Today I’m continuing my musings on great paintings, part of my contribution to the artistic ethos of the Watermill. The iconic picture above, George Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’ÃŽle de la Grande Jatte, is, I suppose, the prime example of pointillisme, the painting style which attempted systematically to apply optical science to art, making our perception of colour brighter and more powerful.
Small brushstrokes and, later, tiny dots, of a single colour, are ‘blended’ by the viewer’s own eye and brain into a brighter array of tones than could be achieved in the colour mixed by the artist himself. Seurat preferred to call his technique ‘chromo-luminarism,’ ‘ alluding to colour and light. While he had a few followers, like Signac and, occasionally, Pissarro, pointillisme soon became an artistic cul-de-sac, but nonetheless it has left quite an impression on the history of art. (To be pedantic the painting is Post-Impressionist, but this is neither the time nor the place for such splitting of hairs.)
It took Seurat two years to paint A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and he made numerous drawings and sketches before he began. As Zuzanna Stańska says in a recent article in the online DailyArt magazine (DailyArtMagazine.com): “He would alter the grouping of people, the number of people within a group and where each group or individual were positioned until he was satisfied that he had achieved the perfect balance.†Even so, there is a curious rigidity about many of the figures. When the painting was shown at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886, one critic unkindly compared them to ‘tin soldiers,’ and you can see his point. Most of them are looking the same direction, and there’s little eye contact between.
This regimented stiffness, and the lack of facial expressions, has led some art historians to suggest that, far from painting a simple scene of Parisians enjoying their day off, Seurat was making a point about fin de siècle French society. Are some of the 48 subjects in the painting not quite what they seem ? What on earth, for instance, is that woman in the right foreground doing with a monkey on a leash?
An unusual pet to take for a walk, so why did Seurat include her? A explanation is that one of the French words for monkey, singesse, is also slang for a prostitute. Similarly, what abount the woman fishing in the river? The verb ‘to fish is pêcher, while pêcher means ‘to sin.’ Were these covert criticisms of a hypocritical society?
I hope you have enjoyed my musings, but while it is fascinating to speculate on the hidden symbolism of Seurat’s painting, it is important not get bogged down in pedantic conjecture. Great art should communicate first and foremost on an emotional level and A Sunday Afternoon… does just that. My thanks to Zuzanna for pointing me in the right direction!