Georges Seurat:

Neo-French Impressionist

Georges Seurat (1859 - 1891)

Georges Pierre Seurat was born Dec. 2, 1859 to a wealthy family in Paris, France. He brought to the Impressionist movement a fresh approach of a painstaking discipline that would be labeled "Neo-Impressionism".

Georges father was an official and a native of Champagne while his mother was a Parisian. He began studying art under the tutorship of sculptor Justin Lequien and attended Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the period between 1878 and 1879. In 1880 he spent a year of service at Brest Military Academy. He returned to Paris at this point and after sharing a small studio with friends moved to a studio of his own where he dedicated himself to the art of black and white drawing.

By 1886, the same year that the last Impressionist exhibition was held, a considerable number of artists became dissatisfied with the goals and methods of Impressionism. The last show was dominated by the work of younger artists such as Georges Seurat. His entry at the exhibition, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island LaGrande Jatte", stated publicly an entirely new technique that revealed a painstaking discipline. This work took him 2 years to complete.

Seurat considered Impressionism as inadequate due to the fact that it concentrated on recording fleeting visual experiences and failed in its attempt to communicate a sense of permanent lasting form. His idea of meticulous pictorial construction was his driving force. Seurat had a sharp scientific mind that carefully studied the color theories of the past but was very much informed about contemporary physics and optics. He constantly strove for harmony and avoided the suggestion of conflict or struggle in his compositions.

Seurat named his new technique divisionism (pointillism), mainly because he divided and separated the colors into component parts which resulted in creating canvases of structural constancy so much so that the forms seemed nearly geometric. One area that he was in agreement with Impressionism was drawing his inspiration from contemporary life that surrounded him. He chose his locations with great care and searched for settings that allowed him to make use of a certain type of straight line or lines and a rectilinear path that provided the organization that he favored. This resulted in a firm sense of visible contour revealing the painter's intent on imposing order.

The Paris Salon rejected Seurat's work causing him to turn away from them and decide to ally himself with the independent Paris artists. His first major painting was a huge canvas completed in 1884, entitled Bathers at Asnieres. The same year he met and befriended fellow artist Paul Signac and shared with him his new idea of pointillism and as a result Signac began painting in the same style.

Seurat's concept of harmony led him to take into consideration the importance of the frame. The Impressionists did not want to call attention to the edge of the canvas. In contrast, he developed a way of painting an intervening band or frame composed of tones that oppose those in the painting itself, such as in "Gray weather, Grande Jatte", painted 1888.

Georges Seurat lived secretly with a young model, Madeleine Knobloch, whom he portrayed in "Jeune femme se poudrant". She gave birth to his son in February of 1890 and they named him Pierre Georges. Two days before Seurat's death he introduced his young family to his parents. Georges Seurat was only thirty two years of age when he passed away. The cause of his death is uncertain, but most believe that it was from diphtheria, as his young son died 2 weeks later from the same disease.

Still, in his very brief career he gained the respect of countless contemporary artists such as Camille Pissarro. Pissarro was the first to recognize the significance of Seurat's systematized Neoimpressionism and he heralded it to other artists and dealers. His final impressive work was The Circus, and was left unfinished at the time of his death.

In the final analysis, his uniform execution and tranquil forms suggest that Georges Seurat had a much greater similarity to the masters of the mathematically planned compositions, much like that of the early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, than he did with contemporaries like Monet.

— by Gwen Howlett  |  September 1, 2010

Print   |  

back to top