Episode 47: George Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884-86)

VOICE 1: I see people in a park.

VOICE 2: It’s large. It’s about the same height as I am.

VOICE 1: Some of them are in the shade. Some of them are in the sunlight. They all seem to be looking out onto the water. Some kids, some adults. Definitely back in the day. With umbrellas to block the sun. It’s a nice day out. People rowing on the water. A lot of dogs playing.

VOICE 2: The lady on the right has a very large butt.

VOICE 1: Seem to be a very diverse set of people.

VOICE 3: It’s a day in the life. Um, pets, uh, interacting with children, interacting with adults.

VOICE 4: Yeah. There’s a lot of people. [laughs] Like, it’s not chaotic by any means. It’s very calm and orderly.

VOICE 1: I see a lot of people in motion, but I don’t feel a lot of motion from this painting.

VOICE 3: It’s funny. To me, it feels extremely frozen. There’s that child mid-skip, a dog mid-leap. I don’t feel the follow through the motion.

VOICE 5: Uh, I think some parts of it, like, freeze you and other parts free you.

VOICE 6: It feels very peaceful, relaxing. It just doesn’t fill me with the urge to go anywhere.

VOICE 2: I feel like I need to put my glasses on. Like, it’s blurry.

VOICE 6: I don’t even know the word for it. It’s… It just looks like a lot of little dots.

VOICE 7: Made out of dots! Like, that’s insane. Like, every little dot, it took so long. That’s so crazy.

VOICE 6: It’s not, like, cohesive. It’s – it’s almost like a low-pixelated photo.

VOICE 7: But it’s not dots of the same color. It’s, like, dots of, like, yellows and greens and blues, which then make together a color, um, which is what I think is really amazing about this painting specifically.

VOICE 3: Um, this painting is transformative where though it’s not a solid color, it leaves you with the idea of solid impact.

VOICE 7: Far away, it looks simple. And then close-up, you’re like, “Wow. They put so much effort into it.” And it’s such a large-scale painting, too. So, it… They definitely, like… Every single dot counts, so…

VOICE 3: You got to conceptualize it, have faith in your skill to know what’s gonna happen when you step back. Does that make sense? That’s the most impressive part of it to me.

Intro credits.

You don’t need me to tell you that we’re living in a very specific time right now.  It’s spring of 2020, and like all of you, I hope, I’m sitting at home, waiting out the COVID-19 pandemic, which really means sitting in my PJs.  My hair is a mess of split ends that I’d meant to get cut two months ago, back when such things were so obvious to do you never got around to doing it.  If you’re listening to this in the future, don’t tell me how this ends, or even that it will, because so much of what defines this experience is how out of time we are.  It’s not really about how it ends, that’s a story for another day.  it’s about how uncanny it feels right now, like a pause button has been pressed on the whole world.  I can’t remember what day of the week it is, or what week of the month.  There’s an eerie sameness to each day, like we’re frozen in time, with only the changing spring air to remind us that the days are indeed passing.

And this is why George Seurat’s hugely famous, hugely huge Post-Impressionist canvas, “A Sunday Afternoon at Grand Jatte” feels like a painting for this specific moment.  And not just because there’s a real bittersweet nostalgia at play here, seeing all these people cramjammed, as Mary Berry would say, into this sunny, suburban riverbank on a summery Sunday afternoon, not a mask or latex glove in sight.  That piece of it was certainly never part of what made this painting particularly noteworthy before now.  But because they feel frozen there, paused in place, which has always been noteworthy.  And it’s where I want to start, because this feeling like we’re watching a scene with a pause button on is actually what makes this painting so significant.  There’s a reason John Hughes used it to lock eyes with Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, because while plenty of art gets roped into staring contests, this is the one that’s always going to win.  It just doesn’t blink.  And you’re not necessarily prepared for this when you arrive in front of it at the Art Institute of Chicago.  You’ve just flitted gaily through galleries of Impressionist paintings, those evanescent, buoyant, blink-or-you-miss-it snapshots of light and movement, and now you’re stopped definitively in your tracks. These people aren’t going anywhere.  They’re in it for the long haul, they’re practically developing rust.  Even the moments that should be ephemeral – the smoke emitted from a tugboat stack, the leaping dog in the foreground, the ripples in the water, that single cloud hanging in the sky – feel heavy and solid, and as frozen as the quarantine ice cream you can now run to the kitchen to get more of, because, you know, pause button.

