"Sunday on the Island of Grande Jatte" is one of the most famous paintings by the great French artist Georges-Pierre Seurat. Georges Seurat (1859-1891) - a famous painter, a prominent representative of post-impressionism, one of the founders of neo-impressionism.
Georges Seurat. Sunday afternoon on the island of Grande Jatte
Also, Georges Seurat became famous due to the fact that he created a method of painting, which is known as pointillism - drawing with dots. The painting Sunday afternoon on the island of Grand Jatte, also known as Sunday afternoon on the island of Grand Jatte, is a prime example of pointillism, which was invented by Georges Seurat. This work is not only an excellent example, but is considered one of the best paintings of this direction of post-impressionism. The art of pointillism here represents the true perfection of beauty and splendor. Perhaps it is thanks to this canvas that pointillism has taken a strong position in world art and is still used by artists on all continents.
The painting "Sunday on the Island of Grande Jatte" was painted in 1886, oil on canvas. 207 × 308 cm. Currently at the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting is a sunny summer landscape with people enjoying nature. The picture looks very harmonious, sustained, calm, rich. Following his technique, Georges Seurat does not mix paints, but applies them in dots in a certain order.
The picture caused a mixed opinion of viewers and critics of art, however, it received its place in the history of art, the history of post-impressionism, and became one of the most striking examples of the beauty of the pointillism style.
Georges-Pierre Seurat(December 2, 1859, Paris - March 29, 1891, Paris) - French post-impressionist painter, founder of neo-impressionism, creator of the original method of painting called divisionism, or pointillism.
Student's work
Pelikan paint set. K12" - paintings
With the release of Pelikan's Original K12 Set, we'd like to share with you some ideas on how to use the Pelikan paint set in a drawing class. The focus is on the work of the artist Georges Seurat.
Materials for this lesson:
A set of paints "K12", Pelikan brushes of various sizes and types of bristles, a sketchbook and cotton swabs.
Sunday afternoon on the island of Grande Jatte, 1884-1886
Tutorial "Sunday on the Island of Grande Jatte"
Drawing a picture from dots can be a difficult task, but only at first glance. The French artist Georges Seurat (1859-1891) managed to create a completely new method of painting - "pointillism". Examination of individual points in a picture made in this technique will lead nowhere. But try to look at the whole picture as a whole, and you can see: the picture is as if woven from dots.
If you look at the picture from a distance, you will see that the dots merge and form colorful objects and three-dimensional images. On the one hand, this method was used in ancient times when creating mosaics, and on the other hand, this principle underlies modern printing methods.
Here's how it works:
- Download the Sunday afternoon on Grande Jatte Island Resource Kit.
- Print Image Template:
- Antique mosaic, floor pattern
- frog eye
- Newspaper clipping (Color breakpoints)
These pictures suggest certain reflections: the floor is made of solid tiles, the ancient era; multiply enlarged computer image of color pixels; color control dots on a four-color newspaper.- Invite students to discuss the question: “What do all these paintings have in common?” You may find it helpful to ask questions such as the following during the discussion:
- What material is used? For example, stone, paper or fabric?
- Or is it paint?
- The main motives of the composition?
- In what technique are the drawings made?
- When children understand that images on surfaces, patterns or objects are made up of small individual dots, then invite them to think about creating their own paintings, and the tools and methods necessary for this.
- Discuss the action plan with students. Start with simple motifs, gradually moving to more complex ones when the dots are applied in several layers.
- Each student draws his own picture with dots.
- Discussing the pros and cons of this drawing technique can enliven the lesson. At the same time, it is worth mentioning aspects of modern printing technology (see illustrations on downloaded templates). The template can be printed on a transparent slide and shown to the whole class. In conclusion, it is necessary to mention once again the artist Seurat and his progressive method of drawing.
Advice:
It is extremely important to clearly explain everything! So, when the most interesting option and suitable materials are chosen, feel free to get to work.Separate combination options
Let's start by drawing dots on the paper with a brush. It is understood that at this stage, students will use brushes of different thicknesses, each time getting a different result. You can experiment and make points using corks or similar round objects.
Technique for applying dots with cotton swabs (confetti effect)
For a change, instead of a brush, you can use cotton swabs. Get your paint ready for dot painting. To do this, using a regular brush, add a few drops of water to the paint mold. Stir the paint with a brush until bubbles appear. Then fill the palette on the lid of the kit with the diluted paint. Feel free to put dots on paper, periodically dipping a cotton swab into the resulting paint.
Dots applied with a cotton swab. (Examples of drawing points).Color the dots
You can also start by coloring various kinds of dots. To do this, use our templates. The house in the picture looks quite recognizable. It remains for students to simply color the remaining points, for example with colored markers.
The template from the download kit is "House of Dots".Schematic representation of figures
To begin with, students draw simple geometric shapes on paper with a thin pencil. Alternatively, download and print templates ready to use in class.
You can download templates with simple shapes and get started right away.Now dilute an additional amount of paint in the palette (see the confetti technique). To get started, try experimenting with the primary colors: yellow, purplish red, and cyan.
Then dip a Q-tip in a pre-prepared paint, such as purple-red, and paint the chosen shape. Now paint the space around the shape with another primary color, like blue.
Finally, cover the entire page with a third primary color, in our case yellow.
First paint the shape with purple-red dots, then blue the area around it, and at the end cover the entire drawing with yellow dots.
In the download kit you will find detailed instructions for the above technique.Encourage your students to experiment with different color combinations. The resulting color variety can surprise.
Various color combinations: yellow and purplish red, purplish red and blue.
And here is a space uniformly filled with yellow, purple-red and blue dots. You will get an equally interesting effect if you use secondary colors: orange, purple and green.Working with confetti
An interesting way to apply dots is to use real confetti. Sprinkle confetti onto a large piece of paper. Have each student “draw” a simple shape, such as a square or a house, using confetti on cardboard. As always, you can use our templates. For example, a picture of a house. Thanks to the bold contour lines, students will easily fill the figure with a scattering of confetti.
Download the template "House" to work with confetti.Additional tip:
Dot shape
The drawing will turn out more interesting and natural if you apply dots with a brush. In this case, the dots come out irregularly shaped, unlike equally round dots on a printed or printed pattern.color effect
The result of a bitmap image largely depends on the selected color and its distribution density. Those. the more dots of one particular color, the more distinct shade of this particular color will be acquired by other colors.Working with the Color Wheel
Use the Pelikan Color Wheel to get a specific color shade. It will help you choose the colors to mix with the main ones.Complementary contrasts
Experiment with different color effects and combinations. To create complementary contrasts, we need contrasting colors. To do this, alternately apply both contrasting colors. They are easy to find on the "Color Kug".Various motives
You can paint with dots not only simple motifs, like a house or a heart, but also more complex ones. Pelikan's Pedagogical Handbook offers another template for you to download, the Mill. - Invite students to discuss the question: “What do all these paintings have in common?” You may find it helpful to ask questions such as the following during the discussion:
Picture: "Sunday on the island of Grand Jatte".
