technique formed themselves into a group of Neo-Impressionists; they included Albert Dubois-Pillet (1846-1890), Charles Angrand (1854-1926), Maximilien Luce (1858-1941) and, for a short period, Camille Pissarro and his eldest son, Lucien Pissaro (1863-1944).
The summer of 1888 Seurat spent on the Normandy coast, where he produced numerous seascapes at Port-en-Bessin.
IMPRESSIONISM:
BIOGRAPHIES:
NEO-IMPRESSIONISM: