Word: seurat
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...campaign hoopla, though, was partly upstaged by more dramatic doings 2,000 miles away in Lebanon. There, Michel Seurat, 39, a French Middle East researcher who was kidnaped in Beirut last May by the shadowy pro-Iranian Shi'ite-dominated terrorist organization Islamic Jihad, purportedly had been executed as a French spy. The terrorists released three black-and-white photographs that showed a bare-chested Seurat with unfocused, half-closed eyes, a shrouded figure in a closed coffin. Although his body has not yet been found, there appeared to be little hope that he was still alive...
From there, the options widen. If culture is your thing, pop across the street from Millennium Park to the Art Institute of Chicago, where you can see some of the world's most famous paintings, including Grant Wood's American Gothic and Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. If it's shopping you crave, check out a classic downtown department store, Carson Pirie Scott or Marshall Field, where if nothing else, you can pick up a box of famous Frango mints...
...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...