Word: seurat
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...late great Georges Seurat is known in the U.S. very largely as the painter of one picture-his big Sunday afternoon scene showing some 40 figures taking their ease on the banks of the Seine, La Grande Jatte. In achieving this sun-struck masterpiece, which one critic declared was filled with "total aerial vibration," Seurat made innumerable sketches, spent two whole years (1884-86). Last week the life of the painter had its first full and fascinating exposition in English, at the hands of a 31-year-old German-born and Sorbonne-trained critic, John Rewald (Georges Seurat; Wittenborn...
Born in 1859 in Paris, Seurat was the son of a one-armed bailiff who was a personality in his own right. Seurat père lived away from home wrapped in "strange religious practices," but consented to dine at his wife's table each Tuesday. On these occasions he screwed knives and forks into the stump of his artificial arm and carved "with speed and even transport, muttons, filets, small game and fowl...
...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...
Outside the city, Painters Manet and Degas went horse racing at Longchamp, while Seurat settled himself down to immortalize La Grande Jatte with shimmering pictures of ladies taking the afternoon sun under the island's trees. In the town of St. Cloud, whose park reveals the most magnificent panorama of Paris, Paris-born Alfred Sisley painted one of his best, The Bridge at St. Cloud. In the tranquil village of Giverny, Claude Monet contemplated the ice and snow on the winter stream, and in summer the riot of purple irises and rare water lilies in his garden...
...towns were Vogue subscribers; stores fought to listed as outlets for goods advertised in Vogue, and thus the Nast judgments set patterns far beyond Vogue's own cirulation of a few hundred thousand. To his own women-readers Nast brought the excitement of modern art, from Seurat to Modigliani and to Covarrubias, the breath-taking photography of Steichen, Beaton, Lohse, Baron Hoyningen-Huene; and the vivid drama of fashion-drawings by Carl Ericsson, Sigrid Grafstrom, Count René Bouët-Willaumez and many others, which in turn influenced all U.S. advertising art. Vogue became a feminine bible...