Dali House

If not in person, Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” has to be seen large. There’s a very good scan on this page at the Athenaeum.

There are moments on hot summer days when we are prepared for a miracle. The stillness and the gently vibrating haze give to our perceptions a kind of finality, and we wait listening for some cosmic hum to enchant, like Papageno’s bells, the uncouth shapes and colours which surround us, so that they all dance to the same tune and finally come to rest in a harmonious order. — Kenneth Clark, “Looking at Pictures”

It’s a pretty Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1885 and we’re having a petit bourgeois luncheon on the grass on on an island in the Seine. La Grande Jatte — the Big Bowl — near Neuilly has been cleaned up considerably after all those years as an industrial canker. There are restaurants and joints where you can dance further along the island, though still lots of factories on the far riverbank, which is why not everyone wants to come here. But now this end of the Jatte is a marvellous green get-away for city folks like us, nice breezes off the river, and we’re doing our best to muck it up with dog shit.

That woman with the monkey is here again too. She keeps it on a leash but it still defecates at the drop of a peanut and alarms the old ladies. Someone ought to complain to the gendarme, but he’s only here for the flirting.

After our quiche we’ll go pester that young Seurat at his easel again. He’s here almost every day, same as last summer, pecking away at his canvases like a pigeon. Millions of little dots. One picture after another. What the hell can he be thinking? He’s such a grouch too — good-looking fellow, nicely dressed, but he definitely deserves to have both of his legs pulled!

Georges-Pierre Seurat was 25 that summer, and if was anti-social, he had a brace of fair reasons. His father, who was in the law game, was a stick in the mud who only showed up at home on Tuesdays; the rest of the week he was at his country villa pecking away at his flower garden like a pigeon. Georges came by his stand-offishness honestly. And besides that, he really had something to prove with his painting. Now was not the time for distractions.

Antoine-Chrisostome’s boy was an Ecole des Beaux-Arts dropout who’d done a year in the army up in Brittany, though not without learning something about vision. Kenneth Clark: “It is characteristic of him that the revelation of light should have come to him as he gazed on the sea during the hours of sentry duty. The solitude, the patience, the immobility and the discipline allowed something in his nature to grow which would have shrunk in the cheerful picnics of Monet, Renoir and their friends at Argenteuil. He saw men not as sunny and convivial presences, but as lonely silhouettes against the horizon.”

In 1880 Seurat jettisoned the tin hat and piled into a little studio at 19 Rue de Chabrol with a couple of students, and then he got his own, not far from his parents’ place at 100 Boulevard de Magenta. If it weren’t for the family allowance he’d have been in a jam but, as everyone said, he had ideas.

In 1884 he submitted to the Salon an enormous canvas called “Bathing at Asnières” — it’s now famous as simply “Baignade”, but back then the jury said “what is that” and “no thanks anyway”. Seurat fumed, until the new Artistes Independants (not yet a proper “society”) took it on board for their first exhibition in May and June in a shed, “Barrack B”, outside the old Tuileries Palace.

And, like the weather now, the reception for Baignade was considerably warmer, and he signed up as a committee member, though he rarely had anything to say. But somehow, Seurat became friends with Paul Signac, who thought his new pal might be onto something with this colour theory of this. There were millions and millions of points to be made, and impressionism had reached an impasse.

In Baignade, incidentally, Kenneth Clark found the “miracle” he was talking about in the text at the top of this post. “The haze and stillness of summer have at last fulfilled their promise. Time has stopped, everything has become its proper shape, and every shape is in its proper place.” (See the full text at Artchive.)

On May 22, 1884, Seurat returned to the scene of the Baignade crime, but a little upriver. His mother used to take him to the wondrous gardens at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, and he thought the scenes of modern man at active leisure were ripe with possibilities.

Five of the people he’d depicted in the Baignade, citizens of the “donkey farm”, from which the commune’s mysteriously name derives, gazed across the Seine to the island of La Grande Jatte, and there, on the north shore of the Big Bowl, with the town of Courbevoie in the near distance, every morning Seurat now sketched and painted the meandering clot of society in their studied idleness. And every afternoon back at his studio he would carefully re-form them into mathematical clusters of dots.

Six years earlier Claude Monet had painted “Springtime on La Grande Jatte”. Today the Allee Claude Monet trots along the islet’s spine past a football pitch ringed by a running track and ending in a string of tennis courts at the southwest tip, where a lock on either side of the Jatte, les ecluses de Suresnes, inspect waterborne things. There is no Rue Seurat here, though there’s a Rue de Villa Seurat in central Paris where Dali parked for a while in 1937

Three years earlier, about seven kilometres further east and on the other side of the Seine, well beyond the Bois de Boulogne and deeper into the countryside in Chatou, Renoir had sipped wine on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise and painted “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (see the Dali House page). Sisley and Manet and Pissarro and Matisse might have been looking over his shoulder, and Monet too.

