Georges Pierre Seurat

Georges Pierre Seurat (Paris December 2nd 1859 - Gravelines March 29th 1891), French painter, pioneer of the movement pointillist, or divisionnism.

Biography

Seurat took part in the birth of the scientific Impressionnisme which will bind the study of divisions of the matter (chemistry of Lavoisier) to that of the light. This evolution was refused by the impressionists of the first hour.

Seurat was born in a middle-class medium. His/her father, a civil servant, was a solitary man, a character which his/her son inherited. In 1877, it was registered with the École of the Art schools of Paris. It was very influenced by Rembrandt, Francisco Goya and Puvis de Chavannes, like by Ingres, whose its professor, Lehman had been a disciple. Its studies were stopped by its military service which it carried out with Brest, where it carried out many drafts of boats, beaches and sea.

Returned to Paris, Seurat was devoted to the control of the art of the black and white diagram and started to really paint in 1882. It completed in 1884 “a bathe with Asnières”, its first of the seven large tables. It took part in the formation of the “Société of the Independent Artists”, opened, without jury nor rewards, and took then the head of the neo-impressionist movement (or pointillist), which joins together inter alia Signac, Cross, Angrand, Luce and during a certain time Pissarro.

After two years of concentrated and systematized work, it finished “One Sunday afternoon in the Island of the Large Bowl”  : it is its principal work. In this composition, contrasts of the shade and light are admirably distributed in space. The table gives an atmosphere of monumental dignity, through the balanced arrangement of the elements and the figures.

Seurat forever be a sociable man and it had practically cut all the bonds with his/her friends during the last year of its life. In summer, the painter resided at Gravelines, where it made a series of landscapes and put in project “the Circus” which it not showed completed with the 8th Living room of the Independent ones. Sunday of the palm (?), he died suddenly during the exposure to the 31 years age of an angina.

In its short life, Seurat produced 7 large tables, 60 smaller, of the drawings, 500 diagrams and of many drafts, which is much, because of its early death and of the enormous labor which its process involved.

Stephen Sondheim (for the music and the words) and James Lapine (for the booklet and the direction) created the musical comedy Sunday in the park with George, starting from Sunday afternoon on the island of the Large Bowl. Mandy Patinkin interprets Seurat there and, in the second act, a fictitious great-grandson.

Works

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