Date: 23-04-1991
Owning Institution: Grand Palais
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999      
Subject:   19th Century    

He died quite suddenly, of diphtheria, at 31. Few artists of comparable stature had briefer lives, but he somehow failed to qualify as a Tragic Figure. Irving Stone never wrote the novel; Kirk Douglas never played him in the movie. Maybe it is not that surprising. Georges Seurat was a deliberate, methodical man, whose chief pictorial innovation - the technique with which he is famously associated, known most commonly as ''pointillism'' - had decisively influenced the course of modern art by the time of his death. If few mourned his passing it was, you might say, because he had already made his point.

A number of major paintings are missing from the Seurat retrospective currently at the Grand Palais in Paris. A Bathing Place, Asnieres has remained at the National Gallery; A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the Art Institute of Chicago; Le Chahut at the Rijksmuseum Kroller- Muller, Otterlo. This matters far more in the case of Seurat than it might in the case, say, of Monet. He, unlike the Impressionists, structured his oeuvre around a sequence of major studio paintings. He made innumerable studies - most of which are at the Grand Palais - for such works; but to see the studies without the end product is to witness the rehearsal without the performance.

Looked at in isolation, Seurat's oil sketches - many done on cigar-box lids - can suggest that he was an artist in the Impressionist mould. Take those for La Grande Jatte: the sun-dappled, riverside promontory is handled in a free, broken manner; figures are rapidly noted, indicating that these works were painted en plein air. Seurat, here, might be mistaken for an improvisatory painter.

In fact, La Grande Jatte is one of the most calculated paintings in existence. The picture, now in Chi-cago, is 10 feet by seven, far bigger than any Impressionist work. The assorted Sunday afternoon strollers who people it have been placed with what seems almost like a watchmaker's precision, and there is some-thing oddly mechanical about the entire painting. Seurat's people are not the transient human presences of Impressionist painting but a strange blend of fashion-plate silhouette and tin soldier: clockwork figures in a brightly artificial Arcadia.

La Grande Jatte was also Seurat's first grand demonstration of ''pointillism'', which he preferred to call ''divisionism''. The Grand Palais show might have its lacunae, but it does allow for an assessment of this technique - countless examples of which are present - and its implications. For the rest, the spectator is left to use his own knowledge to supply the gaps and, so to speak, join the dots.

The theory behind Seurat's divisionism (see box) has a reputation for being both more difficult and more comprehensive than it actually was. His multitude of stippled dots were, he believed, capable of creating precise equivalents to the complex experience of seeing. The news from the Grand Palais is that Seurat was wrong. He was a fascinating painter, but not the definitive realist.

Divisionist painting is founded on a paradox. Seurat's technique, greatly rigorous and disciplined, is fundamentally architectural: he builds each painting brick by brick, through the painstaking addition of one tiny patch of colour to another, slowly walling up the canvas. Yet it also implies a way of seeing the world that is anything but stable. Divisionism was the first style of painting explicitly to acknowledge the modern notion of matter as something almost infinitesimally divisible and, therefore, inherently volatile. Seurat's landscapes, particularly his paintings of the Channel ports of northern France, offer a curiously unsettling spectacle to the eye. Seurat's technique creates extraordinary effects of shimmer and glare; he paints a world which, atomised, has lost rather than gained in definition.

Seurat, the great positivist of late nineteenth-century painting, ended up by painting a world that seems as mysterious, as indeterminate, as any in art. It may be revealing that the later modern painters whose work seems to approach most closely to the mood of Seurat's landscapes - De Chirico, and Magritte - should have been associated with the Surrealist movement. Seurat's art was never quite as straightforwardly empirical as the original propaganda of divisionism asserted.

His magnificent drawings also contradict the myth of Seurat as artist-scientist. When he was 22, Seurat invented a new method of drawing - passing Conte crayon, with varying degrees of pressure, over a highly textured paper - which was a graphic prefiguration of his divisionist painting style. The surface of a Seurat drawing is broken into a multitude of discrete marks thanks to the regular, minuscule interruptions of every gesture effected by the tiny hooked tufts of the paper used. The result is a constellation of tiny, needlepoint blacks and greys, which Seurat used to model form through light and shade with a subtlety that still seems barely credible.

