Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – 1884

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Dr. Beth Harris: [0:04] “Some say they see poetry in my paintings, I see only science.”

Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:10] We’re in the Art Institute of Chicago and we’re looking at “Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of the Grand Jatte” by Georges Seurat.

Dr. Harris: [0:17] And that was a quote by Seurat, whose ambition was to bring science to the methods of Impressionism.

Dr. Zucker: [0:22] What’s interesting is that the science that he was thinking about has been, to some extent, overturned, and we’re left with the poetry.

Dr. Harris: [0:29] The science that he was referring to had to do with ways of making the painting seem more luminous, to seem brighter.

Dr. Zucker: [0:37] I have to say, he’s really succeeded. This is a painting that is brilliantly luminous, and incredibly complex when it comes to color. He’s taking the earlier traditions of the Impressionists and he’s imposing on them the science of vision, and especially the science of color that had been developed by people like Chevreui and Rood.

[0:55] He was interested in this idea of dividing color into its components. That is, instead of trying to find the perfect purple, which is really hard to do.

Dr. Harris: [1:04] You mean when you mix it on your palette?

Dr. Zucker: [1:06] Well, that’s right. And the reason is that when you take, say, a blue and a red and you mix them together, that red is not pure red. It’s got lots of other things in it. The blue is not pure, and when you mix them together, it gets too muddy.

[1:19] So how do you get a pure purple that you might see in nature? Seurat’s solution was to take the red, take the blue, and put them next to each other so that as your eye receives that light, the light waves do the mixing themselves.

Dr. Harris: [1:32] Right. This is called optical mixture. This is really a change from [the] academic technique of finding that local color of an object, mixing it on your palette, and then applying it. If you think back to the Impressionist project, what the Impressionists sought after was to really create a sense of outdoor light.

[1:49] I think using this divisionist method, this idea of optical mixture, Seurat really did that in the “La Grande Jatte.” We have a real sense of Parisians outside on a sunny day and the real strong sense of sunlight streaming through the trees.

Dr. Zucker: [2:05] Clearly there is this bridge back to Impressionism and, in fact, the artist used the term “Neo-Impressionism” when he described the kind of painting that he was doing.

[2:13] And yet this is also so far away from Impressionism. It’s got the leisure of the Impressionist painting. It’s got the outside, but this is not a painting that was painted plein air. This is not done directly before these subjects. He did do small sketches.

Dr. Harris: [2:27] Actually dozens of drawings and oil sketches outside. That’s right.

Dr. Zucker: [2:30] But then he goes back to the studio and makes this very composed, very carefully structured painting. In fact, he said that he wanted his figures to have the kind of solemnity that was found in the sculptures of the frieze of the Parthenon.

Dr. Harris: [2:43] Right. He’s really wanting to bring a sense of timelessness and classicism to the art of Impressionism and also, as you said, a sense of thoughtfulness, of composing, of not doing something spontaneous.

Dr. Zucker: [2:56] The figures are remarkably structured within this space, and the space itself is also remarkably organized.

Dr. Harris: [3:04] There’s much more of an illusion of space than we would ever get in an Impressionist painting.

Dr. Zucker: [3:09] Well, almost going back to the classical tradition of landscape painting of Claude or of Poussin, you have alternating shadow and light, which steps us back slowly into space.

Dr. Harris: [3:19] We also have a receding diagonal line that creates an illusion of space.

Dr. Zucker: [3:24] And yet at the same time, this is a painting, because of its technique, that really draws our eye to the surface of the canvas. So there’s this really interesting tension that exists between this deep pictorial space and the very obvious, heavily worked surface.

[3:37] Let’s go up really close and take a look. I’m looking at the lower left corner of the painting, and I’m looking at the man who’s smoking a pipe, leaning on his back. Take a close look at the way that his body is defined.

[3:50] You can see some of the earlier painting. I see blues, I see reds, and I see yellows, all fairly long strokes. But then I also see, as painted over that, little points of color, of pinks and of blues as well, that Seurat actually added a bit later. You can see that especially in the shadows and the highlights at the top and the bottom, where Seurat in a sense creates a kind of volume.

Dr. Harris: [4:13] And as we’re looking at all of these different brushstrokes that are layered one on the other, I’m also noticing how the figure has really clear contours, which is something that we don’t see in Impressionism.

[4:24] We have a sense of line here, and a form defined by line and even modeling. The figure really seems three-dimensional. We know that we’re in the northwest of Paris, in a place that was frequented by the middle and upper classes for leisure.

[4:37] We know that the other side of the river was frequented more by working-class figures. And so there’s this question of what Seurat is saying about class in Paris in the 19th century.

Dr. Zucker: [4:49] And here, art historians really disagree, and it’s in part because there’s a lot of ambiguity. The ambiguity of class was an issue of his moment, of his time. Class was enormously important, and it had always been, in French society, absolutely clear. The cities had a way now of mixing classes, and this was a modern phenomenon.

Dr. Harris: [5:09] There was a way that clothing and fashion now blurred class distinctions that were more clear before. One of the things that Seurat’s doing is he’s confounding the expectations of a typical viewer in the end of the 19th century.

[5:23] So where someone would expect to see a narrative of a pretty story that was easily readable between the figures, a sense of sentiment or emotion, Seurat’s not giving us that. We have figures who don’t talk to each other, don’t interact. We don’t have a sense of a clear narrative.

[5:39] It just doesn’t do what 19th-century viewers wanted paintings to do.

Dr. Zucker: [5:43] And so this painting was a challenge, not only for that typical viewer that you spoke of but for the art community as well. When this painting was first exhibited in 1886 it caused a real stir. Artists divided into camps supporting it or detracting from it.

Dr. Harris: [5:57] It was so different than anything anyone was doing. I mean, it exploded what the most advanced art of the time was. At that point in 1884 to 1886, the most advanced art was an Impressionist technique of open brushwork, open contours, paintings painted on site, outside en plein air with a sense of spontaneity, capturing outdoor light.

[6:20] Seurat took all that, turned it on its head, and created something really serious, and monumental, and classical, and thoughtful. Everyone had to come to terms with it.

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