A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Artist Georges-Pierre Seurat
Year 1884–1886
Medium Oil on canvas
Subject People relaxing at la Grande Jatte, Paris
Dimensions 207.6 cm × 308 cm (81.7 in × 121.25 in)
Location Art Institute of Chicago[1]

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (French: Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte) painted in 1884, is one of Georges Seurat's most famous works, and is an example of pointillism.

Background

In 1879 Georges Seurat enlisted as a soldier in the French army and was back home by 1880. Later, he ran a small painter’s studio in Paris, and in 1883 showed his work publicly for the first time. The following year, Seurat began to work on La Grande Jatte and exhibited the painting in the spring of 1886 with the Impressionists.[2] With La Grande Jatte, Seurat was immediately acknowledged as the leader of a new and rebellious form of Impressionism called Neo-Impressionism.[3]

Seurat spent more than two years painting A Sunday Afternoon,[4] focusing meticulously on the landscape of the park. He reworked the original and completed numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. He sat in the park, creating numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on issues of colour, light, and form. The painting is approximately 2 by 3 meters (7 by 10 feet) in size.

Inspired by optical effects and perception inherent in the color theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and others, Seurat adapted this scientific research to his painting.[5] Seurat contrasted miniature dots or small brushstrokes of colors that when unified optically in the human eye were perceived as a single shade or hue. He believed that this form of painting, called divisionism at the time but now known as pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brushstrokes. The use of dots of almost uniform size came in the second year of his work on the painting, 1885–86. To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago.

La Grande Jatte, toward Clichy, 2006

The Island of la Grande Jatte is located at the very gates of Paris, lying in the Seine between Neuilly and Levallois-Perret, a short distance from where currently stands La Défense business district. Although for many years it was an industrial site, it is today the site of a public garden and a housing development. When Seurat began the painting in 1884, the island was a bucolic retreat far from the urban center.

The painting was first exhibited in 1886, dominating the second Salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, of which Seurat had been a founder in 1884. Seurat was extremely disciplined, always serious, and private to the point of secretiveness—for the most part, steering his own steady course. As a painter, he wanted to make a difference in the history of art and with La Grand Jatte, succeeded.[6]

Interpretation

The left bank of working class Bathers at Asnières mirrors the right bank of the bourgeoisie on La Grande Jatte.

Seurat's painting was a mirror impression of his own painting, Bathers at Asnières, completed shortly before, in 1884. Whereas the bathers in that earlier painting are doused in light, almost every figure on La Grande Jatte appears to be cast in shadow, either under trees or an umbrella, or from another person. For Parisians, Sunday was the day to escape the heat of the city and head for the shade of the trees and the cool breezes that came off the river. And at first glance, the viewer sees many different people relaxing in a park by the river. On the right, a fashionable couple, the woman with the sunshade and the man in his top hat, are on a stroll. On the left, another woman who is also well dressed extends her fishing pole over the water. There is a small man with the black hat and thin cane looking at the river, and a white dog with a brown head, a woman knitting, a man playing a horn, two soldiers standing at attention as the musician plays, and a woman hunched under an orange umbrella. Seurat also painted a man with a pipe, a woman under a parasol in a boat filled with rowers, and a couple admiring their infant child.[7]

Some of the characters are doing curious things. The lady on the right side has a monkey on a leash. A lady on the left near the river bank is fishing. The area was known at the time as being a place to procure prostitutes among the bourgeoisie, a likely allusion of the otherwise odd "fishing" rod. In the painting's center stands a little girl dressed in white (who is not in a shadow), who stares directly at the viewer of the painting. This may be interpreted as someone who is silently questioning the audience: "What will become of these people and their class?" Seurat paints their prospects bleakly, cloaked as they are in shadow and suspicion of sin.[8]

Notable Marxist historian and philosopher Ernst Bloch was one of the forerunners of drawing social and political significance from Seurat’s La Grande Jatte. The historian’s focal point was Seurat’s mechanical use of the figures and what their static nature said about French society at the time. Afterward, the work received heavy criticism by many that centered on the artist’s mathematical and robotic interpretation of modernity in Paris.[7]

