The Painting
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat
Close and Attentive Looking
Harvard art history professor, Jennifer Roberts' first assignment for her students is to spend three uninterrupted hours with a painting. Roberts recognizes the feat of this task, "It is commonly assumed that vision is immediate. It seems direct, uncomplicated, and instantaneous... but what students learn in a visceral way... is that in any work of art there are details and orders and relationships that take time to perceive. " I am certainly not saying you must or even should spend that long with this work, but I am greatly encouraging that you spend longer than you think paying closer attention than you think to this painting. It, and the messages it carries, are at the absolute root of this musical.
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Unsure where or how to begin? Start here:
ACTIVITY A: Spend your time with this digital scan of the painting by Google Arts and Culture. This link will let you zoom in to any spot on the painting (to the degree that you can see the dots and brushstrokes!). Carefully look and think about the painting, ideally, BEFORE you read or research much about it. Where is your eye drawn first? What strikes you as the most important part? Or the overall theme/takeaway? Pay close attention to the specific quadrant of the painting where your character stands/sits (refer to the information that Kate sent along with the link to the website)
After doing this, take about half an hour to listen to BBC's Moving Pictures episode on this painting while having the painting open in front of you. What have you not noticed before? What is mentioned in Moving Pictures that stands out to you? Either in the painting or in the analysis?
Look further down on this page for a reference to the scene with this painting in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Does the close looking in that scene tie to this activity?
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Discuss any of these questions or any other thoughts that come up in your journal.
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If you are looking for a more in depth and specific look, head to the bottom of this page for additional resources about the painting proper.
The Artist
Georges Seurat (top picture) (December 2, 1859 - March 29, 1891) was born in Paris, son of Antoine-Chrisostôme Seurat and Mme. Seurat, with whom he spend most of childhood along with his brother, Émile, and his sister, Marie-Berthe. Georges attended the École des Beaux-Arts starting in 1878, but did not last long in school and joined the military in 1879. After returning to Paris, Seurat rented a studio and small apartment, and began to paint full time.
Seurat's work was extremely influenced by color theory and it is at this point of his life that we believe he met and worked with French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, whose theories of contrast, color, primary colors, and the visible spectrum were instrumental in Seurat's art moving forward (bottom picture). To explore more about the colors and techniques he used in his paintings, click through this link from ColourLex. To investigate the layers Seurat used in his paintings, check out these two x-ray scans of Seurat's Young Woman Powdering Herself.
Seurat's first major work, Bathers at Asnières, was rejected by the Paris Salon, and instead he showed it at the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in May 1884. Soon after, Seurat began working on La Grande Jatte (Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte) and would work on it for the following two years with countless sketches and three drafts on canvas. In the summer of 1886, the painting was shown in the eighth and final Impressionist group salon. Seurat would continue to work, paint, and exhibit his work. In February of 1890, Seurat's mistress, Madeleine Knobloch, gave birth to his son Pierre-Georges Seurat. Madeleine and her son are the inspiration for Dot and her daughter, Marie. James Lapine details that Madeleine "gave [him] the freedom to imagine that perhaps Seurat had another mistress before or after Knobloch, and perhaps another child as well." This relationship and child would be kept a secret, even from his closest friends and his mother, until his death in March of 1891 at 31 years old.
La Grande Jatte would be left to his mother and then his brother, Émile. It now resides in the Art Institute of Chicago. Some of his other most prominet works include, Bathers at Asnières (1883), Young Woman Powdering Herself (1888), Models (Les Poseuses) (1886–1888), Circus (1891), and many sketches and studies for his larger paintings. If you would like a succinct video about Seurat and the painting, check here. Explore more about Seurat's sketches from this 2007 exhibit from the Museum of Modern Art.
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On his book tour, James Lapine was in conversation with Richard Rand at the Getty Museum in California. Start here at minute mark 11:00 and listen until 24:30 to hear the curator discuss and compare the painting with Lapine.
This Painting's Place in Art History
To get the best understanding of where this painting lives in the canon of art history, we have to look at the art before and after Georges Seurat. Seurat and La Grande Jatte come right at the end of Impressionism: paintings, mostly landscapes, painted outside with airy color, bright light, and messy brushstrokes. It was the beginning of more modern and abstract art. La Grande Jatte was exhibited in the final Impressionist salon in 1886.
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Seurat is considered to be the pioneer of Post-Impressionism and, specifically, Neo-Impressionism. These art eras came as a reaction to the on-the-fly nature of Impressionism. Post/Neo-Impressionist work was still colorful, but much more calculated and symbolic, rather than messy and natural. The mathematical use of color by the Neo-Impressionists, namely Seurat, became known as divisionism, pointillism, or, by Seurat's choice, chromoluminarism (the namesake of Chromolume #7).
Seurat's work continues to not only influence artists of all kinds, but permeate other forms of media. One of the most famous popular media references to Seurat is a scene from the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where Cameron stares at La Grande Jatte in the Art Institute in Chicago. In an article from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, senior curator Eleanor Harvey notes, “He’s struggling to find his place and he dives into the face of that little kid, it almost brings me to tears, because he’s having a soul-wrenching, life changing experience. When he comes out of that painting, he will not be the same.”
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The image to the left is art historian Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s chart of Western abstract art. Take note of Seurat in the top right and how many art styles branch off of his work!
ACTIVITY B: Take a look through the Art History Project's Timeline of Art History. Click around until you find Georges Seurat and his work (look inside a large category, then a style era, then for the individual artists). Is he where you thought he would be? Have any thoughts about the artists and styles before, during, and after Seurat? Note your thoughts in your journal.
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