The long summer of Georges Seurat, Part 2
Part 1 of this post is here.
Shown above is “The Seine with the Pont de la Grande Jatte”, painted in 1887 by Vincent Van Gogh. Perhaps he’d had a go himself after hearing the fuss that Seurat had caused. Van Gogh came to Georges’ studio at the end of 1887, and then joined Seurat and Signac in hanging a few canvases at a show at the new Théâtre Libre on rue Blanche. And Vincent made a final visit to Seurat’s atelier on February 19, 1888, on his was to the train station to leave Paris forever. The next day he was in Arles.
Seurat was bound for different vistas as well, summering that year on the Normandy coast — in Le Crotoy, Honfleur and Gravelines — and painting seascapes and harbour scenes. The following February there was another Les Vingt exhibition in Brussels, and then came Madeleine Knobloch.
Seurat kept his 20-year-old working-class mistress a secret from both family and friends, moving with her into a tiny studio flat at #39 on the elegantly named Passage de l’Elysée des Beaux Arts — it’s the angled building in the middle of the image below. This road is now called rue André Antoine, after a clerk at the Paris Gas Company whose interest in the stage led him to become what some call the “Father of Modern Drama”.
Antoine (1858-1943) established the highly innovative Théâtre-Libre in the street in March 1887, before moving shop in the autumn to rue Blanche in Montparnasse, where Seurat, Signac and Van Gogh helped him “decorate”. Interestingly, 39 rue du Passage de l’Elysée des Beaux-Arts was also Modigliani’s address in 1910 and 1911, but then he did move around a lot.
At this domicile on February 16, 1890, Madeleine gave birth to a son, called Pierre-Georges in a mirror image of his father’s name. Later that year Seurat exhibited just one painting, “Young Woman Powdering Herself”, but he didn’t let on that it was a portrait of his lover.
Jonathan Jones, writing in the Guardian in 2001, suggested that Seurat “both teases and adores his lover” in the picture, depicting her “as comically out of scale to her tiny rococo dressing table. Some have seen it as cold, even misogynistic, in its portrayal of the falsehoods of cosmetics, or snobbish in its mockery of a working-class woman’s attempts to be bourgeois. But how wrong they are. This is a loving portrayal, almost out of control in its enthusiasm.
“The painter’s unhinged involvement is revealed by the story that the bamboo frame on the wall originally contained a portrait of Seurat himself, until a friend warned him it looked bizarre … Seurat delights in her toilette even as he registers the comically disjunctive shapes of real life. Roundness abounds in a rhythmic dance: hairdo, breasts, arms, the folds of her dress.”
At the beginning of 1891, with Madeleine pregnant again, Seurat began work on what would be his last big painting, “The Circus”. In early March, complaining of recent cold and a lingering sore throat, he pitched in on preparations for the coming Indépendants exhibition, for which he entered his unfinished composition. To his horror, Puvis de Chavannes walked past it without even noticing.
“Le Cirque” was, it has to be said, a lost cause by comparison to what preceded it. Seurat had tunnelled so far into academic diagram that his vision had become blurred by procedure “as arbitrary and self-imposed,” Kenneth Clark lamented, “as the rules of chess.”
On March 26 he came down with a sudden fever, and the next day moved to his mother’s home on the Boulevard de Magenta with the aid of a friend and Madeleine and bringing along their 13-month-old son. The family finally learned he had a family. Two days later, on the 29th, Easter Sunday, at 6am, Seurat was dead. He was 31.
“Our poor friend,” Signac grieved, “killed himself by overwork.” But the consensus was diptheria, with others favouring infectious angina or quinsy, meningitis and pneumonia, or a combination of them all. In an extraordinary study a few years ago that’s now online, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that Seurat had been in fine health throughout his life, a smoker, not known to be a boozer, but succumbed to the diptheria then re-emerging in Russia and neighbouring countries. Within two weeks his son Pierre-Georges died of a similar illness, and on May 24 Seurat’s own father died, cause unknown.
Georges-Pierre Seurat was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, soon to be joined there by Pierre-Georges. Their grave is at the centre of the aerial view below, hidden among the trees. The family found room in its grief to quarrel with Madeleine, finally giving her some of Seurat’s paintings, but then cutting her off for good.
For 30 years “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” only occasionally wafted into public view, until is was purchased in 1924 by Frederic Clay Bartlett — the son of a hardware tycoon who studied painting in Germany but couldn’t fit into de Chavannes’ studio class in Paris, yet still enjoyed modest success as a painter. Two years later he bestowed Seurat’s masterpiece, as part of a collection that also included Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Cézanne, to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it remains today. The photo below comes from mss2400’s Flickr site.
The painting percolated cheerfully into the global consciousness, becoming so well known that it’s been utilised with instantaneous effect by Stephen Sondheim, Ferris Bueller, the Simpsons … and the Muppets. Below is “Sunday in the Park with Big Bird” from “On My Way with Sesame Street, Volume 1″.
Where do the good people of Asnières laze on summer afternoons now? Around a safe little pond at the Parc des Chanteraines. No one swims in the Seine anymore!
Meanwhile further along the Seine
Up in impressionist heaven on May 6, Claude Monet took a bow as his 1873 painting “Le Pont du chemin de fer a Argenteuil” sold at Christie’s Auction House in New York for $41,481,000, a new record for him, easily outstripping the paltry $36.5 million paid last year for his 1904 “Nympheas”.
The spring Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale also raked in $27,481,000 for a bronze statuette by Alberto Giacometti and $$22,441,000 for Henri Matisse’s 1935 painting “Portrait au manteau bleu”, all world records on an evening that nevertheless fell short of its Christie’s lowest estimate for the sale of $287 million.
Works by Kees Van Dongen, a van Gogh, three Picassos and two other Monets failed to sell. But the Argenteuil railway bridge was expected to bring no more than $40 million, so they cracked open the champagne anyway.