Understanding this trajectory from light to heavy, from fleeting to frozen, from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism, and specifically George Seurat’s particular brand of meticulous and scientific Post-Impressionism, requires the kind of rational methodology that he was famous for.  And to start, let’s pop into our time machines and go all the way back to episode one, when we looked at Cezanne’s Fruit and Jug on a Table, and unpacked the whole idea of the Post-Impressionists: that band of misfits – most famously Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat – who occupied the time and space in the avant garde art world between the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886 – where Seurat actually debuted this painting –  and Cezanne’s death in 1906.  These artists didn’t really have that much in common with each other – the moniker “Post-Impressionism” came later as a catchall – but they all borrowed from the Impressionist palette and subject matter and permission to experiment, and then pushed back hard against everything else the Impressionists stood for.  Impressionism, as we’ve just said, and as you might even be able to deduce from the name, is about capturing the brief impression of a changing thing, like light.  Their paintings were finished with a quickness and a sketchiness and often weren’t finished at all.  It took Monet over 30 canvases to capture the changing light as it reflected off Rouen Cathedral, which we talked about in episode 7, and even then, after 30 paintings, he didn’t presume to be done.  But the Post-Impressionists finished what they started.  They took their time, taking Impressionism’s sketchy lightness and providing it with a greater sense of structure and monumentality.  And they did so with a very deliberate aim: to take the truly radical, modernist idea that there’s no objective truth to this world, that it only exists so far as our own subjective eyes can process it, and to then capture this subjective experiencing of the world in a systematic and objective way.  In other words, they wanted to depict, on a canvas, the fact that we can all look at the same thing and process that visual information differently, both from one another and even from ourselves, from the last time we looked.  And we talked at length in episode one about how Cezanne does this, how his apples and jug and the table itself are all being seen from different perspectives and how precarious that feels.  You have stationary apples threatening to tumble down a flat table, when in reality he’s just capturing his own shifting perspective over the course of the time it took him to paint the still life – dozens of overlapping, successive perceptions of the same thing.  An objective rendering of his own subjectivity.  And you’ll notice, it looks pretty wonky.  Sure it looks wonky.  It’s an experiment.  And so is “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” except this painting is more of, well, a science experiment.

It’s easy to imagine art and science as existing on two different sides of a spectrum – the rational white lab coated scientist peering into a test tube opposite a band of freewheeling, turpentine-sniffing avant garde artists.  But experimentation is critical to both, and when it comes to the technique of Pointillism in particular, so is theory.  But we’ll come back to this.  First let’s look at Pointillism in practice.

Pointillism comes from the French word point, or dot, which is all you can see when you go up close to a Seurat, and especially this Seurat.  Instead of blended brush strokes, you’re looking at lots and lots and lots of dots.  Imagine Seurat’s brush like a little pecking hen, dab dab dab, and you begin to realize why this painting took him two years to complete, and why he completed relatively few canvases of note in his lifetime. It’s fairly mind blowing to imagine how specific and precise it would be to paint like this, especially on a canvas of this size, which is about 7 x 10 feet.  Like I said, hugely huge.  And each of these dots have a purpose, which returns us to the theory behind Pointillism.  To this end, Seurat preferred the term Divisionism, as in the principle of color division – Pointillism was actually coined by critics as an insult, a way of mocking the fussiness necessary to create a painting by forgoing long, luscious strokes in favor of this equivalent to what might as well be gluing on individual grains of sand.  Divisionism, on the other hand, didn’t speak as much to the technique itself as much as what the technique was attempting to achieve: a new, bold, and even scientific way of looking at color.  Color up to this point had been seen as a question of sum, not parts.  You blended pure colors on a canvas to create the full spectrum, and this blending of blended colors is what creates modeling, contrast, and depth on a canvas.  But the Divisionists, or the Chromoluminists, as Seurat further christened them in 1884, instead of mixing them, placed the pure colors side by side.  It’s not all that different from the printer cartridges that would be invented a century later: taking pure color, like cyan and magenta, and placing a dot of each so close to each other that your eye mixes them in your brain, instead of the artist mixing them on the canvas.  Red and blue placed side by side are optically transformed into purple.  And what’s more, they argued, it’s the most vibrant purple you’ve ever seen.  Because you have each color independently maintaining its own integrity, and then merging with its neighbor inside your eye, a term more formally known as “optical mixing,” to result in double the chromatic brilliance.

