Georges Seurat. Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte
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Differences publishes a translation of Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by American art historian and critic Linda Nocklin: A Dystopian Allegory. In addition to its significance for art history, this text is also relevant for Russian urban studies: the desperate melancholy and mechanistic nature of urban leisure, which Noklin writes about, is a powerful antithesis to the fashionable idea of the paramount importance of a comfortable entertainment environment in a modern city.
The thought that Georges Seurat's masterpiece "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" was a kind of dystopia came to me when I read the chapter "Imaginary Landscape in Painting, Opera, Literature" from the book "The Principle of Hope" - the main work of the great German Marxist Ernst Bloch. Bloch wrote in the first half of this century:
“The opposite of Manet's Breakfast on the Grass, or rather his cheerfulness, is Seurat's countryside scene“ Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte ”. The painting is an established mosaic of boredom, a masterful depiction of disappointed expectation of something and meaninglessness dolce far niente... The painting depicts an island on the Seine near Paris, where the middle class spends Sunday morning ( sic!): that's all, and everything is shown with exceptional contempt. People with expressionless faces are resting in the foreground; the rest of the characters are mostly placed between the verticals of the trees like dolls in boxes, pacing tensely in place. Behind them you can see a pale river and yachts, a rowing kayak, excursion boats - a backdrop, albeit a recreational one, but looking more like the underworld than like a Sunday afternoon. The setting, although a leisure space is depicted here, is more suggestive of the kingdom of the dead than of Sunday. The picture owes a greater share of joyless despondency to the bleached glow of its light-airy environment and the inexpressive water of the Sunday Seine, contemplated just as inexpressively<…>Together with the world of everyday work, all other worlds disappear, everything plunges into a watery torpor. The result is an unprecedented boredom, a devilish dream of a little man to break the Sabbath and prolong it forever. His Sunday is only an annoying duty, and not a welcome touch to the promised land. A bourgeois Sunday afternoon like this is a landscape of suicide not fueled by indecision. In short, it is dolce far niente if only it possesses consciousness, has the consciousness of the most perfect anti-resurrection on the remains of Sunday's utopia. "
The depiction of the dystopia that Bloch wrote about is not just a matter of iconography, not just a plot or a social story reflected on canvas. Seurat's painting is not enough to be regarded as passive reflection the new urban reality of the 1880s, or as an extreme stage of alienation, which is associated with the capitalist restructuring of urban space and social hierarchies of that time. Rather, "La Grande Jatte" is a canvas that is actively produces cultural meanings, inventing visual codes for the contemporary artist to experience urban life. This is where the allegory in the title of this article (“dystopian allegory"). It is the picturesque construction of "La Grande Jatte" - its formal devices - that turns dystopia into an allegory. This is what makes Seurat's works unique - and, in particular, this painting. Seurat is the only post-impressionist who, in the very fabric and structure of his paintings, managed to reflect the new state of affairs: alienation, anomie, the existence of a spectacle in society, the subordination of life to a market economy, where exchange value replaced consumer value, and mass production - handicraft.
A landscape with a suicide that did not take place from indecision.
In other words, if not for Cezanne, but Seurat had taken the place of the key modernist artist, the art of the twentieth century would have been completely different. But this statement is, of course, utopian in itself - or at least historically untenable. Indeed, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, part of the historical paradigm of advanced art was a departure from the global, social and, above all, negative objectively critical position, which is reproduced in the "La Grande Jatte" (as well as in the paintings "Parade" and "Cancan" by that same author). The timeless, non-social, subjective and phenomenological - in other words, "pure" painting - was asserted as the foundation of modernism. As we shall see, the paradoxical belief that the sheer appearance and flat surface of the canvas is modernity is absolutely opposite to what Seurat shows in La Grande Jatte, as in his other works.
Beginning with the High Renaissance, the ambitious goal of all Western art was to create such a pictorial structure that would build a rational narrative and, above all, an expressive connection between the part and the whole, as well as between the parts, and at the same time establish a semantic connection with the viewer. It was assumed that painting "expresses", that is, it brings out some inner meaning due to its structural coherence; that it functions as a visual manifestation of the inner content or depth that make up the fabric of the image, but as a superficial manifestation, albeit of great importance. In such a Renaissance work as Raphael's "School of Athens", the characters react and interact in such a way as to hint (and in reality to affirm) that there is a certain meaning on the other side of the painted surface, so as to convey some complex meaning, which is instantly readable. and goes beyond the historical circumstances that gave birth to it.
In a sense, Manet's Lunch on the Grass asserts the end of the Western tradition of high art as an expressive narrative: the shadow thickens, the priority of the surface denies any transcendence, gestures no longer fulfill their mission of establishing dialogue. But even here, as Ernst Bloch notes in the same chapter of his book, utopian emanations remain. Indeed, Bloch regards Breakfast on the Grass as the opposite of La Grande Jatte, describing it as "... a welcome scene of epicurean happiness" in the most lyrical terms: a naked woman, another - undressing before bathing - and dark male figures. " "Depicted," continues Bloch, "is an incredibly French situation, full of languor, innocence and perfect lightness, unobtrusive enjoyment of life and carefree seriousness." Bloch ranks Lunch on the Grass in the same category as La Grande Jatte - it is Sunday painting; its “plot is a temporary immersion in the world without everyday worries and needs. Although it was no longer easy to reproduce this plot in the 19th century, Manet's Breakfast on the Grass became an exception due to its naivety and charm. This resounding Sunday of Manet would hardly have been possible [in 1863, when the painting was painted] if Manet had allowed petty-bourgeois plots and characters into it; it turns out that it could not exist if it were not for the painter and his models. " And then Bloch turns to the description of La Grande Jatte at the beginning of this essay: “A real, even drawn, bourgeois Sunday looks much less desirable and varied. It - wrong side Manet's Breakfast on the Grass; in other words, Seurat carelessness turns into powerlessness - that's what it is "Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte"". It seems that it was not until the 1880s that it was possible to create a work that accurately, fully and convincingly reflects the state of modernity.
All the system-forming factors in Seurat's project could ultimately serve the tasks of democratization.
