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Seurat and the
Making of La Grande Jatte

June 19 - September 19, 2004

The Art Institute of Chicago
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Chicago, IL 60603
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Seurat and the Making of "La Grande Jatte", the Art Institute's major exhibition of the summer, unfolds through a series of compelling visual conversations. One painting takes up a theme or subject; another answers it; and at the center of the exhibit, the amazing, Byzantine Aprés Midi Sur La Grande Jatte, its prismatic simplicity and contre jour lighting luring viewers into another century, presides over this meaningful foray into the stylistic, cultural and historical contexts of its own genesis.

At the beginning of the exhibit one finds Seurat's drawings and lithographs accompanied by a sampling of prints from Goya to Daumier. Seurat's figures emerge from shading which travels from black to white and vice versa, usually conté crayon, with hazy scenes taking shape in the reconfigured gradations. The dialogue between Seurat and these printmakers elucidates more than technique. Lithography was still new, and printmaking was a part of cultural and political discourse at the time. The rebuilding of Paris after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1871, issues of labor, the mixing of the classes in the urban environment and the continuing reshaping of the Republic were among the issues of the day. The advances of science, particularly with respect to color theory and 'optical impressions', as well as the technological changes that the industrial revolution brought to everyday life in the city, were other topics that were close at hand; and as such form the background of these several artists, usually social critics, who inspired Seurat's depictions of urban life and character.

The next room recasts another timely dialogue, here concerning the representation of work and the landscape. Pissarro captures the figure of a peasant girl asleep in the grass, while Seurat contemplates agricultural workers, stone breakers and rivermen in small canvases and oil studies. Among these images of work -- some subtle, such as Field of Alfalfa, Saint-Denis (oil on canvas:1884/95) -- are the landscapes of leisure. Renoir's seascapes, Monet's cliffs, meadows, and trees along the riverbank at the actual La Grande Jatte accompany Seurat's own views of the French country and seaside. In Seurat's 1885 landscape from the Brittany coast, Le Bec du Hoc (oil on canvas: 26 x 32 in.: 1885, reworked 1888/89), a graceful and austere landform stands out against the sea. Seurat's painting echoes Monet's 1882 Cliff Walk at Pourville (oil on canvas) and its custom-house. Interestingly, Seurat does away with the human elements, the house and the woman with an orange parasol which balance Monet's images. We begin to understand the play of influences and innovations as we trace the development of pointillism out of the earlier generations' use of broken color to evoke light and form, along with the subtle shifts in subject which identify neo-impressionism.

Just as the first two rooms of the exhibit reveal the network of visual and philosophical connections between Seurat, his forbears and his contemporaries, the middle rooms give a sense of the complexity of Seurat's project. The studies reveal his dedication to empirical observation and the development of his visual language. In the same way that the Impressionists and plein air painters before him did, Seurat worked directly from nature; but his large paintings La Grande Jatte and Bathing Place, Asnières (oil on canvas, 79 x 118-1/2 in., 1883-84 (retouched 1887); shown in reproduction in this exhibition) were completed in the studio from studies. La Grand Jatte, its famous dots of color evoking needlework (the 'point' of 'pointillism' means 'stitch', in French), begins as a landscape, but ends up resembling a grand hanging or a new kind of history painting.

Each study is generally about 11x6 inches. The studies for Bathing Place, Asnières are variations on the gentle diagonal recession into space which characterizes both Bathing Place, Asnières and La Grande Jatte. In Bathing Place, Asnières, factories are visible at the vanishing point on the river and smoke trails into the sky. Six male figures rest or bathe, all of them looking toward the river. Asnières is a working class suburb of Pairs and the stoop-shouldered, pensive boys seem to move slowly through the water.