According to historian of Modernism William R. Everdell, "Seurat himself told a sympathetic critic, Gustave Kahn, that his model was the Panathenaic procession in the Parthenon frieze. But Seurat didn't want to paint ancient Athenians. He wanted 'to make the moderns file past ... in their essential form.' By 'moderns' he meant nothing very complicated. He wanted ordinary people as his subject, and ordinary life. He was a bit of a democract—a "Communard," as one of his friends remarked, referring to the left-wing revolutionaries of 1871; and he was fascinated by the way things distinct and different encountered each other: the city and the country, the farm and the factory, the bourgeois and the proletarian meeting at their edges in a sort of harmony of opposites."[9]

The border of the painting is, unusually, in inverted color, as if the world around them is also slowly inverting from the way of life they have known. Seen in this context, the boy who bathes on the other side of the river bank at Asnières appears to be calling out to them, as if to say, "We are the future. Come and join us".[8]

Painting materials

Seurat painted the 'La Grande Jatte' in three distinct stages.[10] In the first stage, which was started in 1884, Seurat mixed his paints from several individual pigments and was still using dull earth pigments such as ochre or burnt sienna. In the second stage, during 1885 and 1886, Seurat dispensed with the earth pigments and also limited the number of individual pigments in his paints. This change in Seurat's palette was due to his application of the advanced color theories of his time. His intention was to paint small dots or strokes of pure color that would then mix on the retina of the beholder to achieve the desired color impression instead of the usual practice of mixing individual pigments.

Seurat's palette consisted of the usual pigments of his time[11][12] such as cobalt blue, emerald green and vermilion. Additionally, Seurat used then new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), predominantly for yellow highlights in the sunlit grass in the middle of the painting but also in mixtures with orange and blue pigments. In the century and more since the painting's completion, the zinc yellow has darkened to brown—a color degeneration that was already showing in the painting in Seurat's lifetime.[13] The discoloration of the originally bright yellow zinc yellow (zinc chromate) to brownish color is due to the chemical reaction of the chromate ions to orange-colored dichromate ions.[14] In the third stage during 1888-89 Seurat added the colored borders to his composition.

The results of investigation into the discoloration of this painting have been ingeniously combined with further research into natural aging of paints to digitally rejuvenate the painting.[15][16]

Acquisition by the Art Institute of Chicago

On display at the Art Institute of Chicago

In 1923, Frederic Bartlett was appointed trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago. He and his second wife, Helen Birch Bartlett, loaned their collection of French Post-Impressionist and Modernist art to the museum. It was Mrs. Bartlett who had an interest in French and avant-garde artists and influenced her husband's collecting tastes. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was purchased on the advice of the Art Institute of Chicago's curatorial staff in 1924.[17]

In conceptual artist Don Celender's 1974–5 book Observation and Scholarship Examination for Art Historians, Museum Directors, Artists, Dealers and Collectors, it is claimed that the institute paid $24,000 for the work[17][18] (over $328,000 in 2013 Dollars[19]).

In 1958, the painting was loaned out for the only time: to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. On 15 April 1958, a fire there, which killed one person on the second floor of the museum, forced the evacuation of the painting, which had been on a floor above the fire in the Whitney Museum, which adjoined MoMA at the time.[20]

Picture of the painting being covered by firefighters here: .

In popular culture

External video
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884, 1884-86, Smarthistory[21]

The January 1974 issue of Playboy magazine featured Nancy Cameron, its Playmate of the Month, on its cover, superimposed on the painting in similar style.[22]

The painting was the basis for the 1984 Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. Subsequently, the painting is sometimes referred to by the misnomer "Sunday in the Park".

The painting is prominently featured in the 1986 comedy film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Such use is parodied, among others, in Looney Tunes: Back in Action and an episode of Family Guy.

In the Simpsons episode "Mom and Pop Art" (10x19), Barney Gumble offers to pay for a beer with a handmade reproduction of the painting.