“Both Renoir and Seurat,” John Canaday wrote in “Mainstreams of Modern Art” in 1961, “were intent on pulling together again the disintegrating forms of impressionism, redefining their boundaries and solidifying the masses that had become ambiguous in their fusion with light and air. Renoir did so by retreating from impressionism; Seurat did so by plunging into it and putting it in order like a fanatic housewife tidying up a bachelor’s apartment. By a more dignified comparison, he was like a catalyst dropped into the frothy impressionist mixture, suddenly reducing it to crystals of perfect geometrical form.”

For all its crowded housing and sports facilities, the Grande Jatte still has its lovely public garden. The photo here, from Anthony Atkielski’s website, shows Square Alfred Sisley and, in the distance, the Pont de Levallois, erected in more recent years. The much older bridge leaning across the island is the Pont de Neuilly. The embankment is steeper now, likely to guard against the Seine’s higher seasonal currents.

“Seine at the Grande Jatte”

Seurat undertook dozens of preparatory efforts that history would love in their own right — “The Seine at the Grand Jatte”, shown above, the evacuated “Landscape, Island of the Grande Jatte” below, he even had some target practice with that monkey.

Eventually there were all the individual characters he’d singled out from the herd and hogtied in lariats of light. He had auditioned the island day-trippers and selected his cast.

Nearly 50 people of all ages and several walks of life, plus three dogs, maybe four, and that damned monkey, and eight boats as well. Perhaps the pooches and the ape ended up in the Cimetière des Chiens on the north bank just up the river.

Seurat had been ready with an early version for the Salon des Indépendants in 1885, but it was cancelled, so he had time to reconsider his approach. He moved his characters around fussily, scalloped the outlines to enhance the picture’s overall tone and rhythm and became bolder with his dots and dashes.

In 1888, after something like 50 different studies in conté crayon and oils and three sizeable canvases, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” was finished — 67 square feet of it — and soon impressionism would be too.

They hung it up at the eighth annual impressionist exhibition in May, the last one ever. Camille Pissarro had invited Seurat to enter, and La Grande Jatte appeared in a separate room with paintings by Camille and his son Lucien and Signac. Gauguin and Degas were to be found among the majority of the pieces on view elsewhere.

A lot of the critics quickly donned their favourite “aghast” masks. The young man was obviously attempting to assassinate Renoir and Monet, they decided. The local gallery gawkers were appalled, too, but they couldn’t stop looking at it. Pissarro begged to differ, and one critic joined him in defending Seurat’s “scientific” impressionism.

Félix Fénéon had a good stare at the “swirling swarm of small dots” and recognised that, in Seurat’s pixelisation lay a whole new means of depicting reality. “Juxtaposed on the canvas but yet distinct, the colours reunite on the retina: hence we have before us not a mixture of pigment colours but a mixture of variously coloured rays of light.” This, Fénéon declared in the new magazine Vogue, was “neo-impressionism”. The word “pointillism” merely waited to be coined.

There was even more to it than primary colours ingeniously marshalled. Seurat has reached back to classicism to ensure the rigidity of his technique and had overcome impressionism’s vulnerability to spontaneous accident. The figures in the painting were deliberately flat and anonymous, almost Egyptian in their timelessness and certainly Greek in their staged arrangement.

And for all its timeworn tradition, he built his atomised scene with molecules of modern fashion, narcissistic preening by the water’s edge within view of clattering trains and belching smokestacks. Bring on the nuclear age, Monet’s steam era is over!

Mission accomplished, Seurat set up afresh at a studio at 128 bis Boulevard de Clichy, a spot just down the street from the Moulin Rouge that’s now occupied by Clichy’s Tavern. It was next door to Signac. Puvis de Chavannes came to pay his respects, and Degas, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec came to pick his brains. As the temperature dropped Seurat got to work on another large piece, “Les Poseuses”, complete with “La Jatte” as a backdrop for his models nonchalantly stripping down.

When it was finished, his friend Octave Maus, an art critic, asked him how much he wanted for it. Seurat told him to reckon up the price: “one year at seven francs a day”. Another account places the converation at the exhibition of the Belgian painters’ group called Les Vingt the following February, which lured Seurat to Brussels. Either way it’s a working man’s matter-of-fact calculation of a bill for labour tended.

Seurat’s second pointillist painting, “The Models” represents a successful attempt to overcome a challenge — it had been said that the technique would only work outdoors because it depended on contrasting hues, and was probably useless for portraying people anyway. It wasn’t easy proving the sceptics wrong — it took a good deal more calculation. “Can’t understand a thing,” he wrote to Signac at one point.

He worked it out, of course, but Georges Seurat didn’t have a great deal of time left, as we shall see in Part 2.