The Politics of Pointillism
By: Remy Dean
Tags: Art, Painting, History, Art History, Modernism

The Politics of Pointillism

French painter George-Pierre Seurat used Pointillism and Divisionism to point out the divisions in society and create the first Modernist Masterpieces

Georges-Pierre Seurat was a Neo-Impressionist painter, who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he was taught by a disciple of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who in turn had been taught by Eugène Delacroix. After taking a year out from his studies for military service, Seurat exhibited his drawing Aman-Jean at the official Salon in 1883 and was heralded as the bright new star of French art.

Georges-Pierre Seurat: Bathers at Asnières (1884)

The following year, his painting Bathers at Asnières caused controversy at the Salon and was rejected. This spurred Seurat and several of his colleagues to found the Société des Artistes Indépendants. This Society of Independent Artists staged their own exhibitions and these art shows eventually became more popular and relevant than those of the official Salon because they increasingly broke with tradition and used art for different purposes.

Georges-Pierre Seurat: Bathers at Asnières (1884) [view license]

Often referred to as “the first Modernist masterpiece”, this is a large oil on canvas (just over 10 feet across) that began the shake-up of art that grew into Modernism. The size of the canvas alone was shocking because of its subject matter. Such large canvasses were the preserve of important historical subjects, but Seurat thought that these ‘noble workers’ were as important as the people in grand historical paintings hung in museums.

His technique was also a great innovation. The green colour of the grass, for example, is made up of dots of pure colours including yellow, pink, blue and orange, yet our eye mixes these colours to give the vivid grass green of summer meadows. This is the beginnings of Pointillism (painting small dots of pure colour with just the tip of a brush), though it is used alongside smoother, blended brushstrokes here.

Although the scale of the figures are inconsistent, the composition closely follows the Golden Section rules of classic Renaissance paintings, also aligning this working-class scene with the great works of art exhibited in palaces and state museums. It was produced as France neared the centenary of its Revolution and therefore was explicitly political, and intentionally critical of the governing elite.

Georges-Pierre Seurat: Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1883–86)

Another large canvas. This is the seminal Divisionist work, produced entirely using Pointillism with its tiny dots of pure colours intended to ‘mix in the eye’. The Divisionist approach is also carried through to the larger formal elements, with areas of dominant colours, and the patches of contrasting light and shade, all treated separately from each other. There’s also a tension between the flatness of the stylised forms, inconsistent perspective and the great depth implied through the traditional perspective thus uniting Renaissance sensibility with a modern approach.

Georges-Pierre Seurat: Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1883–86) [view license]

Seurat was fascinated by the problem of using pigment to represent reflected light and hoped that through the use of pure colour applied meticulously with the tip of a brush, his method of Pointillism would create much more vivid colour. He made many sketches and studies whilst planning this piece and took more than two years to complete the finished painting.

La Grande Jatte was a fashionable leisure spot for wealthy Parisians and is opposite the riverbank at Asnières — the row-boat seen in the previous painting is heading here. Whereas the bathers at Asnières are enjoying limited leisure time whilst their factories loom in the hazy background, here the scene has a stillness and timelessness about it, and from this side of the river the factories are obscured by trees. Many of the figures are reduced almost to graphic motifs and are not portrayed in a way that suggests real people, as the bathers were. Instead they are made to look toy-like, almost wooden.

So here are the rich, fashionable elite strolling in the patchwork shade of decorative trees in the silly stiffness of their fine clothes. They are less human than the working class, and some of these rich folk are looking toward the Asnières bank of the river in a way that seems, perhaps, envious. As they are stifled in buttoned-high dresses and jackets, the workers are shirtless and splashing in the cool waters.

It’s only the children, animals (spot the monkey) and one man who are portrayed as natural and relaxed. The man at the bottom left of the canvas seems a little out of place and he is the only person with a natural face that could possibly be a portrait. His arms are bare and the pipe he smokes is a simple, cheap type. He is probably the ‘butler’ of the nearby pic-nicking couple, or the oarsman who has rowed them along the river. His foot actually extends beyond the edge of the composition toward the bathers. Perhaps he has ‘a foot in the other camp’, his allegiance lying with his working-class comrades across the river.

Georges-Pierre Seurat: Models (1888)

I like to think of this painting as completing Seurat’s great triptych commenting on the unfair divisions he saw in the society around him: class and gender.

Georges-Pierre Seurat: Models (1888) [view license]

Here, Seurat has chosen to depict three models in his studio. Presumably, these are models he used for reference when painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. In contrast, they are not posed rigidly, encased in stiff clothing, but as they are. They’re not idealised but natural and relaxed. The central figure is returning the gaze of the viewer. This is exceptional as there are only a few previous examples in the long history of painting the female nude where the subject is making eye contact.

Generally, the female nude had been painted by male artists for the enjoyment of male clients and almost always the eyes are down-turned or looking away to the middle distance. This was because the female form was perceived as an object of property and allowing eye contact would challenge this objectification. Instead, Seurat is treating his subject with a great deal of respect, so much so that he has made the models the central subject of the painting. This recognises these usually overlooked workers who have provided reference for the great artists for centuries.

Like the workers who bathe at Asnières, the models represent those people who create the infrastructure of society, but whom the elite prefer not to think about or give credit to. People who have been under-represented in serious art. Seurat saw art as a tool for social change and in this respect is one of the earliest ‘political artists’ to follow the example of Francisco Goya.

This painting is concerned with more than the implied political and social issues. though. Seurat was fascinated by the effects of light upon the atmosphere of a painting. First, we saw his two large paintings of outdoor scenes under the summer sun. For Asnières he evoked an oppressive hazy heat and for La Grande Jatte he contrasted sunshine and shade. Here. we see the more muted light of an interior, though still well-lit by natural light. To make this more apparent, Seurat has included a painting within a painting for reference — we see La Grande Jatte propped against the studio wall. He was not afraid of setting himself a challenge!