In Seurat's painting, the characters hardly interact, leaving no feeling of articulated and unique human presence; moreover, there is also no feeling that these painted people have some kind of deep inner core. Here the Western tradition of representation, if not completely abolished, then seriously undermined by an anti-expressive artistic language, resolutely denies the existence of any inner meanings that the artist must reveal to the viewer. Rather, these mechanical outlines, these ordered dots refer to modern science and industry with its mass production; to shops full of numerous and cheap mass produced goods; mass print with its endless reproductions. In short, this is a critical attitude towards modernity, embodied in a new artistic medium, ironic and decorative, and an emphasized (even overly emphasized) modernity of costumes and household items. La Grande Jatte is decidedly historical, it makes no claim to timelessness or generalization, and that also makes it dystopian. The objective existence of a painting within history is embodied, first of all, in the famous dotted stroke ( pointillé ) - the minimal and indivisible unit of a new vision of the world, to which, of course, the audience paid attention first of all. With this brushstroke, Seurat deliberately and irrevocably eliminates his uniqueness, which the author's inimitable handwriting was intended to project into the work. Seurat himself is not represented in any way in his stroke. There is no sense of the existential choice implied by Cézanne's constructive brushstroke, or deep personal anxiety, as in Van Gogh, or decorative, mystical dematerialization of form, as in Gauguin. The application of paint turns into a dry prose act - an almost mechanical reproduction of pigmented "dots". Meyer Schapiro, in what I believe to be the most profound article on La Grande Jatte, views Seurat as a "humble, hard-working and intelligent technologist" from "the lower middle class in Paris, from which they become industrial engineers, technicians and clerks." He notes that "Seurat's modern industrial development has instilled in him the deepest respect for rationalized work, scientific technology and inventions that drive progress."
Before analyzing La Grande Jatte in detail for how dystopianism is developed in every aspect of its stylistic structure, I want to outline what was considered “utopian” in 19th century visual production. Only by placing "La Grande Jatte" in the context of the understanding of the utopian Seurat and his contemporaries, one can fully realize how opposed to this utopia is the nature of his works.
Of course, there is the classic utopia of the flesh - Ingres' Golden Age. Harmonious lines, smooth bodies without signs of aging, attractive symmetry of the composition, free grouping of unobtrusively naked or draped figures in a classic style in an indefinite landscape "a la Poussin" - here is presented not so much utopia as nostalgia for a distant past that never existed, " -chrony ". The social message that we usually associate with utopia is completely absent here. It is rather the utopia of idealized desire. The same, however, can be said about Gauguin's later interpretation of the tropical paradise: for him, the catalyst for the utopian is not temporal, but geographical distance. Here, as in Ingres, the meaning of utopia is a body naked or slightly covered with unmodern clothes - usually a woman's. Like Ingres' utopia, Gauguin's utopia is apolitical: it refers to masculine desire, whose signifier is female flesh.
Musée d'Orsay
Dominic Papeti's painting A Dream of Happiness from 1843 is much better suited to plunge into the context of a utopian representation that sets off Seurat's dystopian allegory. Utopian both in form and content, this painting with its iconography frankly praises Fourierism and strives for classical idealization in its style, which is not much different from Ingres, the teacher of Papeti at the French Academy in Rome. Yet the utopian concepts of Papeti and Ingres differ substantially. Although the Fourierists considered the present - the so-called civilized conditions - to be vicious and artificial, the past was little better for them. The real golden age for them was not in the past, but in the future: hence the name “ Dream about happiness. " The frankly Fourierist content of this utopian allegory is supported by the signature “Harmony” on the statue's plinth on the left side of the canvas, which refers to “the Fourier state and the music of the satyrs”, as well as the title of the book “Universal Society”, in which young scientists are immersed (a direct reference to the Fourierist doctrine and also to one of Fourier's treatises). Certain aspects of La Grande Jatte can be read as an open denial of Fourier's utopia, or more precisely, utopianism in general. In Papeti's painting, utopian ideals are personified by a poet who "praises harmony", a group that embodies "maternal tenderness" and another, denoting a bright childhood friendship, and on the edges - different sides of love between the sexes. All of this is emphasized in La Grande Jatte - because it is omitted. Papeti uses purely classical architecture, although the painting at the same time suggested that these utopian representations were directed towards the future: it depicted a steamer and a telegraph (later removed by the artist). And again we see soft, harmonious figures in classical, more precisely, neoclassical poses; the paint is applied in the usual way. At least in the version of the painting that has come down to us, the signs of modernity have dissolved in favor of a utopia, albeit a Fourierist, but deeply rooted in the distant past and in an extremely traditional, if not conservative, way of representation.
On more material grounds than the obscure utopian image of Papeti, the work of his older contemporary Pierre Puvis de Chavanne correlates with Seurat's dystopian project. Indeed, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" could have looked very different or not taken place at all, if in the same year when Seurat began work on this painting, he had not seen Puvi's work "Sacred Grove", exhibited at the Salon of 1884 ... From a certain point of view, La Grande Jatte can be viewed as a parody of Puvi's Sacred Grove, which calls into question the foundation of this painting and its adequacy to modernity, both in form and in content. Puvi Seurat replaces the timeless muses and classic surroundings with the freshest outfits, the most modern decorations and accessories. Seurat's women wear bustles, corsets and fashionable hats, rather than being covered with classic draperies; his men are not holding Pan's flute, but a cigar and a cane; in the background, it depicts a modern urban landscape rather than pastoral antiquity.
Puvi's work Summer of 1873, created two years after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War and the horrific events around the Commune and its aftermath that split society, is one of the purest examples of utopia. As Claudine Mitchell notes in her recently published article, despite the recognizable image of the distant past, the figurative system of "Summer" assumes a more general, even universal time scale - an idea of some generalized truth of human society. According to the critic and writer Théophile Gaultier, who thought a lot about Puvi's work, he “seeks the ideal outside of time, space, costume or details. He seeks to paint primitive humanity, since it [ sic! ] performs one of the tasks that we can call sacred - to keep close to Nature. " Gaultier praised Puvi for avoiding the unnecessary and accidental and noted that his compositions always have an abstract and general name: "Peace", "War", "Peace", "Work", "Sleep" - or "Summer". Gaultier believed that for Puvi, meaning of the distant past, simpler and more pure, set a more universal order - the order of Nature itself.
So, before us is a classic pictorial version of the utopia of the 19th century, which identifies u- topos(no space) and u- chronos(absence of time) with the foggy time and space of antiquity. The scenic world of Puvi is located outside of time and space - while Seurat's La Grande Jatte is definitely and even aggressively placed within its own time. It is difficult to say whether the temporally and geographically defined, emphatically secular names of Seurat's canvases (Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte (1884)) imply a dystopian critique of the nebulous idealized names of Puvi and other classicists who worked with allegory. One way or another, in his paintings Seurat most seriously struggles precisely with the utopian harmony of Puvi's constructions. Although Puvis could have the characters in separate groups, this did not imply social fragmentation or psychological alienation. Rather, in his paintings, he extols family values and teamwork, during which representatives of all professions, age and gender groups fulfill their assigned tasks. Puvi's works are ideologically aimed at creating aesthetic harmony exactly where disharmony, conflicts and contradictions are concentrated in modern society, be it the position of workers, class struggle or the status of women. For example, in the formal structure of Summer, the value of motherhood for a woman and work for a man is presented as - in fact, inseparable - a component of the natural order, and not as a volatile and contentious issue. In Seurat, as we shall see, the classical elements lose their harmony: they are hypertrophied in their deliberate artificiality, conservatism and isolation. This accentuation of contradictions is part of his dystopian strategy.
