Word: seurat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...time he began work on La Grande Jatte, Seurat was also looking closely at Millet, whose bulky peasants figure behind many of Seurat?s magnificent drawings, and at the velvety etchings of Goya and Rembrandt. Seurat worked in soft, fatty Cont? crayon, dragging it across paper that had a rough, microscopically tufted surface. Minute threads of the paper?s whiteness remain visible beneath the crayon?s black, creating smoky gray and black textures of incredible depth...
...Seurat was also looking closely at the Impressionist works of Renoir, Monet and Pissarro. By the 1880s Impressionism was coming under attack not just from the usual academic conservatives but from a new generation who wanted art to reclaim its larger purposes, to represent moral hierarchies, eternal values, history - anything that imposed an order of the mind on the hectic gatherings of the eye. The Impressionists had no use for any of that. Their working method was to record the fleeting effects of light at a particular moment, and that moment was always...
...Seurat had a longer arc in mind. He wanted to adapt the bright staccato of Impressionist technique to forms that would be as weighty and enduring as the art he saw at the Louvre. Unlike the Impressionists, who preferred to work as rapidly and spontaneously as possible, Seurat returned to the traditional technique of making numerous preliminary sketches and oils in his studio; there are more than 60 for La Grande Jatte. Many of those are in the show, where they make clear how he conceived the island first as an empty stage - early on he produced a view...
...Seurat was steeped in the work of color theorists like Michel-Eug?ne Chevreul, who held that each color gives off a halo of its complementary color and that adjoining dots of different hue would be blended by the eye. Adjacent spots of blue and yellow, for instance, would create a joint aureole of green. From that idea Seurat developed his pointillist technique. But the Chicago show, which was guest-curated by scholar Robert L. Herbert, takes pains to remind us that Seurat was never truly bound to it. In an age that worshipped science - even socialism had been made ?scientific...
...Unfortunately, Seurat opted to experiment with a newly available pigment, zinc yellow, that turned out to be highly unstable. Over time, it turned dull brown. Within a few years, wide areas of La Grande Jatte had darkened. For this show, the Art Institute has prepared a nearly full-scale reproduction that gives an idea of how the painting looked before the colors faded. Predictably, there was a radiance in some passages that?s lost to us now, but what?s interesting is how little the picture has been diminished by the decay of mere pigment. The fascination of La Grande...