Georges Seurat b. December 2, 1859 Georges Seurat was born in Paris, France. After training at the École des Beaux-Arts, he broke free of tradition. Taking his technique a step beyond Impressionism, he painted with small strokes of pure color that seem to blend when viewed from a distance. This method, called Pointillism, is showcased in major works of the 1880s such as A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Seurats career was cut short when he died of illness on March 29, 1891, in Paris. Seurat was also interested in the science behind art, and he did a good deal of reading on perception, color theory and the psychological power of line and form. Two books that affected his development as an artist were Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors, written by chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, and Essay on the Unmistakable Signs of Art, by painter/writer Humbert de Superville. In the mid-1880s, Seurat developed a style of painting that came to be called Divisionism or Pointillism. Rather than blending colors together on his palette, he dabbed tiny strokes or points of pure color onto the canvas. When he placed colors side by side, they would appear to blend when viewed from a distance, producing luminous, shimmering color effects through optical mixing. Seurat continued the work of the Impressionists, not only through his experiments with technique, but through his interest in everyday subject matter. He and his colleagues often took inspiration from the streets of the city, from its cabarets and nightclubs, and from the parks and landscapes of the Paris suburbs. Seurats first major work was Bathers at Asnières, dated 1884, a large-scale canvas showing a scene of laborers relaxing alongside a river outside Paris. Bathers was followed by A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-86), an even larger work depicting middle-class Parisians strolling and resting in an island park on the Seine River. (This painting was first exhibited in the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886.) In both works, Seurat tried to give modern-day figures a sense of significance and permanence by simplifying their forms and limiting their details; at the same time, his experimental brushwork and color combinations kept the scenes vivid and engaging. Seurat died on March 29, 1891, in Paris, after a brief illness that was most likely pneumonia or meningitis. He was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 13:10:13 +0000
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