Gauguin's utopia is apolitical: it refers to masculine desire, whose signifier is female flesh.
Seurat's dystopia is contrasted not only with the classical and rather traditional works of Puvi. The more progressive artist Renoir also created a semi-utopian system of images of his contemporary reality, everyday urban existence, which is based on the joys of healthy sensuality and youth joie de vivre(the joys of life), - for example, in such works as The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette of 1876, where a scattering of multi-colored strokes and a circular dynamic rhythm in their joyful mixture of everything leisure of modern Paris. This work by Renoir is the clearest contrast to Seurat's caustic view of the "new leisure". Renoir seeks to present the everyday life of a large modern city as natural, that is, naturalizes her; Seurat, on the other hand, defames it and denies any naturalization.
Paradoxically, it is the painting of the neo-impressionist Paul Signac, a follower and friend of Seurat, that provides the most vivid picture of the context of utopian images against which La Grande Jatte revolts. Signac was fully aware of the social significance of the work created by his friend. In June 1891 in an anarchist newspaper La Revolte(Revolt), he published an article in which he argued that, depicting scenes from the life of the working class, "or, better yet, the entertainment of decadents<…>like Seurat, who understood with such clarity the degradation of our transitional era, they [the artists] will present their evidence at the great public tribunal that unfolds between workers and Capital. "
Signac's In Harmony, circa 1893-1895 (oil sketch for a mural in Montreuil City Hall), seems to be a response to the specifically capitalist state of anomie and absurdity - in other words, the “time of disharmony” represented in the most famous mature work his friend. In lithograph for the newspaper Jean Grave Les Tempes noveux("Modern Times") Signac presented his anarcho-socialist version of a classless utopia, in which general carelessness and human interaction replace the statics and isolation of the figures of "La Grande Jatte"; in contrast to Seurat, Signac emphasizes family values, rather than obscuring them, and replaces urban décor with more pastoral, rustic, in accordance with the utopian nature of his project. The heroes, although dressed in a relatively modern fashion, are more mildly idealized, like Puvi's, than fashionable, like Seurat's. In a curvilinear composition with its decorative repetitions, the theme of a community - a couple or a community - in a utopian future is subtly carried on. Even the hen and rooster in the foreground depict the mutual assistance and interaction that the entire work calls for and which are so resolutely excluded from the world by Seurat's gaze.
However, I came to a dystopian interpretation of Seurat's painting not only because of the clear differences from the utopian imagery of his time. The critical reaction of contemporaries also serves as confirmation that the painting was read as a scathing criticism of the current state of affairs. As Martha Ward put it in a recent article for the exhibition catalog, “reviewers believed that the expressionless faces, the isolated body position and the rigid posture were more or less subtle parody of the banality and pretentiousness of modern leisure[italics mine] ". For example, one of the critics, Henri Fevre, noted that, looking at the picture, "you come to understand the rigidity of Parisian leisure, tired and stuffy, where people continue to pose even while relaxing." Another critic, Paul Adam, identified rigid contours and deliberate postures with the very modern state of affairs: “Even the immobility of these stamped figures, as it were, voiced modernity; we immediately remember our ill-made suits, tight-fitting bodies, stock of gestures, British jargon, which we all imitate. We pose like people in a Memling painting. " Another critic, Alfred Pole, argued that “the artist created characters with automatic gestures of soldiers who stomp on the parade ground. The maids, clerks and cavalrymen walk with a slow, banal, uniform step, which accurately conveys the character of the scene ... "
The notion of the monotony and inhuman enslavement of modern urban life, this foundational trope of La Grande Jatte, permeates even the analysis of the painting's most significant critic, Felix Feneon, an analysis that claims to be unyielding formalism: Feneon describes the uniformity of Seurat's technique as “monotonous and patient weaving ”is a touching mistake that strikes back at criticism. Yes, he describes a pictorial manner, but he attributes the technique of pointillism to "monotony" and "patience", allegorically interpreting it, thus, as a metaphor for the fundamental properties of urban life. That is, in this figure of Feneon's speech, Seurat's formal language is masterfully absorbed both by the existential state and by the technique of working with material.
The girl's figure is Hope: a utopian impulse buried in the core of its opposite.
What is Seurat's formal language in La Grande Jatte? How does he mediate and construct the painful symptoms of the society of his time and how does he create, in a sense, their allegory? Daniel Rich was quite right when, in his 1935 study, he emphasized the paramount importance of Seurat's innovation at the level of form in what he calls the “transcending” achievement of La Grande Jatte. To do this, Rich uses two schemes that simplify Seurat's already schematic composition: "The organization of the La Grande Jatte in curves" and "The organization of the La Grande Jatte in straight lines" - a typical technique of formal, "scientific" art criticism of the time. But, as Meyer Shapiro points out in his brilliant refutation of this study, Rich was mistaken in disregarding, because of his convinced formalism, the overriding social and critical importance of Seurat's practice. Equally flawed, Shapiro argues, is Rich's attempts to propose a classicizing, traditional and harmonizing reading of Seurat in order to fit his innovative ideas into the law-abiding "mainstream" of painting tradition (how much like art historians!).
In order to separate Seurat from the mainstream and realize his formal innovation, it is necessary to use the modern-specific concept of "system", which can be understood in at least two modalities: (1) as a systematic application of a certain color theory, scientific or pseudoscientific ( depending on whether we believe the artist), in his “chromoluministic” technique;
or (2) as a system of pointillism related to this theory - the application of paint to the canvas in small regular dots. In both cases, Seurat's method becomes an allegory of mass production in the modern era and therefore moves away from both impressionist and expressionist signifiers of subjectivity and personal involvement in artistic production, or from the harmonious generalization of the surface characteristic of classical modes of representation. As Norma Brood noted in her recent article, Seurat may have borrowed his paint system from the current mass-replication technique of visual media of his time - the so-called chromotypic engraving. Seurat's mechanistic technique allows him to criticize the reified spectacle of modern life. Thus, as Brood put it, "she is obviously provocative towards not only the audience in general, but also several generations of impressionists and post-impressionists: Seurat and his followers' impersonal approach to painting threatened their attachment to the romantic concept of authenticity and spontaneous expression." As Brood notes, it was “the mechanistic nature of technology, alien to Seurat's contemporaries' notions of good taste and 'high art', that could have become attractive to him, since radical political views and a 'democratic' addiction to popular art forms became important shaping factors in the evolution of his approach to own art ". You can go even further and say that all the backbone factors in Seurat's project - from pseudoscientific theory of color to mechanized technology and the later adaptation of Charles Henri's "scientifically" grounded "aesthetic protractor" to achieve a balance of composition and expressiveness - could ultimately serve the tasks of democratization. Seurat found an elementary method for creating a successful art, in theory, accessible to everyone; he invented a kind of democratically oriented drawing with dots, completely excluding the role of genius as an exclusive creative person from the act of producing art, even "great art" (although this very concept was redundant in the regime of Total Systematization). From a radical point of view, this is a utopian project, while from a more elitist point of view, it is completely simplistic and dystopian.