The central room contains over thirty studies from La Grand Jatte arranged on dividers which lead to the painting itself. The tiny works are vibrant and dynamic evidence of Seurat's systematic dedication to the larger work. Scene after scene unfolds on the banks of the river; each revealing a slightly new composition while a shifting galaxy of people stroll through each space. In addition to the oil sketches there are conte crayon drawings, particularly of figures -- promeneuses, with bustles and without, appear several times, and Seurat executes several pages of studies before he is ready to paint the monkey.

La Grand Jatte attracts us because we see ourselves in it. Despite the bustles and top hats, that reflection is true. Modernity, the post-industrial-revolution state of affairs in which liberal democracies and capitalist economies structure our lives, was under construction in the late 1880s. We still inhabit those structures -- city parks, weekends, fashion, seeing and be seen -- even as modernity wanes. Seurat exhibited the painting in the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. After that what he called Scientific Impressionism and Félix Fénéon dubbed Neo-Impressionism, a much less cohesive visual style, became ascendent in France. Neo-Impressionism began to register the problems of modernity, what has been famously called "the shock of the new", in a way that Impressionism did not. In La Grand Jatte the isolation of the figures may suggest anomie, then again, may represent a stately utopian decorum -- "an idyllic backdrop for harmonious integration of the urban multitude," as art historian Albert Boime describes it. These paradoxical divergences give La Grande Jatte its power. The composition might recall Puvis de Chauvannes or Piero della Francesca, but these aristocratic (or primitive, as many have characterized the hieratic style) idylls cannot be adopted of a piece to the industrial suburb of Asnières which surrounds the island of La Grande Jatte where the variously middle-class or working-class (depending on which art historian you believe) people promenade on their day of rest.

Seurat was interested in the ideas of the Literary Naturalists -- he was in conversation with writers of the time -- who sought to reveal not the details of everyday life associated with realism, but the larger patterns of life in society that are determined by social structures. Naturalist writers, like Zola or Dreiser, created characters whose fates were determined by social forces such as environment and the rationalized structures of work. Seurat's visual analog to Literary Naturalism lies in his technique: the uniformity of Seurat's brushstrokes, prefiguring the industrial patterns of the dot screen and color separations, his "scientific impressionism" intensifying the distant, mannered postures and the anonymity of his figures who are always looking away.

Despite his obsession with craft Seurat used an unstable yellow, and all of the colors in La Grande Jatte changed rather quickly, even within his own lifetime. The exhibition includes a full-size digital re-creation of the original appearance. Videos on color theory and conservation also flank the galleries, including a short one on Michel-Eugène Chevreul, who gave us the terms complementary and simultaneous contrast, both part of the crucial concept of relativity in color. The exhibit winds up with two more rooms full of dazzling and scrappy paintings of the period -- Signacs, Pissarros and more Seurats, although his post-1886 work is left out, in order to keep the focus of the exhibit on La Grande Jatte, not on the painter himself.

Museums change their function and focus over time; art collections, of course, have only become public since the French Revolution. Blockbuster exhibitions have kept paintings in circulation, and retrospectives centering on the work of an individual artist have generally made the most notable blockbusters, feeding as they do into the narratives of individual struggle and success (or Romantic failure) which characterize our culture. Seurat and the Making of "La Grande Jatte" is one of the most successfully didactic exhibits the Art Institute has presented. The exhibit parallels the manner in which art-historical inquiry has shifted away from its traditional task of providing provenance and upkeep for collections, toward a larger critical and theoretical process which considers not only individual works or artists, but the historical and cultural moments in which they flourish and which they often define. The curators of Seurat and the Making of "La Grande Jatte" have arranged a heterogeneous group of works with a view to exposing the aesthetic, technical and cultural contexts from which the marvelous painting emerges. No one can quite grasp it; it continues to delight, confront and elude. We call it iconic. "Art is harmony" said Seurat, "Harmony is the analogy of opposites."

--Janina A. Ciezadlo

Janina A. Ciezadlo is a Chicago painter, printmaker, photographer and freelance writer. Her art writing has appeared in the Chicago Reader and in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, among other publications. She is a member of the Chicago Area Critics Association and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Illinois/Chicago.