Georges-Pierre Seurat; (French Georges Seurat, December 2, 1859, Paris - March 29, 1891, ibid) - French post-impressionist painter, founder of the 19th century French school of neo-impressionism, whose technique of conveying the play of light using tiny strokes of contrasting color became known as pointillism or divisionism, as the artist himself called it.
With this technique, Seurat created compositions with tiny, stand-alone strokes of pure color that are too small to stand out at a glance, but make his paintings into one delightful piece of art.
Georges Seurat was born on December 2, 1859 in Paris into a wealthy family. His father, Antoine-Chrisostome Seurat, was a lawyer and a native of Champagne; mother, Ernestine Febvre, was a Parisian. Attended the School of Fine Arts. Then he served in the army in Brest. In 1880 he returned to Paris. In search of his own style in art, he invented the so-called pointillism - an artistic technique for conveying shades and colors using individual color points. The technique is used in the calculation of the optical effect of merging small details when looking at an image at a distance. Working from nature, Seurat liked to write on small boards. The hard surface of the wood, not yielding to the pressure of the brush, in contrast to the vibrating stretched plane of the canvas, emphasized the direction of each stroke, which occupies a clearly defined place in the colorful compositional structure of the study. Seurat turned to the method of work discarded by the Impressionists: on the basis of sketches and sketches written in the open air, to create a large-format painting in the studio.
Georges Seurat first studied art with Justin Lequin, a sculptor. After returning to Paris, he worked in the studio with two friends of his student period, and then set up his own workshop. Among artists, he was most interested in Delacroix, Corot, Couture, he was struck by the "intuition of Monet and Pissarro." Seurat gravitated toward the strictly scientific method of divisionism (the theory of decomposition of colors). The operation of a raster display is based on the electronic analogy of this method. Over the next two years, he mastered the art of black and white drawing. Seurat read a lot, keenly interested in scientific discoveries in the field of optics and color and the latest aesthetic systems. According to his friends, his reference book was the "Grammar of the Art of Drawing" "Grammaire des arts du dessin" (1867) by Charles Blanc. According to Blanc, the artist must "acquaint the viewer with the natural beauty of things, revealing their inner meaning, their pure essence."
In 1883, Seurat created his first outstanding work - a huge pictorial canvas "Bathers in Asnieres". The painting presented to the jury of the Salon was rejected. Seurat showed it at the first exhibition of the Group of Independent Artists in 1884 at the Tuileries Pavilion. Here he met Signac, who later spoke of the painting in the following way: “This painting was painted in large flat strokes, one on top of the other and taken from a palette composed, like Delacroix’s, of pure and earthy colors. Ochers and earths darkened the color, and the picture seemed less bright than the paintings of the Impressionists, painted with the colors of the spectrum. But the observance of contrast, the systematic separation of elements - light, shadow, local color - the correct ratio and balance gave harmony to this canvas.
After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat preferred individual creativity and alliances with the independent artists of Paris. In 1884, he and other artists (including Maximilien Luce) formed the Societe des Artistes Indépendants creative society. There he met the artist Paul Signac, who would later also use the pointillism method. In the summer of 1884, Seurat began work on his most famous work, Sunday afternoon on the island of Grande Jatte. The painting was completed two years later.
“Sunday on the Island of Grand Jatte” is a famous painting of huge size (2; 3 m) by the French artist Georges Seurat, which is a vivid example of pointillism - a direction in painting, one of the founders of which was Seurat. It is considered one of the most remarkable paintings of the 19th century of the post-impressionist period. The painting is part of the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
"Mosaic of boredom" - this is how the philosopher Ernst Bloch said about Seurat's canvas. Bloch saw on the canvas only "the poverty of Sunday" and "the landscape of depicted suicide."
The publicist Felix Feneon, on the contrary, considered the canvas cheerful and cheerful and spoke of it like this: “a motley Sunday crowd ... enjoying nature in the height of summer.”
When the painting was exhibited in 1886 at the 8th Impressionist Exhibition, different literary groups perceived it in completely different ways: the realists wrote about it as a Sunday party of the Parisian people, and the symbolists in the frozen silhouettes of the figures heard echoes of the processions of the times of the pharaohs and even panathenaic processions . All this aroused the ridicule of the artist, who only wanted to write "a cheerful and bright composition with a balance of horizontals and verticals, dominants of warm colors and light tones with a luminous white spot in the center."
Seurat made many drawings for her and several landscapes of the Seine. Some critics who have written about Seurat suggest that "The Bath" and then written "Grand Jatte" are paired paintings, the first of which depicts the working class, and the second - the bourgeoisie. Another opinion was held by the English aesthetician and art historian Roger Fry, who discovered the art of the Post-Impressionists to the English public. Fry highly appreciated the Neo-Impressionists. In "Bathing", in his opinion, Seurat's main merit was that he digressed from both the ordinary and the poetic view of things and moved into the area of "pure and almost abstract harmony." But not all impressionists accepted the neo-impressionist work of Seurat. So Degas, in response to the words of Camille Pissarro, who was also carried away by pointillism, that “Grand Jatte” is a very interesting picture, caustically remarked: “I would notice it, but it’s very big,” hinting at the optical properties of pointillism, from which Up close, the painting appears to be a mess of colors. A characteristic feature of Seurat's style was his unique approach to the depiction of figures. Hostile critics certainly drew attention to this element of Seurat's paintings, calling his characters "cardboard dolls" or "lifeless caricatures." Seurat went to simplify the form, of course, quite consciously. The surviving sketches show that he, when required, was able to paint completely “living” people. But the artist sought to achieve the effect of timelessness and deliberately stylized the figures in the spirit of flat ancient Greek frescoes or Egyptian hieroglyphs. Once he wrote to a friend: "I want to reduce the figures of modern people to their essence, make them move in the same way as in the frescoes of Phidias, and arrange them on the canvas in chromatic harmony."
At a certain period, Seurat lives with the model Madeleine Nobloch, whom he depicts in The Powdering Woman (1888-1889). This "inconceivable woman in the grotesque desabiles of the 80s" (Roger Fry) is presented in terms of the same detachment and contemplation as the characters in his other paintings. The influence of "Japanism" common in those years probably affected the image of Madeleine's toilet.
As well as "Parade" and "Cancan", the last, unfinished painting by Seurat - "Circus" (1890-1891) also belongs to the world of spectacles and performances in its plot. But if in the first two the point of view from the hall to the stage is given, then in the last acrobats and the audience are shown through the eyes of the one who performs in the arena - the clown, who is depicted from the back in the foreground of the picture.
Seurat died in Paris on March 29, 1891. Seurat's cause of death is uncertain and has been attributed to a form of meningitis, pneumonia, infective endocarditis, and/or (most likely) diphtheria. His son died two weeks later from the same illness. Georges-Pierre Seurat was buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery.