Nothing says more about Seurat's complete abandonment of the charm of immediacy in favor of principled detachment than a comparison of the details of a large preliminary sketch of "La Grande Jatte" (Metropolitan Museum in New York) with the details of the finished painting. What could be more alien to the generalizing tendencies of classicism than the summarizing schematic and modernity of manner, manifested in the way Seurat constructs, say, a pair in the foreground - this image is so laconic that its referent is read as instantly as the referent of an advertising sign. What could be more alien to the gentle idealization of late neoclassicists like Puvi than the sharply critical modeling of the hand holding the cigar and the mechanistic rounding of the cane? Both of these forms aggressively signify class-coded masculinity, constructing the scheme of a man opposed to his equally socially labeled companion: her figure, with her characteristic rounded outlines due to her costume, resembles the way in which everything superfluous, trimmed in the form of balls in a regular park, is cut off from her. Gender differences are portrayed and structured by obviously artificial means.
Using the figure of a nurse as an example, I would like to show how Seurat, with his sardonic view of the frostbitten leisure of the bourgeois, works on types, simplifying the image to the simplest signifier, reducing the vitality and charming immediacy of the initial sketch to a visual hieroglyph. In a verbal description as delightfully accurate as the painting itself, Martha Ward characterized the final version of the canvas as "a faceless geometric configuration: an irregular quadrangle, divided into two parts by a wedged triangle in the middle, and above them - closed circles." Nurse, better known as Nounou, is a stereotyped character that appeared in connection with the rapid development of visual typing in the popular press of the second half of the 19th century. Seurat, of course, avoided the traps of vulgar caricature, just as he did not seek to give a naturalistic characterization of the nursing profession - a topic relatively popular in the art exhibited at the Salons of that time. Unlike Berthe Morisot, who, in the depiction of her daughter Julia with a nurse (1879), creates a representation of breastfeeding as such - Morisot's figure is frontal, facing the viewer, vividly written and, although simplified to a single volume, creates an acute sense of vital spontaneity, - Seurat erases all the signs of a nurse's professional activity and her relationship with a baby, instead of a biological process, she presents us with a simplified sign.
Seura has worked hard on this character; we can see the process of its simplification in a series of pencil drawings by Conte, from a few heartfelt sketches from life (in the Goodyear collection) to a monumental view of the nurse from behind (Cap and Ribbons, in the Tou collection). Although the woman's figure is composed here of several black and white rectangular and curved-angled forms, united by a faintly high-toned vertical ribbon worn by nurses (and as if duplicating the spinal axis), she maintains a connection with her ward by pushing a baby carriage. In another sketch (in the Rosenberg collection), although the child is present, it turns into a geometric echo of the nurse's round cap devoid of individuality, and her figure gradually takes on the symmetrical trapezoidal shape that we see in the final version of La Grande Jatte. The series ends with a drawing (Albright-Knox collection) of the final version of the nurse's group. In connection with this drawing, Robert Herbert noted that “the nanny that we see from the back is as bulky as a stone. Only the cap and the ribbon, flattened to the vertical axis, let us know that this is indeed a seated woman. " In short, Seurat reduced the nurse figure to a minimum function. In the final version of the picture, nothing reminds of the role of a wet nurse who feeds a child, of the tender relationship between an infant and his “second mother,” which was then considered a wet nurse. The attributes of her occupation - a cap, a ribbon and a cape - are her reality: as if there were no longer anything in mass society that could represent the social position of an individual. It turns out that Seurat reduced the form not in order to generalize the images and make them classic, as Rich explains, but in order to dehumanize human individuality, reducing it to a critical designation of social vices. Characters are no longer depicted in a loosely pictorial manner, as in the old caricature codes, but are reduced to laconic visual emblems of their social and economic roles - a process akin to the development of capitalism itself, as Signac might put it.
I will end, as I began, with a pessimistic interpretation of La Grande Jatte, in the compositional statics and formal simplification of which I see an allegorical denial of the promises of modernity - in short, a dystopian allegory. For me, as for Roger Fry in 1926, "La Grande Jatte" represents "a world from which life and movement are expelled and everything is forever frozen in place, fixed in a rigid geometric frame."
Portrayal of class oppression in a style borrowed from capitalist tables and charts.
And yet there is one detail that contradicts this interpretation - a small dialectical complexity that adds to the meaning of the picture, placed at the very heart of "La Grande Jatte": a little girl skipping. This character was hardly thought of in his final, apparently contradictory form, which he has in a large sketch. In the earlier version, it is almost impossible to tell if she is running at all. The shape is less diagonal and blends more with the surrounding brush strokes; it seems that she is associated with a white-brown dog, which in the final version is already in a different place in the composition. The little girl is the only dynamic figure, her dynamism emphasized by a diagonal pose, flowing hair and a flying ribbon. She makes a complete contrast to the little girl to her left, a figure built like a vertical cylinder, passive and conformal, subordinate and, as it were, isomorphic to the mother, who stands in the shadow of an umbrella in the center of the picture. The running girl, on the other hand, is free and mobile, she is purposeful and chases after something that lies outside our field of vision. Together with the dog in the foreground and a red butterfly hovering slightly to the left, they form the vertices of an invisible triangle. We can say that the figure of the girl is Hope, in Bloch's terms: a utopian impulse buried in the core of its dialectical opposite; antithesis to the thesis of the picture. How different is Seurat's dynamic portrayal of hope - not so much an allegorical figure as a figure that can only become an allegory - from Puvi's harsh and conventional allegory, created after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune! Puvi's hope, one might say, is hopeless if by hope we mean the possibility of change, an unknown but optimistic future, and not a rigid unchanging essence, formulated in the classical language of bashful nakedness and chaste draperies.
