Art: Secrets of Seurat

The late great Georges Seurat is known in the U.S. very largely as the painter of one picture—his big Sunday afternoon scene showing some 40 figures taking their ease on the banks of the Seine, La Grande Jatte. In achieving this sun-struck masterpiece, which one critic declared was filled with “total aerial vibration,” Seurat made innumerable sketches, spent two whole years (1884-86). Last week the life of the painter had its first full and fascinating exposition in English, at the hands of a 31-year-old German-born and Sorbonne-trained critic, John Rewald (Georges Seurat; Wittenborn; $6).

Rewald had access to a vast amount of Seuratiana and to the painter’s lifelong friend, the aged and acute French art critic, Félix Fénéon, from whom he has not heard since the fall of France. The result is an unexpectedly intimate portrait of an unusually reserved man, and a lucid exposition of his “scientific” methods of painting.

Born in 1859 in Paris, Seurat was the son of a one-armed bailiff who was a personality in his own right. Seurat père lived away from home wrapped in “strange religious practices,” but consented to dine at his wife’s table each Tuesday. On these occasions he screwed knives and forks into the stump of his artificial arm and carved “with speed and even transport, muttons, filets, small game and fowl.”

Georges Seurat reacted from such peculiarities by being the most conservative of sons. He went to the reactionary Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he drew and painted in such traditional manners as those of Poussin, Ingres, etc. To the end of his short life, solemn, bearded Georges lived with utter circumspection, detested eccentricity of dress (the black suit and top hat best suited him) and was variously described by friends as resembling the St. George of Donatello, a young business executive, and a notary with the profile of an Assyrian king.

Even the great originality which was soon to characterize his painting proceeded not out of flamboyant inventiveness but from a love of method. He became convinced that painting could and should be based on science—the laws of optics, the precise study of color values, etc. A voracious reader and experimentalist in these fields, he devised what became known as “divisionism.” This meant painting in countless little strokes of pure colors rather than mixing colors on the palette. (The better known term “pointillism” more clearly indicates the application of color by myriads of points.) Thus, in the later paintings of Seurat and his followers—dubbed the “neo-impressionists”—the colors are not blended on the canvas but, by illusion, in the retina of the observer.

For his exquisite pains in pure color dabbing, Seurat was at first subjected to insulting remarks concerning “little green chemists who pile up tiny dots.” But art criticism gradually caught up with Seurat (U.S. reviewers of an 1886 New York show were among the first to get the point), and today it is generally recognized that Seurat’s method made possible a unique and exciting luminosity.

It is also generally recognized that Seurat’s genius was only in small part attributable to his method, to the science of optics or of anything else. He was a “divisionist,” to be sure, but he was first & foremost a great painter—a master of complex composition (the receding planes in La Grande Jatte are extraordinary) and an inspired colorist. He produced only seven large, major canvases, but his hundreds of drawings and oil sketches are rarities in themselves, and his calm vacation seascapes painted at Honfleur and Grandcamp are among the finest chapters in the painted literature of the ocean.

In 1891, when he was only 31, Georges Seurat died of septic quinsy. It was only then that his closest friends in the Paris studios learned that this orderly gentleman, who had dined every day with his mother, had taken one of his models as a mistress and by her had a son (who died soon after his father, stricken by the same disease). One of Seurat’s finest paintings, Jeune femme se poudrant, is of this woman, Madeleine Knobloch.