So does this hold any actual scientific water, or is it kind of bullshit?  Well, yes and yes.  The rationale of Seurat and the other Divisionists had its origins in the scientific theories of Ogden Rood, Charles Blanc, and particuarly Michel Eugene Chevreul, who each studied how the eye understood color.  Rood was an American physicist, famous for his book on color theory from 1879, titled “Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry,” which divided color into three constants: purity, luminosity, and hue.  It was Rood who pushed the idea in the first place that dots of different colors could blend from a distance, and that even the most subdued dabs would pop when placed next to the appropriate color.  Blanc was a French art critic, perhaps best known for the creating the color wheel that we all had hanging on the wall in our middle school art classes, which essentially made visual what the French chemist Chevreul had written about complementary colors.  Complementary colors are colors that contain none of the other in themselves, like red and green, or orange and blue, and when you place them side by side, as Chevreul’s work discovered, it creates a powerful optical charge.  They flicker and pop and practically singe your eyeballs.  And moreover, they literally appear to change color themselves, based on the colors they’re placed next to.  Chevreul explained this phenomenon through the concept of simultaneous contrast, like the same gray looking darker or lighter when placed next to white or black.  The color is unchanging, yet, it changes according to our perceptions.  That’s kind of profound, the idea that what can feel so empirically true is just a trick of the cones and rods, the stuff of all those optical illusions you loved as a third-grader, the spiraling and vibrating of static images. 

But any scientist would remind us that we shouldn’t confuse this perceived reality with objective reality, even if the two start to blend together.  Projecting an actual value judgement as to the brilliance of a purple blended on a palette versus blended in the brain begins to tread into pseudo-science territory.  This lead several recent critics, and even critics at the time, to make the case that the Divisionists – who now insisted they were progress-bent, forward-marching Neo-Impressionists – had misinterpreted basic elements of optical color theory.  To wit: colors retain their intrinsic brilliance whether they’re mixed physically or optically, and furthermore, it’s not actually possible to take two averagely bright colors and increase their luminosity just by putting them side by side – I mean, zero times zero is still zero.  But then, putting the scientific rigor of the Divisionists under the microscope, so to speak, seems a little nitpicky when we consider the value of their larger aims.  This revolutionary idea of objectively rendering the mechanics of our individual, subjective vision was so profoundly important to all the Post-Impressionists – and is so profoundly important to just being human – that we can almost give them a pass for willfully misinterpreting some of the more technical aspects.  Regardless of what we are optically supposed to see when we look at “A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte,” what we actually something that’s still visually monumental, even arresting.  It’s a massive, highly stylized, tightly composed, and not a little bit mysterious canvas, and, in the language of these painstaking little dots of color, speaks loudly to both its present moment and its history.

But to get into all this, we have to revisit a point that was left dangling.  We just said that simultaneous contrast and complementary colors create a sense of movement in a static image, sometimes aggressively so – all those flickers and pops.  And yet one thing we broadly experience in this painting is how frozen in place its subjects feel.  We can approach this technically - the smaller and denser the dots, the heavier the object appears to be.  But there’s also, perhaps, a metaphorical reason for this sense of posed stiffness.  And this is when we dive into the context of modern life in Paris. 

Much of this scene came from direct observation – these figures were, quite literally, spending Sunday in the Park with George – which means that they were captured in all their authentic, modern class-intermingling, fashions-of-the-day-wearing glory.  And it was actually this authentic slice of modern life that inspired Seurat to consider his role as an artist, depicting it.  He told a critic at the time that he was painting this that he was influenced by the procession of the friezes in the Parthenon, those high-relief narrative sculptures that march along like Egyptian hieroglyphics, forward-moving but flat as paper dolls.  Yet, like Manet before him, he wanted to update these ancient scenes for the present day, painting “the moderns file past in their essential form.”  But what did “essential form” mean to Seurat, about how he felt about modern Parisians?  These are open questions, even today.  We know that he had a bit of a left-wing revolutionary streak in him – which critics have attributed to the maybe confrontational stare that Cameron gets locked into with that outward-facing little girl in white – but beyond that, we can’t be sure if Seurat is implying any kind of judgement here.  Some have interpreted the frozenness of the painting as his comment on the parade of the mechanical, vacant foot soldiers that were the direct result of a technology-driven, fad-chasing middle class, those lemmings who shop at department stores, and therefore all dress alike, and who attend the opera when they all knew that the real performance was seeing and being seen in their finest.  We looked at them in episode 21.  And this biting, cynical interpretation of Seurat’s figures actually seems pretty apt when you hold this painting up alongside his other grand canvas from two years earlier, “Bathers at Asnieres,” a scene that just so happens to be taking place on the banks across the river, and also happens to speak much more explicitly to class. 

