 |
Image: Bathing at Asnieres, Georges Seurat, 1883 |
 Georges Seurat |
Color and Composition Systematized
Neither Monet nor Cezanne reached the climax of their achievements until the turn of the century. Meanwhile younger painters, all of whom predeceased them, took the art of painting in entirely new directions. As we have discussed, there was a general crisis in Impressionist circles in the 1880's, when the knowledge dawned that straightforward naturalism was exhausted and could now only be vulgarized. Naturalism was in any case coming to be equated with materialism, and as the century drew to its close so did the more questing minds start to doubt the values on which society was based. A concentration on artistic problems alone did not seem sufficient. It was against this background that the Post-Impressionists, reaction occurred. There were two rival but often related movements, led by Seurat and Gauguin. Van Gogh, the greatest of the three Post-Impressionists, drew from both the others and went on his own way. Georges Seurat brought to painting the brilliant logic of a mathematician, anxious to clarify and tabulate. He analyzed the roles in painting first of tone, then of color and finally of line and composition, proposing a kind of scientific Impressionism. Seurat was an extremely methodical man. In making a system out of the impressionist technique he reduced brush-strokes to dots of paint and, at one stage, used only the three primary colors and their omplementaries. Space within his pictures became more and more shallow. In the last large painting, the strangely colored Circus, the design is entirely on the surface, like a poster. Seurat did all he could to emphasize its flatness. There is very little modeling and no linear perspective. The eye moves up and down the picture, so that we seem to be on a level with the figures at both the top and the bottom. All this enabled Seurat to concentrate on the pictorial construction, which he worked out with mathematical exactitude, making use of such ancient and half-magical formulas as the Golden Mean, the division of line according to the proportion most harmonious to the eye. Seurat's early death at the age of thirty-one was a tragedy. At the end of his life he was evolving a theory according to which moods of joy, serenity, and sadness can be directly conveyed in terms of tone, color, and line. Subject matter now played a very subservient part. The way lay open, as in so much late 19th-century painting, for a complete abstract art. |