Georges-Pierre Seurat Sunday afternoon on the island of Grand Jatte, 1884-1886 Un dimanche après-midi à l "Île de la Grande Jatte Oil on canvas. 207 × 308 cm Art Institute, Chicago
Analysis of the painting "Sunday afternoon on the island of Grand Jatte"
The artist worked on this work of art for exactly two years, coming to Grand Jatte more than once and spending more than one morning on the shore, turning his back on the Courbevoie bridge, he painted a Sunday crowd of people walking in the shade of trees. In order to better remember the terrain, poses and location of the characters, to clarify the choice of details, the master made a lot of sketches in order to later choose more successful elements for his canvas. He analyzed everything: the dosage of local tones and light, the colors and effects that were obtained when exposed to them. And he sketched all those around him, those that attracted his attention and those whose figures were inanimate.
As a result of the work, the painting gets the name "Sunday afternoon on the island of Grand Jatte" and in addition to the landscape, where there are trees and a river, the artist manages to place more than thirty characters. Among them are a standing lady with an umbrella, and a man in military uniform, and a woman with a fishing rod, and many children who frolic, and a monkey on a leash, and even a dog that sniffs the grass with its tail up. Already working in the studio, the master compares the croquetons, and decides which characters will be present on the canvas, and which will need to be discarded or drawn in the background. Seurat takes the choice seriously and includes images in the composition only after they are perfectly combined.
The artist begins to work with a landscape without walking people, only with a river, with trees, with sunny and shady areas, with two ships and a sailboat. And only then proceeds to the characters of this picture. He embodies them in turn and gives them a share of irony, emphasizing funny features with cold slyness. Only Seurat of all the Impressionists is not afraid to convey to the canvas observations in which humor shines through (which is only worth an unexpected creature like a monkey, which is held on a leash by a fashionably dressed lady).
In the painting, we see how Seurat arranges the figures using and adhering to lines of composition, geometrical precision with precise horizontals, verticals and diagonals. The picture is visually divided vertically by a woman who holds the girl by the hand and acts as the central figure here. The composition is balanced by two groups of people on the right and left: on the one hand, three people are drawn in their poses, on the other, a standing couple.
A picture drawn by him with a technique he invented, which is called pointillist, in simple words dotted. Thanks to what the work came out in such an unusual form. When creating a painting, the artist uses a special palette of colors: indigo blue, titanium white, ultramarine, raw umber, yellow ocher and cadmium, burnt sienna, Winsor yellow and red, and black paint.
Looking at the picture in detail, you can see the so-called geometric transformation. The entire coast of the "Grand Jatte" and the space are inhabited not by personalities and animated characters, but by types that differ from each other only in their behavior and clothing. A figure that is devoid of any individual features and traits catches the eye. A hat with ribbons makes us understand that this is a nurse, and her image, drawn from the back, is reduced to a gray geometric figure topped with a red circle on her head and a dissected red stripe.
A woman with a fishing rod also draws attention, which stands out very sharply against the background of blue water, thanks to an orange dress. Here the artist presents us with the double meaning of the verb "perher", which means "sin" and "catch" in French. That is why we see the image of a prostitute who allegedly “catches” men.
If we look at the girl with her hair flying in the wind, who is galloping, as well as the dog in the foreground, we see frozen figures. Their movements do not add a bit of dynamics to the composition, and the butterflies that I fly look like they are pinned to the canvas.
In the foreground of the picture, we can see a fashionable couple, here there is a man who smokes a cigar, and a modern woman holds him by the arm, whose silhouette is curved by the lush protrusions of the bustle. And again, we notice how Seurat conveys to us the routine and everyday life, drawing a leash with a monkey in his hand. It is she who acts as an obvious symbol, because at that time, in the Parisian jargon, prostitutes were very often called monkeys.
Seurat, finishing the picture, wrote an unusual frame, which he wanted to emphasize the intensity of the primary colors. Having completed it from colored dots, he complemented the primary colors on the canvas, located near the very border of the picture.
Discord publishes a translation of Georges Seurat's 'Sunday on the Island of Grande Jatte' by American art historian and critic Linda Knocklin: a dystopian allegory. This text, in addition to its significance for art history, is also relevant for Russian urban studies: the desperate melancholy and mechanicalness of urban leisure, which Knocklin writes about, are a powerful antithesis to the fashionable idea of the paramount importance of a comfortable entertainment environment in the modern city.
The idea that Georges Seurat's masterpiece "Sunday on the Island of Grand Jatte" is a kind of dystopia visited me when I read the chapter "Imaginary Landscape in Painting, Opera, Literature" from the book "The Principle of Hope" - the main work of the great German Marxist Ernst Bloch. Here is what Bloch wrote in the first half of our century:
“The opposite of Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, or rather its cheerfulness, is Seurat’s country scene Sunday on the Island of Grande Jatte. The painting is a mosaic of boredom, a masterful depiction of frustrated expectation and meaninglessness. dolce far niente. The painting depicts an island on the Seine near Paris, where the middle class spends Sunday mornings ( sic!): only and everything, and everything is shown with exceptional contempt. People with expressionless faces are resting in the foreground; the rest of the characters are mostly placed between the verticals of the trees like dolls in boxes, pacing tensely in place. Behind them, a pale river and yachts, a rowing kayak, sightseeing boats are visible - a background, although recreational, but looking more like hell than like a Sunday afternoon. The setting, although it depicts a space of leisure, is more suggestive of the realm of the dead than of Sunday. The picture owes a greater share of joyless despondency to the bleached glow of its light-air environment and the inexpressive water of the Sunday Seine, contemplated just as inexpressively<…>Together with the world of everyday work, all other worlds disappear, everything sinks into a watery stupor. Outcome - grandichenaya boredom, the devilish dream of a little man to break Shabbat and prolong it forever. His Sunday is only a tedious duty, not a welcome touch on the promised land. A bourgeois Sunday afternoon like this one is a landscape of suicide, undone by indecision. In short, this dolce far niente, if only it has consciousness, has the consciousness of the most perfect anti-resurrection on the remains of the Sunday utopia.
The depiction of the dystopia that Bloch wrote about is not just a matter of iconography, not just a plot or social history reflected on the canvas. Seurat's painting is not enough to be regarded as a passive reflection new urban reality of the 1880s or as an extreme stage of alienation, which is associated with the capitalist restructuring of urban space and social hierarchies of that time. Rather, "Grand Jatte" is a canvas that is actively produces cultural meanings, inventing visual codes for the artist's contemporary experience of urban life. This is where the allegory in the heading of this article comes into play (“the dystopian allegory"). It is the pictorial construction of the "Grand Jatte" - its formal devices - that turns the dystopia into an allegory. This is what makes the works of Seurat unique - and, in particular, this picture. Seurat is the only post-impressionist who, in the very fabric and structure of his paintings, managed to reflect the new state of affairs: alienation, anomie, the existence of the spectacle in society, the subordination of life to a market economy, where exchange value replaced consumer value, and mass production replaced handicraft.
Landscape with a suicide that did not take place due to indecision.