Many of the figures in Seurat's drawings seem on the point of disappearance into the space that sur-rounds them. He drew his mother, emerging from thick, velvety darkness, as a spectre. These images speak of transformation and instability; he frequently envisages thin air as a kind of ether, crackling with mysterious static. Seurat's drawings picture a dim, phantasmal alternative to the bleached-out world of dissolved form you find in the paintings.

Seurat died young, but not before his art went into crisis. The crisis, which might be said to begin as early as 1887, with The Sideshow, and which extends to his last year, when he painted The Circus, manifests itself stylistically. In these works, oddly, Seurat goes against his greatest gift. He becomes an apostate from his own virtuosity.

Seurat abandons the dense, shimmering grids of his earlier divisionism for surfaces marked by an alto-gether heavier touch. The dots become thicker and eventually metamorphose into shapes more like hy-phens. This is interesting because it signals an absolute reversal of priorities: forms are no longer modelled, but - because Seurat uses his new and more linear vocabulary to give shapes hard edges - contained. The chromatic complexity of his earlier work disappears; he becomes, in effect - and this is clearest in The Circus - a kind of illustrator.

There are two possible explanations for this. Perhaps Seurat recognised that divisionism, which had led him to create images of such mystery and instability, conflicted with his own positivist ambitions for clarity. Perhaps this parody of his earlier manner was the only way he could get a sense of solidity, of stability, back into his art. If so, his later paintings mark a sad decline.
 Or perhaps Seurat was striking out for something altogether new. Seurat's later paintings - and this is foreshadowed in La Grande Jatte - envisage an odd, mechanical world, peopled by robots: the cast of Le Chahut, present in Paris only in sketch form, are a bunch of high-kicking automata who seem as mechani-cally cheerful as a team of synchronised swimmers; the musicians in The Sideshow are strange, bowler- hatted clones of one another; the performers in The Circus look like wind- up toys. Seurat, here, may just predict the machine age painting of Leger and the automated nightmare of Chaplin's The Great Dictator. This would give his late style a certain logic. A banal world, painted banally: Seurat turns himself into an automa-ton, blandly outlining shapes and simply filling them in, a dot-and-dash-producing apparatus.

Seurat's later paintings might even mark the first attempt by an artist to reproduce, by hand, the effects of mass reproduction. These pictures bear a certain resemblance to the cheap colour reproductions with which printers first began to experiment in the 1880s. Seurat as the father of Lichtenstein, pioneer of Ben Day dot art? Seurat as the father of Warhol, the first artist-as machine? Maybe Pop Art started, with Seurat, in the 1880s - way back, you might say, in the year dot.

Point to point
By 1886, the date of Seurat's The Hospice and Lighthouse at Honfleur, the dot of paint, applied to the canvas in a multitude of separate touches like the tesserae in a mosaic, had become Seurat's signature. Literally, in this painting of the Channel coast landscape that was so much to Seurat's taste: the artist has spelt out his name, bottom left, in tiny lentils of alternating colour, light blue and orange.

Seurat derived his ideas about colour from a number of nineteenth-century aesthetic theorists. Eugene Chevreul, author of The Law of Simultaneous Colour Contrast, was the most influential of these. According to Chevreul, colour as perceived is always mixed. A spot of pure colour always gives the retinal impression that it is haloed by its complementary: orange by blue, purple with yellow, and so on. Furthermore, the colour of any object is altered by the reflected colours of those objects adjacent to it in the field of vision. The human experience of colour, therefore, is not of single, determinate, hues, but of a complex, shifting process of interaction; colour, as seen, is always composed of a virtually infinite admixture of reflections and complementaries.

Seurat's divisionist technique was intended to do justice to the complexities of colour- perception. Seurat's dots, so the theory went, enabled him to present compounds of colour in a more precise and ana-lytical way than any previous painter. Viewed at the correct distance, his cunning orchestrations of colour would resolve into the most deceptive, most truly mimetic paintings in the history of art. Seurat was the heir to the tradition of positivist thinking that had contributed, too, to the Impressionists' creed of fidelity to visual experience (he might have argued that he was simply better informed than they). When the Eiffel Tower was erected for the World's Fair of 1889, Seurat was one of the first artists to paint it, dashing off the small oil that can be seen near the end of the Grand Palais show. He thought of his works as Eiffel Towers of art: monuments, in effect, to the progress of empirical thought.