A volume which embodies an entire generation of scholarship on the artist. Seurat's brief but brilliant career is traced from his early academic drawings of the 1870s to the paintings of popular entertainments and the serene landscapes of his final years.
Georges Seurat died in 1891, aged only 32, and yet in a career that lasted little more than a decade he revolutionized technique in painting, spearheaded a new movement, Neoimpressionism, and bought a degree of scientific rigour to his investigations of colour that would prove profoundly influential well into the 20th century. As a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Seurat read Chevreul's 1839 book on the theory of colour and this, along with his own analysis of Delacroix' paintings and the aesthetic observations of scientist Charles Henry, led him to formulate the concept of Divisionism. This was a method of painting around colour contrasts in which shade and tone are built up through dots of paint (pointillism) that emphasise the complex inter-relation of light and shadow.
The origins, development, execution, and influence on artist Georges Seurat's greatest work, A Sunday in La Grande Jatte, is examined in a study that reveals a compositional process that used Old Master traditions and methods.
Georges SEURAT est à l'origine d'une nouvelle pensée artistique comme d'une nouvelle technique picturale : le point, ou divisionnisme. Mort à 31 ans, il laisse pourtant derrière lui une œuvre achevée, qui sans avoir fait école, est l'une des plus importantes des XIXe et XXe siècles. Son œuvre influencera aussi bien les futuristes, les cubistes analytiques que l'Art Nouveau. Bien que tout à fait personnelle, la démarche de Seurat s'inscrit dans le contexte d'une époque où la littérature se voulait scientifique avec Zola, où, au nom de la raison, l'Histoire démythifiait l'Ecriture sainte avec Renan. Ainsi Seurat, incarnation du néo-impressionnisme, occupe-t-il une place d'exception dans l'aventure de l'art. Anne Distel, conservateur en chef au Musée d'Orsay a participé à l'organisation et aux catalogues de nombreuses expositions, notamment ceux du Musée d'Orsay à Paris et du Metropolitan Museum of Art à New York consacrés à Seurat. Toute de sensibilité et de rigueur scientifique, elle nous fait découvrir dans ce volume de la collection Profils de l'Art l'œuvre et la vie brève du peintre.
... a powerful lesson in what a museum can do when it draws on its own resources." -- The Washington Times "Seen individually or as an ensemble, these compositions represent a culminating phase of Seurat's development, at once lucid, subtle, and strong.... In its clear focus upon an important aspect of Seurat's work, it nevertheless stands as a welcome addition to the literature on that preeminent master of Neo-Impressionism." -- Choice This illuminating introduction to Seurat's unusual art explores the four different views of Gravelines, a small seaport in Normandy, which Seurat painted in 1890, the summer before his death. The book contains reproductions and full documentation of Seurat's Gravelines works and analyzes Seurat's distinctive approach to color, design, and perception.
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