Seurat's "Sunday" painting.

The career of the nineteenth-century French painter Georges Seurat was lamentably short; he died in 1891 at the age of thirty-one, five years after completing his most celebrated achievement--A Sunday on the Grande Jatte (1884-1886). Yet he undoubtedly changed the course of Western art. For that remarkable feat, he wasn't always praised, however. Even for those of us who have long been inured to the idiocies that were heaped upon the heads of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters in the heyday of their achievements, some of the criticisms directed at Seurat's masterwork are still astounding.

Here is Joris-Karl Huysmans, writing in La Revue independante in 1887:

   Strip his figures of the colored fleas with
   which they are covered, and underneath there
   is nothing, no soul, no thought, nothing.
   Nothingness in a body of which only the contour
   exists. Thus in his pictures of the Grande
   Jatte the human armature becomes rigid and
   hard; everything is immobilized and congealed.

To which he added: "I am decidedly afraid that there is only too much process, too many systems here, and not enough of the flame that ignites, not enough life!"

A younger, now forgotten critic, Emile Hennequin, while praising some of Seurat's seascapes, came down pretty hard, too, on Grande Jatte:

   When Monsieur Seurat uses his method to
   paint Norman seascapes, especially as in that
   marvelous canvas entitled Grandcamp, when
   he describes the grey arrival of evening, he is
   excellent. But if, as in the Grande Jatte, he attacks
   the problem of sunlight and the fading
   figure, he is glaringly unsuccessful, not only
   because of the absence of light but because of
   the absence of life in these figures whose outlines
   have painstakingly filled in with colored
   dots as in a tapestry. They are painted Gobelin
   tapestries, as unpleasant as the originals.

Yet, fortunately for Seurat, he found in a much more perceptive critic--Felix Feneon--a champion who instantly understood and admired both the radicalism of his technique and the significance of his subject n the Grande Jatte when the painting was first shown to the public in the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1886. This is how Feneon described it on that occasion:

   It is four o'clock on Sunday afternoon in the
   dog-days. On the river the swift barks dart to
   and fro. On the island itself, a Sunday population
   has come together at random, and from a
   delight in the fresh air, among the trees,
   Seurat has treated his forty or so figures in
   summary and hieratic style, setting them up
   frontally or with their backs to us or in profile,
   seated at right-angles, stretched out horizontally,
   or bolt upright: like a Puvis de Chavannes
   gone modern.

It was Pissarro, however, who secured a place for Seurat's shocking work in this fateful exhibition, and then underscored his admiration for the younger Seurat by adopting his controversial pointillist technique in his own painting, thus setting in motion a pictorial influence that has rarely been absent from modern painting ever since.

We have lately been reminded of all this in the splendid exhibition called Seurat and the Making of "La Grande Jatte" at the Art Institute of Chicago, (1) where Seurat's masterpiece has been a prized feature of the permanent collection since 1926. The exhibition itself is a virtual cornucopia of drawings and oil studies related to the Grande Jatte, and its weighty catalogue, with lengthy texts by Robert L. Herbert and others, is encyclopedic in the detail it devotes to Seurat and the emergence of the Neo-Impressionist movement. So much so, indeed, that some of the longueurs lavished upon Paul Signac and sundry, other secondary figures are likely to try the patience of readers who are not specialists in the subject.

About what has often struck me as an important feature of the Grande Jatte--the deadpan humor to be seen in the depiction of so many of the painting's figures--there is curiously little serious discussion. I've seen people actually laugh out loud on their first encounter with the Grande Jatte, and among the visitors I observed in the Art Institute there were many with wide smiles on their faces. Yet, the only reference to comedy that I can recall in Mr. Herbert's text occurs in a quotation from Meyer Shapiro's well-known essay on Seurat in which Seurat is said to have been "drawn to the comic as a mechanization of the human (or perhaps as a relief from the mechanical)." The most Mr. Herbert will grant Seurat in this matter is an "irony and bemused wit," which doesn't really account for Seurat's spirited comedy.

At the same time, far too much is made of Seurat as a social critic. Owing to the influence of two Marxist art historians, Linda Nochlin and T. J. Clark, Seurat has in recent years been transformed, if only in academic circles, into some sort of political radical, and many students are now taught to regard the Grande Jatte, The Circus, and other major paintings as political allegories. I have written about this subject once before in these pages; I will cite here one brief reference to Professor Nochlin from that earlier essay:

   Taking her cue from some remarks by the
   German Marxist writer Ernst Bloch, who described
   the scene depicted in La Grande Jatte
   as an example of what he called "landscapes of
   painted suicide"--Bloch even characterized
   the boats on the river in this painting as
   "belong[ing] more to Hades than to a Sunday"--Professor
   Nochlin says of Seurat that
   "he is the only one [of the Post-Impressionists]
   to inscribe the modern condition
   itself--with its alienation, anomie, the experience
   of living in a society of the spectacle,
   of making a living in a market economy," etc. (2)

Now the only thing we actually know about Seurat and politics is that some of his friends--Feneon and Pissarro, among them--were anarchists. That a vaguely anarchist sentiment may have influenced Seurat's satirical treatment of the bourgeois figures in the Grande Jatte is certainly plausible. But this is hardly sufficient reason to define the Grande Jatte as an "anti-utopian allegory." But then, Professor Nochlin doesn't hesitate to tell us that Seurat's Circus reminds her of "Hitler and the crowd at Nuremberg, or, more recently, the American electorate and performer-candidates who mouthed slogans and gesticulated with practiced artistry on television." I think the smiles on the faces of the visitors to the exhibition in Chicago are more to be trusted than the critics who see red in everything they look at.

(1) Seurat and the Making of "La Grande Jatte" at the Art Institute of Chicago (June 16-September 19).

(2) "Seurat, One Hundred Years Later" (The New Criterion, June 1991). See also "T. J. Clark & the Marxist Critique of Modern Painting" (The New Criterion, March 1984).