In other words, if not for Cezanne, but for Seurat, he took the place of a key modernist artist, the art of the twentieth century would have been completely different. But this assertion is, of course, utopian in itself - or at least historically untenable. After all, at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, part of the historical paradigm of advanced art was a departure from the global, social and, above all, negative objective-critical position, which is reproduced in the Grand Jatte (as well as in the paintings Parade and Cancan of that same author). The timeless, extrasocial, subjective and phenomenological - in other words, "pure" painting - was asserted as the basis of modernism. As we shall see, the paradoxical conviction that the pure appearance and flat surface of the canvas is modernity is exactly the opposite of what Seurat shows in Grande Jatte, as in his other works.
Since the High Renaissance, the ambitious goal of all Western art has been to create such a pictorial structure that would build a rational narrative and, above all, an expressive connection between the part and the whole, as well as the parts among themselves, and at the same time establish a semantic connection with the viewer. It was assumed that painting "expresses", that is, brings out some inner meaning due to its structural coherence; that it functions as a visual manifestation of the inner content or depth that makes up the fabric of the image - but as a superficial manifestation, although of great importance. In a Renaissance work such as Raphael's The School of Athens, the characters react and interact in such a way as to hint (and actually affirm) that there is some meaning beyond the pictorial surface, so as to convey some complex meaning, which is instantly readable, and goes beyond the historical circumstances that gave rise to it.
In a sense, Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" asserts the end of the Western tradition of high art as expressive narrative: the shadow thickens, the primacy of the surface denies any transcendence, gestures no longer fulfill their mission of establishing a dialogue. But even here, as Ernst Bloch points out in the same chapter of his book, utopian emanations remain. Indeed, Bloch considers "Breakfast on the Grass" the opposite of "Grand Jatte", describing it as "... a welcome scene of epicurean happiness" in the most lyrical terms: a naked woman, another - undressing before bathing - and dark male figures. “Depicted,” continues Bloch, “is an incredibly French situation, full of languor, innocence and perfect lightness, unobtrusive enjoyment of life and carefree seriousness.” Bloch places "Breakfast on the Grass" in the same category as "Grand Jatte" - it is Sunday picture; her “plot is a temporary immersion in the world without everyday worries and needs. Although it was no longer easy to reproduce this story in the 19th century, Manet's "Breakfast on the Grass" was an exception due to its naivety and charm. This healthy Sunday by Manet would hardly have been possible [in 1863, when the picture was painted] if Manet had allowed petty-bourgeois plots and characters into it; it turns out that it could not exist if it were not for the painter and his models. And then Bloch moves on to the description of the Grand Jatte given at the beginning of this essay: “A real, even painted, bourgeois Sunday looks much less desirable and diverse. This - wrong side“Breakfast on the Grass” by Manet; in other words, Seurat carelessness turns into impotence - that's what it is “Sunday afternoon on the island of Grande Jatte”". It seems that it was not until the 1880s that it became possible to create a work that so accurately, completely and convincingly reflects the state of modernity.
All system-forming factors in the Seurat project could ultimately serve the tasks of democratization.
In Seurat's painting, the characters barely interact, leaving no sense of an articulated and unique human presence; moreover, there is also no feeling that these painted people have some kind of deep inner core. Here, the Western tradition of representation, if not completely annulled, is seriously undermined by an anti-expressive artistic language, which strongly denies the existence of any internal meanings that the artist should reveal to the viewer. Rather, these mechanical outlines, these ordered dots, refer to modern science and industry with its mass production; to stores full of numerous and cheap mass-produced goods; mass press with its endless reproductions. In short, this is a critical attitude towards modernity, embodied in a new artistic medium, ironic and decorative, and emphasized (even over-emphasized) modernity of costumes and household items. Grande Jatte is decidedly historical, it does not pretend to be timeless or generalistic, and this also makes it dystopian. The objective existence of a picture within history is embodied, first of all, in the famous dotted stroke ( pointillé ) - the minimum and indivisible unit of a new vision of the world, which, of course, the audience paid attention to first of all. With this stroke, Seurat consciously and irrevocably eliminates his uniqueness, which was intended to be projected into the work by the unique handwriting of the author. Seurat himself is not represented in any way in his stroke. It lacks the sense of existential choice suggested by Cezanne's constructive brushstroke, or deep personal anxiety, as in Van Gogh, or the decorative, mystical dematerialization of form, as in Gauguin. The application of paint turns into a dry prose act - an almost mechanical reproduction of pigmented "dots". Meyer Shapiro, in what I consider to be the most profound article on the Grande Jatte, sees Seurat as "a modest, efficient and intelligent technologist" from "the lower middle class in Paris, from which come industrial engineers, technicians and clerks." He notes that Seurat's "modern development of industry has instilled in him the deepest respect for rationalized labor, scientific technique and inventions that drive progress" .
Before I analyze Grande Jatte in detail about how dystopianism is developed in every aspect of its stylistic structure, I want to outline what was considered "utopian" in 19th century visual production. Only by placing the "Grand Jatte" in the context of the understanding of the utopian Seurat and his contemporaries, one can fully realize how opposed to this utopia the nature of his works.
Of course, there is the classic utopia of the flesh - Ingres' "Golden Age". Harmonious lines, smooth bodies with no signs of aging, attractive symmetry of the composition, free grouping of unobtrusively naked or classically draped figures in an indefinite landscape “à la Poussin” - this is not so much utopia as nostalgia for a distant, never-existing past, “at -chrony. It completely lacks the social message that we tend to associate with utopia. It is rather a utopia of idealized desire. The same, however, can be said about Gauguin's later interpretation of the tropical paradise: for him, the catalyst for the utopian is not temporal, but geographical distance. Here, as in Ingres, the signifier of utopia is a naked or slightly covered with out-of-date clothes body - usually a woman's. Like Ingres' utopia, Gauguin's is apolitical: it refers to male desire, whose signifier is female flesh.
Musee d'Orsay
Dominique Papeti's Dream of Happiness, 1843, is much better suited for plunging into the context of utopian representation that sets off Seurat's dystopian allegory. Utopian both in form and in content, this painting frankly sings of Fourierism with its iconography and strives for classical idealization in its style, not much different from Ingres, Papeti's teacher at the French Academy in Rome. Yet the utopian concepts of Papeti and Ingres differ significantly. Although the Fourierists considered the present - the so-called civilized conditions - vicious and artificial, the past was little better for them. The real golden age for them was not in the past, but in the future: hence the name " Dream about happiness." The frankly Fourierist content of this utopian allegory is supported by the signature "Harmony" on the pedestal of the statue on the left side of the canvas, which refers to the "Fourier state and the music of satyrs", as well as the title of the book "Universal Society", in which young scientists are immersed (a direct reference to the Fourierist doctrine , as well as to one of Fourier's treatises). Some aspects of the Grande Jatte can be read as an open denial of Fourier's utopia, or, more precisely, of utopianism in general. In Papeti's painting, utopian ideals are personified by a poet who "sings of harmony", a group embodying "motherly tenderness", and another, denoting bright children's friendship, and along the edges - different sides of love between the sexes. All this is accentuated in the "Grand Jatte" - because it is omitted. Papeti uses purely classical architecture, although the painting simultaneously suggested that these utopian ideas were directed to the future: it depicted a steamship and a telegraph (later removed by the artist). And again we see soft, harmonious figures in classical, more precisely, neoclassical poses; paint is applied in the usual way. At least in the version of the picture that has come down to us, the signs of modernity have dissolved in favor of a utopia, although Fourierist, but deeply rooted in the distant past and in an extremely traditional, if not conservative, way of representation.
