Seurat
and the Making of La Grande Jatte
by Robert L.
Herbert, with an essay by Neil Harris
and contributions by Douglas W. Druick
and Gloria Groom, Frank Zuccari and Allison
Langley, Inge Fiedler, and Roy S. Berns
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL,
in association with University of California
Press, Berkeley CA, 2004
288 pp., illus. 64 b/w, 307 col. Paper,
$34.95
ISBN: 0-520-24211-4.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa, USA
ballast@netins.net
It is largely
because of one painting, A Sunday on
La Grande Jatte (1884-86), that French
Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat is among
history's best-known artists. That picture
is surely a jewel in the crown of the
Art Institute of Chicago, along with American
Gothic by Grant Wood and the exquisite
dream-like boxes of Joseph Cornell. In
the summer of 2004, in part to mark the
80th year since the painting's acquisition,
the museum mounted an exhibition called
Seurat and the Making of La Grande
Jatte, which included along with that
artwork a parade of historical artifacts
that, in one way or another, contributed
to La Grand Jatte. This large,
impressive volumea 288-page
exhibition catalog, illustrated by hundreds
of images (including recent parodies)
and enhanced by a medley of scholarly
talks that touch on a wide range of issues
(from aesthetic considerations to historiography)was
produced to accompany that showing.
How wonderful to have at hand such diverse
and detailed essays on one particular
painter, and even more to learn so much
about a single painting (by adjusting
scans of the painting, for example, it
is now possible to digitally "unage" its
surface without physically "restoring"
it, by making prints that are all but
identical to its original condition).
This approach is especially helpful in
the case of Seurat, who does not easily
fit in with the stereotype of a "Modern
artist," whose aims are so often purported
to be self-expression and unbridled spontaneity.
Seurat, on the contrary, claimed to be
as much a scientist as an artist (he relied
on "the science of color," he said), with
the result that the bulk of his paintings
(like those, for example, of M.C. Escher
or Victor Vasarely) are often dismissed
as too static, as lacking in gestural
freshness. As we learn from this volume,
Seurat's creative process (and it was
creative) was informed by an extraordinary
discipline, as when he decided (based
on the "scientific aesthetics" of Charles
Blanc, Charles Henry and others) that
certain angles are inherently related
to certain emotions (upward angles, for
example, are perceived as more cheerful
than downward), and that a comparable
"aesthetic protractor" might as readily
be devised for color, intensity, value,
and other attributes of form.
During his lifetime, people such as French
novelist Victor Hugo (who often toyed
with painting) were experimenting with
chance and accidental strokes. But Seurat
wavered rarely in his quest for an objective
process, as shown by his marks that are
visible now through infrared photography,
X-radiography, and other scientific ways
to examine what exists beneath an opaque
painted surface. We now have evidence
of his use of grids, and of the countless
revisions he made. A particularly wonderful
part of this book is its account of the
cultural contexts of La Grande Jatte (the
island pictured by Seurat) and La Grande
Jatte (the painting itself). Almost
as if by sleight of handor
would it be better to think of it as literary
Pointillismthis book partly
functions as a social history of the Art
Institute of Chicago in the years since
the painting was purchased in 1924.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, No. 1,
Autumn 2004.)