Gustave Courbet. Artist's workshop. 1855 Paris, Musée d'Orsay
Seurat's figure of a child as a symbol of hope is an active character in the middle of an ocean of frozen passivity, reminding us of yet another image: a young artist, immersed in work, hidden in Courbet's painting The Artist's Workshop (1855), the subtitle of which is "a real allegory." Of the works of the 19th century, this is closest to Seurat: in that it presents utopia as a problem, not a ready-made solution, as well as in a decidedly modern setting and, oddly enough, in the fact that it is organized as a static, frozen composition. Like La Grande Jatte, The Artist's Workshop is a work of immense strength and complexity, in which utopian and non- or dystopian elements are inextricably intertwined, and in which the truly utopian and dystopian are shown as mutually reflected dialectical opposites. In the gloomy cave of the studio, the little artist, half-hidden on the floor on the right side of the painting, is the only active figure, not counting the artist himself at work. The artist's alter ego, a boy admired by Courbet's work, occupying a central place corresponding to that of the master, personifies the admiration of future generations; like Seurat's girl, this child can be considered an image of hope - hope inherent in an unknown future.
Yet Seurat's works are dominated by a negative understanding of modernity, especially urban modernity. Throughout his short but impressive career, he was busy with the project of social criticism, which consisted in the construction of a new, partly mass, methodically formal language. In Models (in the Barnes collection), a sardonically mocking manifestation of the contradictions of modern society in relation to "life" and "art", contemporary models take off their clothes in the studio, revealing their reality against the background of the painting - a fragment of "La Grande Jatte", which looks more "Modern", more socially expressive than themselves. What detail stands for art here? The traditional nudity of the "three graces", who are always depicted in three angles - frontal, side and from the back, or a great canvas about modern life, which serves as their background? In the painting Cabaret of 1889-1890 (Kröller-Müller Museum), commodified entertainment, a crude product of an emerging mass culture industry, is shown in all its emptiness and artificiality; they are not fleeting pleasures that Renoir might have portrayed, or spontaneous sexual energy in the spirit of Toulouse-Lautrec. The transformation of a man's nose into a pig-like patch of frankly hints at greed for pleasure. The dancers are standard characters, decorative pictograms, high-quality advertising for slightly dangerous leisure activities.
Georges Seurat. The circus. 1891 Paris, Musée d'Orsay
The painting Circus (1891) deals with the contemporary phenomenon of the spectacle and the accompanying passive contemplation. The painting parodies artistic production, allegorically depicted as a public performance - dazzling in technique, but dead in movement, acrobatics for the needs of a frozen public. Even the participants in the performance seem to be frozen in their dynamic poses, reduced to typified bends, ethereal pictograms of movement. There are also darker interpretations of the relationship between the spectator and the performance in the film "Circus". This audience, frozen in a state close to hypnosis, denotes not only a crowd of art consumers, but can be understood as the state of a mass spectator in front of someone who skillfully manipulates them. Thomas Mann's ominous work Mario and the Wizard comes to mind, or Hitler in front of a crowd in Nuremberg, or, already today, the American electorate and candidate clowns who, with learned artistry, voice slogans and gesticulate on television. In addition to the fact that "Circus" depicts contemporary social problems, as an allegorical dystopia, it also contains a prophetic potential.
It seems to me that La Grande Jatte and Seurat's other works have too often been included in the “great tradition” of Western art, marching briskly from Pierrot to Poussin and Puvis, and too rarely associated with the more critical strategies characteristic of the radical art of the future. For example, in the work of a little-known group of political radicals who worked in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s - the so-called Cologne progressives - Seurat's radical formulation of the experience of modernity finds its followers: this is not an influence or a continuation of his work - in its dystopism the progressives went further than Seurat. As political activists, they equally denied art for art and the modern expressionist identification of social morbidity with agitated pictoriality and expressionist distortion, which for them was nothing more than an individualistic overexposure. Progressives - including Franz Wilhelm Seivert, Heinrich Herle, Gerd Arnz, Peter Alma, and photographer August Sander - resorted to a dispassionate pictographic depiction of social injustice and class oppression that awakens revolutionary consciousness in a style borrowed from capitalist tables and charts.
Dystopians par excellence, they, like Seurat, used the codes of modernity to question the legitimacy of the existing social order. Unlike Seurat, they questioned the very legitimacy of high art, but we can say that this was inherent in certain aspects of his work. The emphasis he placed on anti-heroism rather than gesture; on "patient weaving", which implies mechanical repetition, rather than the impatient strokes and strokes of the brush, which Feneon called "virtuoso painting"; to social criticism instead of transcendental individualism - all this allows us to speak of Seurat as the forerunner of those artists who reject the heroism and apolitical sublimity of modernist art, preferring critical visual practice. From this point of view, the photomontage of Berlin's Dadaists or the collages of Barbara Kruger has more in common with the neo-impressionist heritage than the harmless paintings painted by artists who use pointillis to create otherwise traditional landscapes and seascapes and call themselves Seurat's followers. The dystopian impulse is at the very heart of Seurat's accomplishments — in what Bloch called “the prevailing mosaic of boredom,” “expressionless faces,” “the inexpressive water of the Sunday Seine”; in short, "a landscape with a suicide that did not take place from indecision." It is this legacy that Seurat left to his contemporaries and those who followed in his footsteps.
Translated from English: Sasha Moroz, Gleb Napreenko
This text was first read in October 1988 at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of a series of lectures in memory of Norm W. Lifton. Linda nochlin. The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-century Art and Society. Westview Press, 1989. - Approx. per.).
Seurat himself, first exhibiting this canvas in 1886 at the Eighth Exhibition of the Impressionists, did not indicate the time of day.
Bloch E. The Principle of Hope. - Cambridge, Mass .: The MIT Press, 1986, II. S. 815. in English. language - Neville Ples, Stephen Ples and Paul Knight. This passage was also cited in a different context in Seurat's last catalog, ed. Erich Franz and Bernd Grow « Georges Seurat: Zeichnungen» (Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden- Baden, 1983-1984), p. 82-83. Minor changes have been made to the translation for readability. (Only a fragment of the book has been translated into Russian: E. Blokh. The principle of hope. // Utopia and utopian thinking. M., 1991. - Approx. per. The Sacred Grove at the Art Institute of Chicago is a miniature copy of a huge canvas housed in the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Lyon.
GautierTh. Moniteur universel... June 3, 1867 Quoted. on: Mitchell Cl. Time and the Ideal of Patriarchy in the Pastorals of Puvis de Chavannes // Art History, 10, no. 2 (June 1987). P. 189.
Anon. Impressionistes et revolutionaires // La Revolte, June 13-19, 1891, p. 4. Cit. on: Thomson R. Seurat. - Oxford: Phaidon Press; Salem, N.H .: Salem House 1985, p. 207.