On more material grounds than Papeti's obscure utopian image, the work of his older contemporary, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, correlates with Seurat's dystopian project. Indeed, "Sunday on the Island of Grande Jatte" could have looked very different or not taken place at all, if in the same year that Seurat began work on this picture, he did not see the work of Puvis "The Sacred Grove", exhibited at the Salon of 1884 . From a certain point of view, "Grand Jatte" can be seen as a parody of "The Sacred Grove" by Puvis, which calls into question the foundation of this picture and its adequacy of modernity, both in form and in content. The timeless muses and classic setting are replaced by Puvis Seurat with the freshest outfits, the most modern decorations and accessories. Seurat's women wear bustles, corsets and fashionable hats, and are not covered by classical draperies; his men do not hold Pan's flute, but a cigar and a cane; against the background, it depicts a modern urban landscape, rather than pastoral antiquity.
A Puvis work like Summer of 1873, written two years after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War and the terrible events around the Commune and its socially divided aftermath, is one of the purest examples of utopia. As Claudine Mitchell notes in her recent article, despite the recognizable depiction of the distant past, the imagery system of "Summer" suggests a more general, even universal time scale - a representation of some generalized truth of human society. In the words of the critic and writer Theophile Gautier, who thought a lot about the work of Puvis, he “is looking for an ideal outside of time, space, costume or details. He aims to paint primitive humanity as it [ sic! ] performs one of the tasks that we can call sacred - to maintain closeness to Nature. Gautier praised Puvis for avoiding the optional and the accidental, and noted that his compositions always had an abstract and general title: "Peace", "War", "Peace", "Work", "Dream" - or "Summer". Gauthier believed that for Puvis, the signifiers of a distant past, simpler and purer, set a more universal order - the order of Nature itself.
So, before us is a classic pictorial version of the utopia of the 19th century, identifying u- topos(lack of space) and u- chronos(lack of time) with the foggy time and space of antiquity. The picturesque world of Puvis is located outside of time and space - while Seurat's "Grand Jatte" is definitely and even aggressively placed within his own time. It is difficult to say whether the temporally and geographically defined, emphatically secular titles of Seurat's paintings ("Sunday on the Island of Grande Jatte (1884)") imply a dystopian critique of the vague idealized titles of Puvis and other classicists who worked with allegory. One way or another, in his paintings, Seurat most seriously struggles precisely with the utopian harmony of Puvi's constructions. Although Puvis could have the characters in separate groups, this did not imply social fragmentation or psychological alienation. Rather, in his paintings, he exalts family values and teamwork, during which representatives of all professions, age and gender groups perform their assigned tasks. Puvis's works are ideologically aimed at creating aesthetic harmony exactly where disharmony, conflicts and contradictions are concentrated in modern society, whether it be the position of workers, class struggle or the status of women. Thus, for example, in the formal structure of Leta, the value of motherhood for a woman and work for a man is presented as - in fact, inseparable - a component of the natural order, and not as a changeable and controversial issue. In Seurat, as we shall see, the classical elements lose their harmony: they are exaggerated in their deliberate artificiality, conservatism and isolation. This accentuation of contradictions is part of his anti-utopian strategy.
Gauguin's utopia is apolitical: it refers to male desire, whose signifier is female flesh.
Seurat's dystopia is contrasted not only by the classical and rather traditional works of Puvis. The more progressive artist Renoir also created a semi-utopian system of images of contemporary reality, everyday urban existence, which is based on the joys of healthy sensuality and youthfulness. joie de vivre(the joys of life) - for example, in such works as "The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette" in 1876, where a scattering of multi-colored strokes and an annular dynamic rhythm in their joyful mixture of everything and everything play out at the level of form the erasure of class and gender division in an idealized leisure of contemporary Paris. This work by Renoir is the most distinct contrast to Seurat's scathing view of the "new leisure". Renoir seeks to present the everyday life of a large modern city as natural, that is, naturalizes her; Seurat, on the contrary, alienates her and denies any naturalization.
Paradoxically, it is the painting of the neo-impressionist Paul Signac, a follower and friend of Seurat, that gives the most vivid idea of the context of utopian images against which the Grand Jatte rebels. Signac was fully aware of the social significance of the work created by his friend. In June 1891 in an anarchist newspaper La Revolte("Rebellion"), he published an article in which he claimed that by depicting scenes from the life of the working class "or, better yet, the entertainment of decadents<…>like Seurat, who understood with such clarity the degradation of our transitional age, they [artists] will present their evidence at the great public trial that is unfolding between workers and Capital.
Signac's painting "In the Time of Harmony", painted around 1893-1895 (oil sketch for the wall painting of the city hall of Montreuil), seems to be a response to a specifically capitalist state of anomie and absurdity - in other words, to the "time of disharmony", presented in the most famous mature work his friend. In a lithograph for Jean Grave's newspaper Les Tempes novelux("Modern Times") Signac presented his anarcho-socialist version of a classless utopia in which general insouciance and human interaction replace the static and isolated figures of the "Grand Jatte"; unlike Seurat, Signac emphasizes rather than obscures family values, and replaces urban settings with more pastoral, rustic ones, in keeping with the utopian nature of his project. The characters, despite being relatively modernly dressed, are softly idealized, like in Puvy, rather than fashionable, like in Seurat. In a curvilinear composition with its decorative repetitions, the theme of community - a couple or a community - is insinuatingly carried out in a utopian future. Even the hen and the rooster in the foreground depict the mutual assistance and interaction that the whole work calls for and which are so decisively excluded from the world by Seurat's gaze.
However, I came to the anti-utopian interpretation of Seurat's painting not only because of the clear differences from the utopian imagery of his time. The critical reaction of contemporaries also confirms that the painting was read as a scathing critique of the current state of affairs. As Martha Ward put it in a recent exhibition catalog article, “Reviewers felt that expressionless faces, isolated postures, and rigid postures were more or less subtle parodies of the banality and pretentiousness of modern leisure[italics mine]". For example, one of the critics, Henri Febvre, noted that, looking at the picture, “you come to understand the rigidity of Parisian leisure, tired and stuffy, where people continue to pose even during rest.” Another critic, Paul Adam, identified the rigid contours and deliberate poses with the very modern state of affairs: “Even the immobility of these stamped figures, as it were, voices modernity; one immediately comes to mind our ill-tailored suits, tight-fitting bodies, stock of gestures, the British jargon that we all imitate. We pose like people in a Memling painting. Another critic, Alfred Pole, argued that “the artist created characters with automatic gestures of soldiers who trample on the parade ground. The maids, clerks and cavalrymen walk in a slow, banal, uniform step, which accurately conveys the character of the scene ... "
A notion of the monotony and inhuman enslavement of contemporary urban life, this founding trope of the Grande Jatte, pervades even the analysis of the painting's most significant critic, Felix Feneon, an analysis that claims to be inflexible formalism: Feneon describes the uniformity of Seurat's technique as "monotonous and patient weaving” is a touching error that strikes back at criticism. Yes, he describes the painting style, but he attributes "monotonity" and "patience" to the technique of pointillism, thus allegorically interpreting it as a metaphor for the fundamental properties of urban life. That is, in this figure of speech of Feneon, the formal language of Seurat is masterfully absorbed both by the existential state and the technique of working with the material.
