Dots and Data: Seurat, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty

The distinction between the theoretical and the practical has been a provocative one in the history of philosophy. This is no less true in aesthetics, wherein the theory/practice distinction takes on its own special character in relation to art production and art assessment. Theory may be the ground on which the work of art is produced, a state of affairs that has become quite common in the hyperintellectualized scene of Western art in the modern era. On the other hand, in cultures where the production and assessment of art is closely tied to traditions drawn from religion, myth, superstition, no extensive theory of aesthetics is needed. This hard and fast distinction may be contested (I don’t intend to let it rest easily). However, the final measure of its fruitfulness may not be whether the difference between aesthetic theory and practice can be fully demarcated in general, but rather, how helpful it proves as a guide in the particular case. To this end, we will discuss Georges Seurat (1859–1891), a French painter most closely associated with the school of Pointillism (although he preferred the more theoretically pregnant term chromoluminarism). His emergence onto the scene coincided with a massive push by avant-garde artists into a theoretical discursive space previously occupied, in a mostly uncontested way, by philosophy and science. In section I, we will examine Seurat, his aesthetic theory, and his works of art. The great question with Seurat is always: what led what? Of the theory and the works themselves, which was the chariot and which was the horse that carried him to notoriety? We will first consider the empirical research underlying chromoluminarism and then introduce three of his major paintings that track the development of this technique. In section II, we will turn to Sartre and develop a critique of chromoluminarism. This critique will issue out of the intellectual framework of phenomenology, which Husserl had originated shortly after the end of Seurat’s life, as a philosophical response to psychologism and the kind of empirical research that had grounded chromoluminarism. Since Husserl has no philosophy of art to speak of, we will draw the textual examples of the phenomenological critique from two of his intellectual heirs, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Drawing from Sartre’s aesthetic comments in The Imaginary, we will address the magical experience as the superadded experience missed by common empirical observations of artworks. We will further refine the admittedly mysterious descriptor ‘magical’ with a later contribution from Merleau-Ponty that addresses the same problem. Finally, in section III, we will make a more sustained analysis of the paintings introduced in section 1 with the key question in mind: does Seurat’s practice live up to his theory? In other words, do the works of art realize the theories that surrounded them, and can the force and beauty of the works be reduced to the successful expression of theory? I will argue that Seurat’s practice deviates from his theory and that he anticipates, in practice, many of the criticisms that would have been leveled against him years later by Sartre and others. We will look for this deviation and show how Seurat utilized the magical aspect of experiencing art, years before Sartre and MerleauPonty joined the discussion.