At the Old Deaf School Park in Columbus, Ohio, sculptor James T. Mason re-created the painting in topiary form;[23] the installation was completed in 1989.

The painting was the inspiration for a commemorative poster printed for the 1993 Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix, with racing cars and the Detroit skyline added.

In 2011, the cast of the US version of The Office re-created the painting for a poster to promote the show's seventh season finale.[24]

The cover photo of the June 2014 edition of San Francisco magazine, "The Oakland Issue: Special Edition", features a scene on the shore of Lake Merritt that re-creates the poses of the figures in Seurat's painting.[25]

Related works by Seurat

References

  1. ↑ Roch, Christine L. "From "Rube Town" to Modern Metropolis:".
  2. ↑ Janis Tomlinson, ed., Readings in Nineteenth-Century Art, 1996
  3. ↑ Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Nineteenth-Century European Art, 2012 (3rd Edition)
  4. ↑ "YouTube". Retrieved 2016-02-13.
  5. ↑ Robert Herbert, Neo-Impressionism, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1968, Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 68-16803
  6. ↑ Herbert, Robert L., Neil Harris, and Georges Seurat. Seurat and the making of La Grande Jatte. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago in association with the University of California Press, 2004. Print.
  7. 1 2 Burleigh, Robert, Seurat and La Grande Jatte: connecting the dots, New York: H.N. Abrams in association with the Art Institute of Chicago, 2004. Print
  8. 1 2 BBC, The Private Life of a Masterpiece (2005) Series 4, Georges Seurat: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
  9. ↑ William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 66-7.
  10. ↑ Inge Fiedler, La Grande Jatte: A Study of the Painting Materials, in Robert L. Herbert, Douglas W. Druick, Gloria Groom, Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte, University of California, 2004
  11. ↑ Inge Fiedler, A Technical Evaluation of the Grande Jatte, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, The Grande Jatte at 100 (1989), pp. 173-179+244-245
  12. ↑ Georges Seurat, 'Sunday afternoon on La Grande Jatte', ColourLex
  13. ↑ Gage, John (1993). Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. Boston: Little, Brown. pp. 220, 224..
  14. ↑ Casadio, F., I. Fiedler, K. A. Gray, and R. Warta. Deterioration of zinc potassium chromate pigments: elucidating the effects of paint composition and environmental conditions on chromatic alteration. In ICOM-CC 15th Triennial Conference Preprints, New Delhi, 22–26 September 2008, ed. J. Bridgland, 572–580. Paris: International Council of Museums.
  15. ↑ Berns, R. S., Byrns, S., Casadio, F., Fiedler, I., Gallagher, C., Imai, F. H., … Taplin, L. A. Rejuvenating the color palette of Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884: A simulation. Color Research & Application, 31(4), 278 – 293, DOI: 10.1002/col.20223
  16. ↑ Berns, R.S. Rejuvenating Seurat’s Palette Using Color and Imaging Science: A Simulation, Website of R.S. Berns at Rochester Institute of Technology
  17. 1 2 The Art Institute of Chicago, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884
  18. ↑ Celender, Don (1974–75). Observation and Scholarship Examination for Art Historians, Museum Directors, Artists, Dealers, and Collectors. Publication was produced for an exhibition held at the O.K. Harris Gallery, 383 West Broadway, New York, from 7 to 28 December 1974. pp. Question: Page 5, Answer: Page 23.
  19. ↑ CPI Inflation Calculator
  20. ↑ New York Times, Fire in Modern Museum; Most Art Safe; 6 Canvases Burned, Seurat's Removed, 16 April 1958
  21. ↑ "Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte". Smarthistory at Khan Academy. Retrieved April 23, 2016.
  22. ↑ Lucass Pivey, Stagerism Alert: Seurat
  23. ↑ The Topiary Park: A Unique Interpretation of a Painting Archived 20 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine.
  24. ↑ "First Look: NBC's amazing new 'The Office' poster". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on 26 October 2015.
  25. ↑ "The Oakland Issue". San Francisco Magazine.

Further reading

(see index)

External links

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