The figure of the girl is Hope: a utopian impulse buried in the core of its opposite.
What is Seurat's formal language in Grand Jatte? How does he mediate and construct the painful symptoms of the society of his time, and how does he create, in a sense, their allegory? Daniel Rich was quite right when, in his 1935 study, he emphasized the paramount importance of Seurat's form-level innovation in what he calls the "transcending" achievement of the Grande Jatte. To do this, Rich uses two schemes that simplify the already sketchy composition of Seurat: “Organization of the Grand Jatte in curves” and “Organization of the Grand Jatte in straight lines” - a typical device for formal, “scientific” art criticism of that time. But, as Meyer Shapiro points out in his brilliant rebuttal of this study, Rich erred in not taking into account, because of his staunch formalism, the paramount social and critical significance of Seurat's practice. In Shapiro's opinion, Rich's attempts to offer a classicizing, traditional and harmonizing reading of Seurat in order to fit his innovative ideas into the law-abiding "mainstream" of the pictorial tradition are equally misguided (how similar it is to art historians!).
In order to separate Seurat from the mainstream and to recognize his formal innovation, one must use the modern-specific concept of "system", which can be understood in at least two modalities: (1) as a systematic application of a certain color theory, scientific or pseudoscientific ( depending on whether we believe the artist ), in his "chromoluminarist" technique;
or (2) as a related system of pointillism, the application of paint to a canvas in small, regular dots. In both cases, Seurat's method becomes an allegory of mass production in the modern era and therefore moves away from both the impressionistic and expressionist signifiers of subjectivity and personal involvement in artistic production, or from the harmonious generalization of the surface characteristic of classical modes of representation. As Norma Brood pointed out in a recent article, Seurat may have borrowed his inking system from the current mass production visual media technique of his time, the so-called chromoprinting. Seurat's mechanistic technique allows him to criticize the reified spectacle of modern life. Thus, in Brood's words, "it is obviously provocative not only to the audience as a whole, but also to several generations of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists: the impersonal approach of Seurat and his followers to painting threatened their attachment to the romantic concept of authenticity and spontaneous self-expression." As Brood points out, it was "the mechanistic nature of technology, alien to Seurat's contemporaries' notions of good taste and 'high art'" that could have attracted him, since radical political views and a "democratic" predilection for popular art forms became important shaping factors in the evolution of his approach to own art." One can go even further and say that Everybody the systemic factors in Seurat's project - from pseudo-scientific color theory to mechanized technique and the later adaptation of Charles Henri's "scientifically" based "aesthetic protractor" to achieve a balance of composition and expressiveness - could ultimately serve the tasks of democratization. Seurat found an elementary method of creating successful art, in theory accessible to everyone; he came up with a kind of democratically oriented dot painting, completely excluding the role of a genius as an exceptional creative person from the act of producing art, even "great art" (although this very concept was superfluous in the regime of Total Systematization). From a radical point of view, this is a utopian project, while from a more elitist point of view, it is completely simplistic and dystopian.
Nothing says more about Seurat's complete abandonment of the charm of immediacy in favor of principled detachment than comparing the details of a large preliminary sketch of the Grand Jatte (Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) with the details of the finished painting. What could be more alien to the generalizing tendencies of classicism than the summarizing schematicity and modernity of manner, manifested in the way Seurat constructs, say, a couple in the foreground - this image is so laconic that its referent is read as instantly as the referent of an advertising sign. What could be more alien to the mild idealization of late neoclassicals such as Puvis than the sharply critical modeling of the hand holding the cigar and the mechanistic rounding of the cane? Both of these forms aggressively signify class-coded masculinity, constructing a schema of a man, opposed to his equally socially marked companion: her figure, with characteristically rounded outlines due to the costume, resembles, in the way everything superfluous is cut off from her, bushes trimmed in the shape of balls in a regular park. Gender differences are portrayed and systematized by apparently artificial means.
Using the figure of the nurse as an example, I would like to show how Seurat, with his sardonic view of the frostbitten leisure of the bourgeois, works on types, simplifying the image to the simplest signifier, reducing the vitality and charming immediacy of the initial sketch to a visual hieroglyph. In a verbal description as delightfully accurate as the painting itself, Martha Ward characterized the final version of the canvas as "a featureless geometric configuration: an irregular quadrilateral, divided into two parts by a triangle wedged in the middle, and on top of them - closed circles." Nurse, better known as Nounou, is a stereotyped character that appeared in connection with the rapid development of visual typing in the popular press of the second half of the 19th century. Seurat, of course, avoided the traps of vulgar caricature, just as he did not seek to give a naturalistic description of the profession of a wet nurse - a topic relatively popular in the art of this time exhibited at the Salons. In contrast to Berthe Morisot, who, in the image of her daughter Julia with a nurse (1879), creates a representation of breastfeeding as such - Morisot's figure is frontal, turned towards the viewer, vividly painted and, although simplified to a single volume, creates a keen sense of life's immediacy - Seurat erases all signs of the nurse's professional activity and her relationship with the baby, presenting us with a simplified sign instead of a biological process.
Seurat seriously worked on this character; we can see the process of its simplification in a series of drawings in pencil by Conte - from a few quite heartfelt sketches from nature (in the Goodyear collection) to a monumental view of the nurse from behind ("Cap and Ribbons", in the Thaw collection). Although the figure of the woman here is composed of several black-and-white rectangular and curviangular shapes, united by a faintly distinguished vertical ribbon that nurses wear (and, as it were, duplicating the spinal axis), she maintains a connection with her ward, pushing the baby carriage. In another sketch (in the Rosenberg collection), although the child is present, it turns into a geometric echo of the nurse's round cap, devoid of individuality, and her figure gradually acquires the symmetrical trapezoidal shape that we see in the final version of Grand Jatte. The series ends with a drawing (Albright-Knox collection) referring to the final version of the wet nurse group. In connection with this drawing, Robert Herbert noted that “the nurse, whom we see from the back, is as bulky as a stone. Only a cap and a ribbon flattened to a vertical axis let us know that this is really a seated woman. In short, Seurat reduced the figure of the wet nurse to a minimal function. In the final version of the picture, nothing reminds of the role of a nurse feeding a child, of the tender relationship between an infant and its “second mother”, as nurses were considered then. The attributes of her occupation - a bonnet, a ribbon and a cape - are her reality: as if in a mass society there is no longer anything that can represent the social position of an individual. It turns out that Seurat reduced form not in order to generalize the images and make them classic, as Rich explains, but in order to dehumanize human individuality, reducing it to a critical designation of social vices. Types are no longer depicted in the free-painting manner of the old caricature codes, but are reduced to laconic visual emblems of their social and economic roles, a process akin to the development of capitalism itself, as Signac might have put it.
