MILAN – The world of art today remembers the birth of George Pierre Seurat, which took place in Gravelines in 1891. One of the most revolutionary artists of the mid-nineteenth century, he was the pioneer of the pointillist movement. Among his most famous works we remember “A Sunday afternoon on the island of Grande-Jatte” and “A bathroom in Asnieres”. Beginning
Georges Pierre Seurat was born on 2 December 1859 in Paris. From an early age he appreciated painting and drawing, thanks also to the teachings of his uncle Paul, an amateur painter: thus, in 1876 he enrolled in the municipal drawing school, where he met Edmond Aman-Jean. Here Georges has the opportunity to copy the drawings of masters such as Raphael and Holbein, but also to practice on plaster casts: he therefore knows the works of Ingres, whose plasticism and pure lines he admires.Studies and training
A rather serious pupil even if not particularly talented, he devoted himself to reading theoretical texts such as the ‘Grammar of the art of drawing’ by Charles Blanc, a member of the French Academy who had highlighted the influence determined by the combination of colors, questioning the relationship between primary and complementary tones. In 1878 Seurat enrolled at the School of Fine Arts, where he attended the courses of Henri Lehmann and read the ‘Law of the simultaneous contrast of colors’, a text written by the chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul, which opened up a new world to him regarding the study of colors. According to Chevreul, in fact, the laying of a color not only allows you to color a certain part of the canvas, but also to color the surrounding part of the canvas with its complementary color. Meanwhile Georges attended the Louvre with diligence, realizing that the theories about colors he learned were actually already put into practice by Delacroix and Veronese, albeit in an empirical way, and studied the copies of the ‘Legend of the True Cross’ made by Piero della Francesca. Shortly after he was deeply impressed, together with Ernest Laurent, by an exhibition of the Impressionists staged in avenue Opera in which works by Pissarro, Monet, Degas, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte and Jean-Louis Forain are exhibited. Struck by that artistic current, he realizes that academic education is no longer sufficient for him, and therefore leaves the School of Fine Arts: he begins, in this period, to make his first canvases, after having also read Leonardo’s Treatise of painting. realizing that the theories about colors he learned were actually already put into practice by Delacroix and Veronese, albeit in an empirical way, and he studied copies of the ‘Legend of the True Cross’ made by Piero della Francesca. Shortly after he was deeply impressed, together with Ernest Laurent, by an exhibition of the Impressionists staged in avenue Opera in which works by Pissarro, Monet, Degas, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte and Jean-Louis Forain are exhibited. Struck by that artistic current, he realizes that academic education is no longer sufficient for him, and therefore leaves the School of Fine Arts: he begins, in this period, to make his first canvases, after having also read Leonardo’s Treatise of painting. realizing that the theories about colors he learned were actually already put into practice by Delacroix and Veronese, albeit in an empirical way, and he studied copies of the ‘Legend of the True Cross’ made by Piero della Francesca. Shortly after he was deeply impressed, together with Ernest Laurent, by an exhibition of the Impressionists staged in avenue Opera in which works by Pissarro, Monet, Degas, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte and Jean-Louis Forain are exhibited. Struck by that artistic current, he realizes that academic education is no longer sufficient for him, and therefore leaves the School of Fine Arts: he begins, in this period, to make his first canvases, after having also read Leonardo’s Treatise of painting. and studies copies of the ‘Legend of the True Cross’ made by Piero della Francesca. Shortly after he was deeply impressed, together with Ernest Laurent, by an exhibition of the Impressionists staged in avenue Opera in which works by Pissarro, Monet, Degas, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte and Jean-Louis Forain are exhibited. Struck by that artistic current, he realizes that academic education is no longer sufficient for him, and therefore leaves the School of Fine Arts: he begins, in this period, to make his first canvases, after having also read Leonardo’s Treatise of painting. and studies copies of the ‘Legend of the True Cross’ made by Piero della Francesca. Shortly after he was deeply impressed, together with Ernest Laurent, by an exhibition of the Impressionists staged in avenue Opera in which works by Pissarro, Monet, Degas, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte and Jean-Louis Forain are exhibited. Struck by that artistic current, he realizes that academic education is no longer sufficient for him, and therefore leaves the School of Fine Arts: he begins, in this period, to make his first canvases, after having also read Leonardo’s Treatise of painting. Degas, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte and Jean-Louis Forain. Struck by that artistic current, he realizes that academic education is no longer sufficient for him, and therefore leaves the School of Fine Arts: he begins, in this period, to make his first canvases, after having also read Leonardo’s Treatise of painting. Degas, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte and Jean-Louis Forain. Struck by that artistic current, he realizes that academic education is no longer sufficient for him, and therefore leaves the School of Fine Arts: he begins, in this period, to make his first canvases, after having also read Leonardo’s Treatise of painting.Birth of pointillism
Interested in luminous phenomena, he refuses the irregular brushstrokes of impressionist painting, and instead devotes himself to pointillism, a technique that involves applying small, juxtaposed brushstrokes of pure color on a white background. The manifesto of pointillism (or pointillisme, in the French style), is ‘A Sunday afternoon at the Ile de la Grande Jatte’ (dating back to 1886 and currently kept at the Art Institute of Chicago), in which hieratic and geometrized characters are placed at the interior of a regular space: in any case, Seurat’s first major work dates back to two years earlier: it is ‘A bathroom in Asnieres’, and is exhibited at the Salone degli Indipendenti (currently and at the National Gallery in London). Influencing individual artists such as Van Gogh and Gauguin but also the entire art movement of modern painting, Seurat is unwittingly embracing the legacy of the Impressionists and laying the foundations for Cubism, Fauvism and even Surrealism. In 1887 he sent ‘La Modella standing’, one of his studios, to the Terzo Salone degli Indipendenti, where Maximilien Luce and other exponents of divisionism exhibited: the following year, however, it was the turn of the ‘Circus Parade’ and de ‘The models’, ‘Les Poseues’. With ‘The models’, the artist wants to respond to the criticisms of those who argue that his painting technique can be used to portray landscapes and panoramas but not subjects and figures, which would be lifeless and woody. Therefore, this painting puts the human figure at the center of the scene, and engages him for several weeks. In spite of the initial difficulties, he succeeds in attempting him, by making some innovations in his way of acting: for example by outlining the perimeter of the canvas with a painted border, in such a way as to remove the white detachment that usually circumscribes it. For ‘Le Modelle’, as for subsequent works, the paintings and preparatory drawings made are few: it is as if the painter concentrated more on abstractions and less and less on reality, on chromatic relationships.Last works and death
The painter’s last works deal with moving figures in artificially illuminated environments and in almost unbridled manifestations. Even the chosen subjects testify to it: just think of the dancers of Chahut or the artists of the unfinished ‘The circus’, exhibited in March 1891 at the Independents. That will be the last public appearance of Georges Seurat, who died on the morning of March 29, 1891 after a severe sore throat which turned into a violent flu. The official cause of death is angina, although the truth has never been disclosed: Seurat probably contracted acute encephalitis, which in France had already caused several deaths that year, or diphtheria. Two weeks after George’s death, his son will also die of encephalitis.
