Word: seurat
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Georges Seurat reacted from such peculiarities by being the most conservative of sons. He went to the reactionary Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he drew and painted in such traditional manners as those of Poussin, Ingres, etc. To the end of his short life, solemn, bearded Georges lived with utter circumspection, detested eccentricity of dress (the black suit and top hat best suited him) and was variously described by friends as resembling the St. George of Donatello, a young business executive, and a notary with the profile of an Assyrian king...
...these fields, he devised what became known as "divisionism." This meant painting in countless little strokes of pure colors rather than mixing colors on the palette. (The better known term "pointillism" more clearly indicates the application of color by myriads of points.) Thus, in the later paintings of Seurat and his followers-dubbed the "neo-impressionists"-the colors are not blended on the canvas but, by illusion, in the retina of the observer...
...exquisite pains in pure color dabbing, Seurat was at first subjected to insulting remarks concerning "little green chemists who pile up tiny dots." But art criticism gradually caught up with Seurat (U.S. reviewers of an 1886 New York show were among the first to get the point), and today it is generally recognized that Seurat's method made possible a unique and exciting luminosity...
...also generally recognized that Seurat's genius was only in small part attributable to his method, to the science of optics or of anything else. He was a "divisionist," to be sure, but he was first & foremost a great painter-a master of complex composition (the receding planes in La Grande Jatte are extraordinary) and an inspired colorist. He produced only seven large, major canvases, but his hundreds of drawings and oil sketches are rarities in themselves, and his calm vacation seascapes painted at Honfleur and Grandcamp are among the finest chapters in the painted literature of the ocean...
...when he was only 31, Georges Seurat died of septic quinsy. It was only then that his closest friends in the Paris studios learned that this orderly gentleman, who had dined every day with his mother, had taken one of his models as a mistress and by her had a son (who died soon after his father, stricken by the same disease). One of Seurat's finest paintings, Jeune femme se poudrant, is of this woman, Madeleine Knobloch...