It depicts a crew of working-class boys stripped down to their skivvies in the summer heat, swimming and sunbathing.  While the Pointillist technique renders them similarly immobilized and unengaged with one another, they all seem pretty relaxed and content, despite the fact that the banks of the island of Grand Jatte were an industrial site that was only recently cleaned up, and that the factory in the background – something conveniently omitted from the more famous painting – would have been noisy and smelly in the heat, and that the most likely still-polluted water wouldn’t have been much better.  Critics have described the “Bathers at Asineres” as representing the human side of Parisian industrialization, an earned moment of leisure where the dignified working-class boys can lazily enjoy a swim, in contrast, maybe, with the laziness of the middle-class couple in the background, who can’t even be bothered to row their own boat.  Some have even suggested that if you put the two canvases side by side, bank to bank, the boy calling out in the lower righthand corner of Asnieres is speaking directly to the anticipated La Grande Jatte bourgeoisie, telling them to put down their parasols, unpin their hats, and come join them. 

But, as we also discussed at length in episode 21, the fact that the middle class all dressed alike was itself a form of revolution.  Fashion is so often a political act, as is looking like your neighbors.  And when you live in a society where the classes share the same access to the same ready-to-wear bustles and waistcoats and top hats, class systems, at least visually, become virtually indistinguishable.  This is a sartorial revolution, breezy though it may seem, that is playing out on this grassy riverbank.  And in this way, Seurat didn’t see himself as an arbiter, but simply an observer – studying the hat, reaching through the world of the hat, in the words of Stephen Sondheim.  Exploring the way that the modern world, in these little modern details, offered so many encounters that were made possible as more and more boundaries were blurred: the way the classes intermingled, the way that industry met nature, the way that the city folk put their monkeys on a leash to come to the country on weekends for a little bucolic escape.  And to be sure, it’s this invisible mixing, the very fact that these Parisians are blending together on a riverbank, rather than having their stark class differences flicker and pop when they stand side by side, that creates a true portrait of modernity. 

And this idea that modernity is having its portrait painted, helps make sense of the painting’s painted frame.  These brightly-colored orangey purply dots, which Seurat said he added to make the painting itself feel more vivid, also makes it feel, well, more like a painting.  As we said earlier, Impressionist paintings, influenced as they were by photography, perfected the art of painting a snapshot, a fleeting moment of life as it was being lived, which included painting in those inconvenient photobombs and cut-off sides, just to heighten that snapshot realism.  But here, the addition of the frame literally freezes this scene in time.  He’s not just painting a snapshot collection of lives being lived.  He’s painting a painting of a larger moment.

And so, if this as a painting in every sense of the word, then let’s strip off our white lab coats and fully lean into the painterly elements of Pointillism.  There is an artistic madness that reveals itself in this method, a kind of artistry that emerges from the scientific precision of the technique.  Seurat did beautiful things with Pointillism’s stillness and texture, not the least of which is how he played with how simultaneously heavy and light he could make the atmosphere enveloping his figures.  In fact, the critic Roger Fry wrote that “no one could render envelopment with a more exquisitely tremulous sensibility, a more unfailing consistency, than Seurat.”  This is exemplified by the shimmering, stagnant summer heat that just seems to sit, baking the air, in “Bathers at Asnieres”, by the misty light emanating from penumbral gas lights in the nightlife “Parade de Cirque” from 1888.  His Divisionist style simultaneously embodies haze and clarity, like seeing the world through a million tiny reflecting, refracting gemstones, made all the more varied and vivid depending on where you stand.  When you go right up close to the painting, you see that this static application of dots has exploded into dynamic sprays of confetti.  That little dog is leaping, those leaves are dancing on their branches, the silky ripples of the water are lapping onto the shore.  All those little pixels throb with life, as does the entire painting, when you step back out again. 

And you have to hand it to Seurat.  He completed this painting at the tender 26, only five years before tuberculosis would cut his life obscenely short at the age of 31, and with a seriousness and commitment to meticulous methodology that was wise beyond his years.  And what’s more, he possessed the foresight to know at the outset that these little dots would and could amount to something truly monumental.  And not only in his own moment, but as Neo-Impressionism marched forward.  These attenuated little dabs proved hugely influential in subsequent movements, even as they took on a different meaning from one to the next: these short, pure brushstrokes created the world of the Fauvists, provided movement for the Futurists, represented multiple perspectives for the Cubists, and arranged mosaics for De Stijl.  And this brings us to our moment, to that monumental stillness, that uncanny pause button, that speaks to us so poignantly today.  It’s not about how this ends.  It’s about where we are right now, existing in a framed portrait of today.  The world outwardly frozen, while our vibrancy, even our anxiety, flickers beneath the surface, inside our homes, inside our PJs, while we count down the days until we’re cramjammed together again.