The very use of the concept of "harmony" in the title refers to the Fourierist and, later, more generalized socialist and anarchist designation of a social utopia. The famous utopian colony, founded in the USA in the 19th century, was called New Harmony ("New Harmony").
Indeed, if you look at the criticism of this time, it becomes clear that it is the expressive-formal structure of the canvas, and not the social differences that mark the selection of characters - or, more precisely, the unprecedented juxtaposition of workers with figures of the middle class, which T.J. Clarke, in his last note on this painting ( Clark T. J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. - N. Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. C. 265-267) - made the greatest impression on the audience of the 1880s and made them consider "La Grande Jatte" a sarcastic social criticism. As Martha Ward recently noted, contemporaries “recognized the heterogeneity of the characters, but did not pay attention to its possible meanings. Most critics were much more inclined to explain why all the figures froze in posed poses, dumbfounded and devoid of expression ... "( The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886, exhibition catalog, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts and National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1986, p. 435).
Ward M. New Painting... P. 435.
Cit. on: Ward M. New Painting... P. 435. Thomson quotes the same fragment, but translates it differently: “Little by little we look closely, we guess something, and then we see and admire a large yellow spot of grass eaten by the sun, clouds of golden dust in the treetops, the details of which cannot see the retina blinded by light; then we feel that the Parisian promenade is as if starched - normalized and empty, that even rest becomes deliberate in it. " Cit. on: Thomson R. Seurat... C. 115, p. 229. Thomson quotes Henri Febvre: Fevre H. L "Exposition des impressionistes // Revue de demain, May-June 1886, p. 149.
Adam P. Peintres impressionistes // Revue contemporaine litteraire, politique et philosophique 4 (April-May 1886). P. 550. Quoted. on: Ward M. New Painting... P. 435.
The whole fragment of the Field looks like this: “This picture is an attempt to show the bustle of a banal promenade that people in Sunday clothes do without pleasure, in places where it is customary to walk on Sundays. The artist gave his characters the automatic gestures of soldiers who are marking time on the parade ground. The maids, clerks and cavalrymen walk with the same slow, banal, identical step, which accurately conveys the character of the scene, but does it too persistently. " Paulet A. Les Impressionistes // Paris, June 5, 1886. Quoted. on: Thomson. Seurat... P. 115.
Feneon F. Les Impressionistes en 1886 (VIIIe Exposition impressioniste) // La Vogue, June 13-20, 1886 S. 261-75b per. - Nochlin L. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904,Source and Documents in the History of Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J .: Prentice Hall, 1966). P. 110. The catchy figure of Feneon's speech, which connects the idea of patience and weaving, of course, resembles the gender-colored image of patiently embroidering Penelope and a whole host of stories and metaphors that include women and textiles - and not least Freud's famous statement about women and sewing ; in his essay On Femininity, he writes that sewing is the only contribution of women to civilization ( Freud S. Femininity // Freud S. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Trans. J. Strachey. - N.Y .: Norton, 1965, p. 131). For a detailed breakdown of gender-sensitive tropes and narratives associated with sewing, weaving and sewing, see: Miller N.K. Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic // Miller N.K. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. - N.Y .: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 77-101. Feneon's "Patient Weaving" can also be read as the antithesis of the more familiar metaphors of modernist creativity, metaphorizing the power, spontaneity and emotionality of the artist's (man's) creative practices through likening his brush to an assertive or seeking phallus and emphasizing, respectively, either the crushing passion of applying paint, or, on the contrary, his delicacy and sensitivity. Within this discursive context, Feneon's phraseological unit can be considered a deconstruction of the main image of the avant-garde production of modernity - in short, a crisis figure of speech.
Rich D.C. Seurat and the Evolution of "La Grande Jatte". - Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935. C. 2.
One has only to think, for example, of the famous diagrams of Cézanne's paintings in the book by Erle Laurent: Loran E. Cezanne Composition: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of His Motifs (Berkeley and los angeles, 1943). These diagrams were later used by Roy Lichtenstein in such works as "Portrait of Madame Cezanne" in 1962. Part of the book was published in 1930 in The arts... Cm.: Rewald J. The History of Impressionism, rev.ed. - N.Y .: Museum of Modern Art, 1961. C. 624.
Schapiro M. Seurat and "La Grande Jatte"... S. 11-13.
For the most recent analytical material on Seurat's "scientific" theories of color, see: Lee A. Seurat and Science // Art History 10, no. 2 (June 1987: 203-26). Lee makes an unambiguous conclusion: "His 'chromoluministic' method, which had no scientific basis under itself, was pseudoscientific: it was deceptive in theoretical formulations and was applied with indifference to any critical assessments of its empirical validity" (p. 203).
Seurat in Perspective, ed. Norma broude (Englewood Cliffs, N.J .: Prentice-Hall, 1978). P. 173.
It's funny that Seurat fiercely defended his primacy in the invention of neo-impressionism and tried to prevent Signac and other artists from developing "his" technique. For a discussion of the contradictions within the Neo-Impressionist group see: Thomson, with. 130, 185-187. Here I am talking about the possibilities of neo-impressionism as a practice, not about Seurat's personal integrity as the leader of the movement. Of course, there was a contradiction between the potential of Neo-Impressionism and its concrete incarnations in Seurat and his followers.
Georges Seurat's painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" was painted in 1886 in the style of pointillism. For this time, this writing technique was completely unexpected. Each color is applied by the artist in separate small strokes; merging into a single whole when viewed, they turn into a meaningful image.
Presented at the exhibition, the picture caused a very contradictory response. The audience was also puzzled by the fact that people's faces were not drawn ... It seems that mannequins are depicted ... But the artist explained this by the fact that everything earthly is not so important for conveying the spiritual meaning. The main thing is the rest of the Parisians in their favorite place: someone is on a picnic, someone is admiring the river, someone is walking along the lawn, picking flowers ... The artist emphasizes the idleness of Sunday, the opportunity to enjoy "doing nothing".
Thanks to the use of various shades, the picture turned out to be very rich.
You can buy a reproduction of this painting in our online store.
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Painting by Georges Seurat Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte: description, biography of the artist, customer reviews, other works of the author. A large catalog of paintings by Georges Seurat on the website of the BigArtShop online store.
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Georges Seurat was born in 1859 in Paris to the family of a bailiff.
Painting originally studied at a small municipal school under the direction of Justine Lequin, where he entered in 1875. From March 1878 to November 1879 he studied at the School of Fine Arts in the class of Henri Lehmann, a student of Ingres.
From November 1879 he served in the army for a year.
In 1880 he returned to Paris and continued his painting studies, moving from cultural and historical subjects to depicting the daily life of the city.