I will end, as I began, with a pessimistic interpretation of the Grand Jatte, in whose compositional statics and formal simplification I see an allegorical negation of the promises of modernity - in short, a dystopian allegory. For me, as for Roger Fry in 1926, Grande Jatte represents "a world from which life and movement have been banished and everything is forever frozen in its place, fixed in a rigid geometrical frame."
Depiction of class oppression in a style borrowed from capitalist tables and charts.
And yet there is one detail that contradicts such an interpretation - a small, but introducing dialectical complexity, placed at the very core of the Grande Jatte: a little girl running hopping. This character was hardly conceived in its final, apparently contradictory form, which it has in the big sketch. In an earlier version, it's almost impossible to tell if it's running at all. The figure is less diagonal and blends more with the surrounding strokes; it seems that it is connected with a white-brown dog, which in the final version is already in a different place in the composition. The little girl is the only dynamic figure, her dynamism being emphasized by her diagonal pose, flowing hair and flying ribbon. She is in complete contrast to the little girl to her left, a figure built like a vertical cylinder, passive and conformal, subservient and, as it were, isomorphic to the mother, who stands in the shadow of the umbrella in the center of the picture. The running girl, on the contrary, is free and mobile, she is purposeful and chasing something that lies beyond our field of vision. Together with the dog in the foreground and the red butterfly hovering slightly to the left, they form the vertices of an invisible triangle. One could say that the figure of the girl is Hope, in Bloch's terms: a utopian impulse buried in the core of its dialectical opposite; antithesis to the thesis of the picture. How different is Seurat's dynamic depiction of hope - not so much an allegorical figure as a figure that can only become an allegory - from the rigid and conventional allegory of Puvis created after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune! Puvi's hope can be said to be hopeless, if by hope we mean the possibility of change, an unknown but optimistic future, and not a rigid, unchanging essence formulated in the classical language of bashful nudity and chaste draperies.
Gustave Courbet. Artist's workshop. 1855 Paris, Musée d'Orsay
The figure of the child as a symbol of hope in Seurat is an active character in the midst of an ocean of frozen passivity, reminding us of another image: a young artist immersed in work, hidden in Courbet’s painting “The Artist’s Workshop” (1855), the subtitle of which is “a real allegory”. Of 19th-century works, this is closest to Seurat, in that it presents utopia as a problem rather than a ready-made solution, in a decidedly modern setting, and, ironically, in that it is organized as a static, frozen composition. Like Grand Jatte, The Artist's Workshop is a work of great power and complexity, in which utopian and non- or dystopian elements are inextricably intertwined, and in which the truly utopian and dystopian are shown as mutually reflected dialectical opposites. In the gloomy cave of the studio, the little artist, half-hidden on the floor on the right side of the picture, is the only active figure, apart from the artist himself at work. The alter ego of the artist, the boy, admiring the work of Courbet, occupying a central place, corresponding to the place of the master, personifies the admiration of future generations; like the girl in Seurat, this child can be considered an image of hope - a hope laid down in an unknown future.
Yet Seurat's work is dominated by a negative understanding of modernity, especially urban modernity. Throughout his short but impressive career, he was engaged in the project of social criticism, which consisted in the construction of a new, partly mass, methodically formal language. In The Models (in the Barnes collection), a sardonically derisive manifesto of modern society's contradictions regarding "life" and "art", contemporary models take off their clothes in a workshop, revealing their reality against the backdrop of a painting - a fragment of "Grand Jatte", which looks more "modern", more socially expressive than themselves. What detail does the art signify here? The traditional nudity of the "three graces", which are always depicted from three angles - frontal, side and from the back, or a great canvas about modern life that serves as a backdrop for them? In the painting Cabaret of 1889-1890 (Kröller-Müller Museum), commodified entertainment, a crude product of the emerging mass cultural industry, is shown in all its emptiness and artificiality; these are not fleeting pleasures that Renoir could portray, and not spontaneous sexual energy in the spirit of Toulouse-Lautrec. The transformation of a man's nose into a pig-like snout frankly hints at greed for pleasure. Dancers - standard characters, decorative pictograms, high-class advertisements for a slightly dangerous pastime.
Georges Seurat. Circus. 1891 Paris, Musée d'Orsay
In the painting "The Circus" (1891), we are talking about the modern phenomenon of the spectacle and the passive contemplation that accompanies it. The picture parodies artistic production, allegorically depicted as a public performance - dazzling in technique, but dead in movement, acrobatics for the needs of a frozen audience. Even the participants in the performance seem to be frozen in their dynamic poses, reduced to typed curves, ethereal pictograms of movement. There are also more gloomy interpretations of the relationship between the viewer and the performance in the film "The Circus". This audience, frozen in a state close to hypnosis, denotes not only a crowd of consumers of art, but can be understood as the state of a mass spectator in front of someone who skillfully manipulates them. Thomas Mann's sinister Mario and the Magician comes to mind, or Hitler in front of a crowd in Nuremberg, or, already today, the American electorate and clown candidates who, with learned artistry, voice slogans and gesticulate on television. In addition to the fact that the "Circus" depicts contemporary social issues, as an allegorical dystopia, it also contains a prophetic potential.
It seems to me that Grande Jatte and other works by Seurat have too often been included in the "great tradition" of Western art, marching briskly from Pierrot to Poussin and Puvy, and too rarely associated with the more critical strategies characteristic of the radical art of the future. For example, in the work of a little-known group of political radicals who worked in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s - the so-called Cologne Progressives - Seurat's radical formulation of the experience of modernity finds its followers: it is not an influence or continuation of his work - in their dystopianism, the Progressives went further than Seurat. As political activists, they equally rejected art for art's sake and modern expressionist identification of social morbidity with agitated pictorialism and expressionist distortion, which for them was nothing more than individualistic overexposure. Progressives - including Franz Wilhelm Seivert, Heinrich Herle, Gerd Arntz, Peter Alma, and the photographer August Sander - resorted to revolutionary conscience-awakening, dispassionate pictographic depiction of social injustice and class oppression in a style borrowed from capitalist tables and charts.
Dystopians par excellence, they, like Seurat, used the codes of modernity to question the legitimacy of the existing social order. Unlike Seurat, they questioned the very legitimacy of high art, but it can be said that this, too, was embedded in certain aspects of his work. The emphasis he placed on anti-heroism rather than gesture; to "patient weaving", implying mechanical repetition, and not the impatient strokes and strokes of the brush, which Feneon called "virtuoso painting"; to social criticism instead of transcendent individualism - all this allows us to speak of Seurat as the forerunner of those artists who deny the heroism and apolitical loftiness of modernist art, preferring critical visual practice. From this point of view, the photographic montage of the Berlin Dadaists or the collages of Barbara Krüger have more in common with the neo-impressionist legacy than the harmless paintings produced by artists who use pointille to create otherwise traditional landscapes and marinas and call themselves followers of Seurat. The dystopian momentum lies at the very heart of Seurat's achievements - in what Bloch called "the prevailing mosaic of boredom", "expressive faces", "the expressionless water of the Sunday Seine"; in short, "a landscape with a suicide that did not take place due to indecision." It was this legacy that Seurat left to his contemporaries and those who followed in his footsteps.
