본문 바로가기
History of Arts/19C

seurat georges 신인상주의

by @artnstory 2020. 4. 20.

seurat georges
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
1884-86; "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"; Oil on canvas, 81 x 120 in; Signed, bottom right; Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Collection

*그랑 자트 섬의 일요일 오후*
쇠라만의 스타일을 느낄 수 있는 작품.
한가로운 오후 시간이 멈춘 듯한 정지화면이 이 작품에서 유독 더 강한 이유가 뭘 까?
은은 하고 아련함이 묻어나는 그만의 기법으로 인한 연유가 아닐까 싶다.
햇볕이 드는 잔디와 그늘진 잔디, 하늘을 가리운 나무들, 그리고 바다의 색들과 보색되는 붉은 색과 어두운 색의 사람들의 모습.
그것으로 인하여 자연에서 보여지는 산뜻함과 싱그러움이 한층 더 강조되고 있다.


Un dimanche apr?-midi ?l'Ile de la Grande Jatte
1884-86; "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"; Oil on canvas, 81 x 120 in; Signed, bottom right; Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Collection

The question has been asked whether Seurat's great work should be regarded as the necessary outcome of Impressionist ideas or as deliberately anti-Impressionist, and an answer might be that it contains elements of both. In pursuing the analysis of colour, Seurat carried on, though in more systematic fashion, what Monet and Pissarro had been doing. The division of colour was scarcely new, though the primary colours were more scientifically defined by the range he based on the spectrum; but he added to this divisionism or pointillism an equally elaborate and scientifically considered treatment of line in order to attain a harmonious unity of composition, which was distinct from the Impressionist aim of suggesting light, atmosphere and movement.

The difference is more readily perceptible in a figure composition as here than in landscape. The men, women and children enjoying the sun in the public park on the island of La Grande Jatte in the Seine have the sort of fixity that a moving film acquires when it comes suddenly to a halt; they are frozen in their various attitudes. As a preliminary, Seurat made a number of oil sketches on the spot in a free and indeed Impressionist style. The finished work was intentionally different. The technique used is so interesting that it is apt to gain exclusive attention. One becomes absorbed in the geometric order that Seurat has imposed on the scene and this certainly is an opposite value to that of Impressionism. Pissarro, Signac and other artists attracted by the pointilliste method were somewhat led astray by the assumption that it opened up a new prospect solely in terms of translating light into colour. The comparison that has often been made between the Italian master of the geometrically-conceived composition, Piero della Francesca, and the Seurat of La Grande Jatte is justified in demonstrating the latter's essential direction. Absorbed though he was with theory, it would be wrong to assess Seurat as one unaware of the life around him. The statuesque figures to the right are the acme of bourgeois propriety though the lady may show pretensions to the eccentricity of `high life' by having a pet monkey on a lead. In many details it is a reality magically become unreal. A moment of charm is made lasting in the little girl running and the nearer girl bending over her bunch of flowers. The racing four that flashed across the canvases of Monet and Renoir at Argenteuil and other river craft here have the sharpness of a miniature.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To comment on this vast canvas where Seurat for the first time succeeded in applying, with scientific rigor, the theory of optical mixture by the division of tones-a technique which Rubens, Watteau, and Delacroix had employed intuitively-one cannot do better than to quote the following text by Jules Christophe. It was published in Les Hommes d'aujourd'hui, No. 368, an issue devoted to Seurat. The list of motives was dictated and revised by the artist himself:

Under a blazing midafternoon summer sky, we see the Seine flooded with sunshine, smart town houses on the opposite bank, and small steamboats, sailboats, and a skiff moving up and down the river. Under the trees closer to us many people are strolling, others are sitting or stretched out lazily on the bluish grass. A few are fishing. There are young ladies, a nursemaid, a Dantesque old grandmother under a parasol, a sprawled-out boatman smoking his pipe, the lower part of his trousers completely devoured by the implacable sunlight. A dark-colored dog of no particular breed is sniffing around, a rust-colored butterfly hovers in mid-air, a young mother is strolling with her little girl dressed in white with a salmon-colored sash, two budding young Army officers from Saint-Cyr are walking by the water. Of the young ladies, one of them is making a bouquet, another is a girl with red hair in a blue dress. We see a married couple carrying a baby, and, at the extreme right, appears a scandalously hieratic-looking couple, a young dandy with a rather excessively elegant lady on his arm who has a yellow, purple, and ultramarine monkey on a leash.

There was public resistance to the picture at first, Arsene Alexandre tells us: Everything was so new in this immense painting-the conception was bold and the technique one that nobody had never seen or heard before. This was the famous pointillism.

When exhibited at the Independants, the work aroused sneers and indignation. There were outcries, Christophe goes on to say, but by standing its ground the picture's revolutionary character won out in the end. Its success was immediately hailed in La Vogue, to which Felix Feneon contributed a lively, logical, and well-informed article.

Prior to its acquisition by the Art Institute of Chicago, the painting was owned successively by Seurat's mother, Maximillien Luce, Edmond Cousturier, and Charles Vildrac.