The fourth exhibition of the Impressionists made a strong impression on the aspiring artist. Initially infatuated with their style, Seurat sought to develop his own. Experimenting with color and light, he invented pointillism (the reception of the transmission of shades and colors by separate color points), counting on the optical effect of fusion of small details when viewing a picture from a distance.
In 1883, Seurat creates his first outstanding work, Bathers at Asnieres.
After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat opted for individual creativity and alliances with independent Parisian artists.
The most famous painting subsequently "Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte".
Seurat died in Paris at the age of 32 in 1891 from a severe infection.
In his short life, Seurat created only seven large canvases: the technique he created was laborious and complex.
The texture of the canvas, quality paints and large format prints allow our reproductions of paintings by Georges Seurat to match the original. The canvas will be stretched onto a special stretcher, after which the picture can be framed in the frame of your choice.
Georges-Pierre Seurat Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886 Un dimanche après-midi à l "Île de la Grande Jatte Oil on canvas. 207 × 308 cm Art Institute, Chicago
Analysis of the painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"
The artist worked on this work of art for exactly two years, more than once coming to La Grande Jatte and spending more than one morning on the shore, with his back to the Courbvois bridge, he painted a crowd of people on Sunday strolling in the shade of trees. In order to better remember the terrain, poses and the location of the characters, to clarify the choice of details, the master did a lot of sketches in order to then choose more successful elements for his canvas. He analyzed everything: the dosage of local tones and light, colors and effects that were obtained when they were exposed. And he sketched everyone around, those who attracted his attention and those whose figures were inanimate.
As a result of the work, the painting gets the name "Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte" and besides the landscape, where there are trees and a river, the artist manages to place more than thirty characters. Among them are a standing lady with an umbrella, and a man in military uniform, and a woman with a fishing rod, and many children frolic, and a monkey on a leash, and even a dog sniffing the grass with its tail raised. Already working in the studio, the master compares croquetones and decides which characters will be present on the canvas, and which ones will need to be discarded or drawn in the background. Seurat approaches the choice seriously and includes images in the composition only after their ideal combination.
The artist begins to work with a landscape without walking people, only with a river, with trees, with sunny and shady areas, with two ships and a sailing boat. And only then proceeds to the characters of this picture. He in turn embodies them and gives them a grain of irony, emphasizing the funny features with cold slyness. Only Seurat of all the Impressionists is not afraid to transfer observations to the canvas, in which humor shines through (which is only an unexpected creature like a monkey, held on a leash by a fashionably dressed lady).
In the painting, we see Seurat placing figures using and adhering to compositional lines, geometric precision with verified horizontals, verticals and diagonals. The picture is divided visually vertically by a woman who holds the girl's hand and is the central figure here. The composition is balanced by two groups of people on the right and on the left: on the one hand, three people are drawn in their poses, on the other, a standing couple.
The picture painted by him with his own invented technique, which is called pointillist, in simple words, point. Thanks to this, the work came out in such an unusual guise. When creating a painting, the artist uses a special palette of colors: indigo blue, titanium white, ultramarine, raw umber, yellow ocher and cadmium, burnt sienna, Winsor yellow and red, as well as black paint.
Examining the picture in detail, you can see the so-called geometric transformation. The entire coast of the "La Grande Jatte" and the space is inhabited not by personalities and animated characters, but by types that differ from each other only in demeanor and clothing. A figure striking the eye is devoid of any individual characteristics and traits. A hat with ribbons lets us know that this is a nurse, and her image, drawn from the back, is reduced to a gray geometric figure, crowned with a red circle on the head and cut with a red stripe.
A woman with a fishing rod, which stands out very sharply against the background of blue water, thanks to an orange dress, also attracts attention. Here the artist presents us with the double meaning of the verb "perher", which from French means "to sin" and "to catch". That is why we see the image of a prostitute in front of us, who supposedly "catches" men.
If we look at the girl with her hair fluttering in the wind, who is galloping, as well as the dog in the foreground, we see frozen figures. Their movements do not add a drop of dynamics to the composition, and the butterflies that fly look like they are pinned to the canvas.
In the foreground of the picture, we can contemplate a fashionable couple, here there is a man who smokes a cigar, and a modern woman holds his arm, whose silhouette is twisted by the lush bustle protrusions. And again we notice how Seurat conveys to us the routine and everyday life, drawing in his hand a leash with a monkey. It is she who acts as an obvious symbol, because at that time, in the Parisian jargon, prostitutes were very often called monkeys.
Sulfur, finishing the picture, painted an unusual frame with which he wanted to emphasize the intensity of the primary colors. Having completed it from colored dots, he complemented the main colors on the canvas, located near the border of the picture.
At first glance, Georges-Pierre Seurat's enormous painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Ile de la Grande Jatte, painted in 1884, appears to be a common depiction of people enjoying a warm, sunny day in a beautiful park. But, if you look closely at the most famous work in the genre of pointillism or neo-impressionism, you will find a number of interesting facts.
1. The painting consists of millions of dots
Having created a similar picture, Seurat became the father of pointillism and neo-impressionism. Nevertheless, he himself preferred to call his technique "chromium-containing luminarism" - a term that seemed to the artist more appropriate for focusing on the play of light and colors.
2. It took more than two years to complete the painting
Work on this masterpiece of pointillism began in 1884 with a series of 60 sketches by Seurat in a Parisian park. Then he began to paint the picture itself using small horizontal strokes. After that, the artist, until the spring of 1886, completed his creation by applying paint with tiny dots.
3. The choice of the artist's color was based on a scientific approach
"Some say they see poetry in my paintings, Seurat once said." I see only science in them. " The artist was fascinated by the color theories of scientists Chevreul and Ogden Rude. As a result, Seurat selected the colors for the painting based on their methods.
4 Parisian sketch inspiration
The inspiration for the Parisian sketches was the ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek and Phoenician art. Seurat sought to immortalize what Parisians looked like in his era, being impressed by the study of ancient images of people.
5. Critics attacked the artist with criticism
Seurat's innovative methods became the subject of intense criticism at the Impressionist exhibition in 1886, where the painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" was first exhibited. The poses of the people in this picture were compared either with Egyptian hieroglyphs or with tin soldiers.
6. The painting was updated in 1889
Seurat refreshed the picture by drawing sharper borders from red, orange and blue dots.
7. Seurat completed his most famous work at the age of only 26
He was one of the most promising and promising young artists. Unfortunately, illness cut short his life in 1891, when Seurat was only 31 years old.
8.The painting was forgotten for 30 years after the death of the artist
After Seurat's death, the painting first appeared in public in 1924, when art lover Frederic Bartlett Clay acquired "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" and loaned the canvas indefinitely to the Art Institute of Chicago.