Translation from English: Sasha Moroz, Gleb Napreenko
This text was first delivered in October 1988 at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Norma W. Lifton Memorial Lecture Series. Linda Nochlin. The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-century Art and Society. Westview Press, 1989. - Note. per.).
Seurat himself, exhibiting this painting for the first time in 1886 at the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition, did not indicate the time of day.
Bloch E. The Principle of Hope. - Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986, II. S. 815. Per. in English. language - Neville Ples, Steven Ples and Paul Knight. This fragment was also cited in a different context in Seurat's latest catalog, ed. Erich Franz and Bernd Grow « Georges Seurat: Zeichnungen» (Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Staatliche Kunsthalle baden- baden, 1983-1984), p. 82-83. Minor changes have been made to the translation for readability. (Only a fragment of the book was translated into Russian: E. Bloch. The principle of hope. // Utopia and utopian thinking. M., 1991. - Note. per. The Sacred Grove at the Art Institute of Chicago is a scaled-down copy of a huge canvas held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon.
GautierTh. Moniteur universel. June 3, 1867. Op. on: Mitchell C. Time and the Ideal of Patriarchy in the Pastorals of Puvis de Chavannes // Art History, 10, No. 2 (June 1987). S. 189.
anon. Impressionistes et revolutionaires // La Revolte, June 13-19, 1891. P. 4. Cit. on: Thomson R. Seurat. - Oxford: Phaidon Press; Salem, N.H.: Salem House, 1985. C. 207.
The very use of the concept of "harmony" in the title refers to the Fourierist and, later, more generalized socialist and anarchist designation of a social utopia. The famous utopian colony founded in the USA in the 19th century was called New Harmony ("New Harmony").
Indeed, if one looks at the criticism of this time, it becomes clear that it is the expressive-formal structure of the canvas, and not the social differences that mark the selection of characters - or, more precisely, the unprecedented juxtaposition of working figures with figures of the middle class, which T.J. Clark in his last note about this painting ( Clark T. J. The painting of Modern life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His followers. - N. Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. pp. 265-267) - made the greatest impression on the audience of the 1880s and made them consider the "Grand Jatte" scathing social criticism. As Martha Ward recently noted, contemporaries “recognized the heterogeneity of the characters, but did not pay attention to its possible meanings. Most critics were much more inclined to explain why all the figures were frozen in staged poses, dumbfounded and devoid of expression ... "( The New painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886, exhibition catalogue, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts and National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1986, p. 435).
Ward M. New Painting. C. 435.
Cit. on: Ward M. New Painting. P. 435. Thomson quotes the same fragment, but translates it differently: “Little by little we look closely, we guess something and then we see and admire a large yellow spot of grass eaten by the sun, clouds of golden dust in the tops of trees, the details of which cannot see the retina blinded by light; then we feel that the Parisian promenade is as if starched - normalized and empty, that even rest becomes deliberate in it. Cit. on: Thomson R. Seurat. C. 115, p. 229. Thomson quotes Henri Fevre: Fevre H. L "Exposition des impressionistes // Revue de demain, May-June 1886, p. 149.
Adam P. Peintres impressionistes // Revue contemporaine litteraire, politique et philosophique 4 (April-May 1886). S. 550. Cited. on: Ward M. New painting. C. 435.
The whole fragment of Paul looks like this: “This picture is an attempt to show the vanity of the banal promenade that people make in Sunday clothes, without pleasure, in places where it is customary that it is appropriate to walk on Sundays. The artist gave his characters the automatic gestures of soldiers trampling on the parade ground. The maids, clerks and cavalry walk with the same slow, banal, identical step, which accurately conveys the character of the scene, but does it too insistently. Paulet A. Les Impressionistes // Paris, June 5, 1886. Op. on: Thomson. Seurat. C. 115.
Feneon F. Les Impressionistes en 1886 (8th Exposition impressioniste) // La Vogue, June 13-20, 1886. S. 261-75b trans. - Nochlin L. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904,Source and Documents in the History of Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966). P. 110. Feneon's catchy figure of speech, which links the idea of patience and weaving, certainly brings to mind the gendered image of Penelope patiently embroidering and a host of stories and metaphors involving women and textiles - not least Freud's famous saying about women and sewing ; in his essay "On Femininity" he writes that sewing is women's only contribution to civilization ( Freud S. Femininity // Freud S. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Trans. J. Strachey. - N.Y.: Norton, 1965, p. 131). For a detailed analysis of gender-specific tropes and narratives related to sewing, weaving and tailoring, see: Miller N.K. Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic // Miller N.K. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. - N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 77-101. Feneon's "patient weaving" can also be read as an antithesis of the more familiar metaphors of modernist creativity, metaphorizing the imperious force, spontaneity and emotionality of the artist's (male) creative practices by likening his brush to an assertive or seeking phallus and emphasizing, respectively, either the crushing passion of applying paint, or, on the contrary, his delicacy and sensitivity. Within this discursive context, Feneon's phraseology can be considered a deconstruction of the main image of the avant-garde production of modernity - in short, a crisis figure of speech.
Rich D.C. Seurat and the Evolution of "La Grande Jatte". - Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935. C. 2.
One has only to think, for example, of the famous diagrams of Cezanne's paintings in Erle Laurent's book: Loran E. Cezanne Composition: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1943). These charts were later used by Roy Lichtenstein in such works as "Portrait of Madame Cezanne" in 1962. Part of the book was published in 1930 in The Arts. Cm.: Rewald J. The History of Impressionism, rev.ed. - N.Y.: Museum of Modern Art, 1961. C. 624.
Schapiro M. Seurat and "La Grande Jatte". C. 11-13.
For the most recent analytical material on Seurat's "scientific" color theories, see: Lee A. Seurat and Science // Art History 10, No. 2 (June 1987: 203-26). Lee concludes unequivocally: "His 'chromoluminarist' method, which had no scientific basis, was pseudoscientific: it was deceptive in its theoretical formulations and applied with indifference to any critical assessment of its empirical validity" (p. 203).
Seurat in Perspective, ed. Norma Broude (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978). C. 173.
It's funny that Seurat quite fiercely defended his primacy in the invention of neo-impressionism and tried to prevent Signac and other artists from developing "his" technique. For a discussion of the contradictions within the Neo-Impressionist group, see: Thomson, with. 130, 185-187. Here I am talking about the possibilities of Neo-Impressionism as a practice, and not about Seurat's personal integrity as a leader of the movement. Of course, there was a contradiction between the potential of neo-impressionism and its concrete incarnations in Seurat and his followers.