Seurat, Georges


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(b. Dec. 2, 1859, Paris--d. March 29, 1891, Paris)
Painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism. Using this techique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Une Baignade (1883-84) and Un dimanche apr?-midi ?l'Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86).

A French painter who was a leader in the neo-impressionist movement of the late 19th century, Georges Seurat is the ultimate example of the artist as scientist. He spent his life studying color theories and the effects of different linear structures. His 500 drawings alone establish Seurat as a great master, but he will be remembered for his technique called pointillism, or divisionism, which uses small dots or strokes of contrasting color to create subtle changes in form.

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born on Dec. 2, 1859, in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. His teacher was a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Young Seurat was strongly influenced by Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya.

After a year of military service at Brest, Seurat exhibited his drawing Aman-Jean at the official Salon in 1883. Panels from his painting Bathing at Asnieres were refused by the Salon the next year, so Seurat and several other artists founded the Societe des Artistes Independants. His famous canvas Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte was the centerpiece of an exhibition in 1886. By then Seurat was spending his winters in Paris, drawing and producing one large painting each year, and his summers on France's northern coast. In his short life Seurat produced seven monumental paintings, 60 smaller ones, drawings, and sketchbooks. He kept his private life very secret, and not until his sudden death in Paris on March 29, 1891, did his friends learn of his mistress, who was the model for his painting Young Woman Holding a Powder Puff.

seurat
The Side Show
1888; Oil on Canvas, 39 3/4 x 59 1/8 in; Unsigned; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960

*쇼의 일면*
죠르쥬 쇠라는 흔히 신인상주의의 창시자로 알려져 있다.
그는 인상주의를 바탕으로 한 새로운 인상주의로 분할주의라 일컫는 점묘법을 이용하여 신선한 작품을 선보였다.
영화 <Before sunrise>에서 여주인공이 비엔나의 한 길가에 붙어있는 쇠라의 전시회 포스터를 보며 한 말이 생각난다.
"배경이 인물에 스며드는 느낌이 좋아" 라고...
점으로 표현하여 주제와 배경이 하나로 통일되고, 화면속에 주제는 더욱 선명하게 드러난다.색채의 병치혼합과 보색 또한 이 시기의 특징인데,
이 시기부터 본격적으로 과학적인 색채학이 연구되기 시작하였다.

Seurat, Georges

(b. Dec. 2, 1859, Paris--d. March 29, 1891, Paris)
Painter, founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism whose technique for portraying the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of contrasting colours became known as Pointillism. Using this techique, he created huge compositions with tiny, detached strokes of pure colour too small to be distinguished when looking at the entire work but making his paintings shimmer with brilliance. Works in this style include Une Baignade (1883-84) and Un dimanche apr?-midi ?l'Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86).

A French painter who was a leader in the neo-impressionist movement of the late 19th century, Georges Seurat is the ultimate example of the artist as scientist. He spent his life studying color theories and the effects of different linear structures. His 500 drawings alone establish Seurat as a great master, but he will be remembered for his technique called pointillism, or divisionism, which uses small dots or strokes of contrasting color to create subtle changes in form.

Georges-Pierre Seurat was born on Dec. 2, 1859, in Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. His teacher was a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Young Seurat was strongly influenced by Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya.

After a year of military service at Brest, Seurat exhibited his drawing Aman-Jean at the official Salon in 1883. Panels from his painting Bathing at Asnieres were refused by the Salon the next year, so Seurat and several other artists founded the Societe des Artistes Independants. His famous canvas Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte was the centerpiece of an exhibition in 1886. By then Seurat was spending his winters in Paris, drawing and producing one large painting each year, and his summers on France's northern coast. In his short life Seurat produced seven monumental paintings, 60 smaller ones, drawings, and sketchbooks. He kept his private life very secret, and not until his sudden death in Paris on March 29, 1891, did his friends learn of his mistress, who was the model for his painting Young Woman Holding a Powder Puff.




The Side Show

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1888; Oil on Canvas, 39 3/4 x 59 1/8 in; Unsigned; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960

After the outdoor light of La Grande Jatte and the studio light of The Models, here is an artificial light; the gas and acetylene lamps create the mood of traveling fairs.

This work shows to what extent Seurat was concerned with construction. It is clear here how deeply Seurat had been impressed by David Sutter's observations on the architectonics of classical works of art. The canvas analyzes itself, as it were. It would be pedantic nowadays to trace the counterpoint of verticals and horizontals, clear-cut rectangles and blurred ovals, the whole broken by a few slanting lines (the branches of the tree, the ringmaster's riding crop, the railing of the staircase behind the trombone player at the center).

This is perhaps the sole work of nineteenth-century painting that unequivocally anticipates Cubism (and even Purism). It heralds the coming of a new school, which, from 1908 on, was to revolutionize form no less profoundly than Seurat revolutionized the treatment of color.

Seurat here is at his coldest and most austere. It would seem that the balance of La Grande Jatte and The Models has given way to excessive deliberateness. We may say that like certain works of Poussin, The Side Show is a painting which has been wholly thought out in advance.

The face of the ringmaster (or perhaps animal trainer), with the same haircut and mustache twisted to turn up, will reappear in Le Chahut, where the riding crop is replaced by the conductor's baton.