9. American philosopher helped change public opinion about the painting
In 1950, Ernest Bloch, in his work The Principle of Hope, explored the socio-political interpretations of Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, thereby renewing interest in the painting.
10. Today the picture looks like Seurat wanted it
After Seurat finished painting the borders of the painting, he inserted it into a specially made white wooden frame. It is in this frame that the canvas is exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago.
11. The colors of the painting have changed
Seurat used a new pigment in his painting, yellow zinc chromate, in the hopes that it could be used to more realistically convey the color of the park's grass. But over the years, this pigment underwent a chemical reaction that changed its color to brown.
12. The painting is bigger than commonly believed
"Sunday Afternoon on the Ile de la Grande Jatte" is not only Seurat's most famous painting, but also his largest. Its size is 207 × 308 cm.
13. Scene from the park can have a hidden meaning
Some researchers have noticed a lady with a monkey in the picture. In French, a monkey sounds like "singesse", the same word in jargon means a lady of easy virtue. They also refer to a lady who is standing with a fishing rod on the shore. She's too smartly dressed for fishing.
14. The painting nearly died in a fire in New York
On April 15, 1958, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" was on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when a fire broke out at the nearby Whitney Museum. The fire damaged six canvases, 31 people were injured, and one worker was killed. Seurat's painting was evacuated.
15. One of the most reproduced and parodied paintings in the world
"Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte" and its lines have appeared in many films, and somehow was even featured on the cover of Playboy. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine made a musical about her creation, which was called "Sunday in the Park with George."
Very interesting and, which has been controversial among art lovers around the world for more than 500 years.
Student's work of authorship
Pelikan paint set. К12 "- paintings
With the release of the "Original K12" series from Pelikan, we would like to bring to your attention ideas for using the Pelikan paint kit in a drawing lesson. The focus is on the work of the artist Georges Seurat.
Materials for this lesson:
A set of paints "K12", Pelikan brushes of various sizes and types of bristles, a sketchbook and cotton swabs.
"Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte", 1884-1886
Study Guide "Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte"
Drawing a picture of dots can be a daunting task, but only at first glance. The French artist Georges Seurat (1859-1891) managed to create a completely new method of painting - "pointillism". Examining individual points in a painting made using this technique will lead nowhere. But try to take a look at the whole picture as a whole, and you will be able to see: the picture is as if woven from dots.
If you look at the picture from a distance, you will see that the points merge and form colorful objects and three-dimensional images. On the one hand, this method was used in ancient times to create mosaics, and on the other, this principle is the basis of modern printing methods.
This is how it works:
- Download the Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte kit.
- Print template images:
- Antique mosaic, floor pattern
- Frog eye
- Newspaper Clipping (Color Control Points)
These pictures give rise to certain reflections: the floor is made of solid tiles, the antique era; a multiply enlarged computer image of colored pixels; color breakpoints on a four-color newspaper.- Invite students to discuss the question: "What do all these paintings have in common?" Perhaps, during the discussion, questions of this kind will be useful to you:
- What material is used? For example, stone, paper or cloth?
- Or is it paints?
- The main motives of the composition?
- What technique are the drawings made in?
- When the children understand that images on surfaces, patterns or objects are made up of small individual dots, invite them to think about creating their own paintings, and the tools and methods needed for this.
- Discuss an action plan with students. Start by drawing simple motives, gradually moving on to more complex ones, when the dots are applied in several layers.
- Each student draws his own picture with dots.
- Discussing the pros and cons of this drawing technique can liven up the lesson. At the same time, it is worth mentioning aspects of modern printing technology (see illustrations on downloaded templates). The template can be printed on a transparent slide and shown to the entire class. In conclusion, it is necessary to mention once again the artist Seurat and his progressive drawing method.
Advice:
It is imperative to clarify everything clearly! So, when you have chosen the most interesting option and suitable materials, feel free to get to work.Separate combination possibilities
Let's start by drawing dots on the paper with a paintbrush. At this stage, students are expected to use brushes of different thicknesses, each time getting a different result. You can experiment and apply dots using plugs or similar round objects.
Technique for applying dots with cotton swabs (confetti effect)
For a change, you can use cotton swabs instead of a brush. Prepare the paints for dotting. To do this, using a regular brush, add a few drops of water to the paint tin. Stir the paint with a brush until bubbles appear. Then fill the palette on the lid of the kit with thinned paint. Feel free to put dots on the paper, periodically dipping a cotton swab into the resulting paint.
Dots made with a cotton swab. (Examples of drawing points).Color the dots
You can also start by coloring different kinds of dots. To do this, use our templates. The house in the picture looks quite recognizable. Students can simply color in the rest of the points, for example, with colored markers.
Template from the download kit - "House of dots".Schematic representation of figures
To begin, students draw simple geometric shapes on paper with a thin pencil. Alternatively, download and print templates ready for use in the lesson.
You can download templates with simple shapes and get started right away.Now dilute more paint in the palette (see the confetti technique). To get started, try experimenting with the primary colors: yellow, magenta red, and cyan.
Then, dip a cotton swab in a previously prepared paint, such as purple-red, and paint on the selected shape. Now paint the space around the shape with a different base color, for example, blue.
Finally, cover the entire page with a third primary color, in this case yellow.
First paint the shape with magenta-red dots, then blue the space around it, and finally cover the whole drawing with yellow dots.
In the download kit you will find detailed instructions for the above technique.Encourage your students to experiment with different color combinations. The resulting color variety can surprise.
Various color combinations: yellow and magenta red, magenta red and cyan.
And here is a space that is uniformly filled with yellow, purple-red and cyan dots. You get an equally interesting effect if you use secondary colors: orange, purple and green.Working with confetti
An interesting way to add dots is to use real confetti. Pour the confetti onto a large piece of paper. Have each student “draw” a simple shape, such as a square or a house, out of confetti on cardboard. As always, you can use our templates. For example, an image of a house. The bold contour lines make it easy for students to fill the shape with a scattering of confetti.
Download the Confetti House template.Additional advice:
Point shape
The drawing will turn out to be more interesting and natural if you apply points with a brush. In this case, the dots come out in an irregular shape, as opposed to uniformly circular dots in a printed or printed pattern.Color effect
The result of a bitmap image largely depends on the selected color and its density. Those. the more dots of one specific color, the clearer the shade of this particular color will be acquired by other colors.Working with the "Color Wheel"
Use Pelikan's Color Wheel to achieve a specific hue. He will help you choose the colors to mix with the main ones.Complementary contrasts
Experiment with different color effects and combinations. To create complementary contrasts, we need contrasting colors. To do this, apply both contrasting colors alternately. They are easy to find on the "Color Kuga".Various motives
You can paint with dots not only simple motives, like a house or a heart, but also more complex ones. Pelikan's Pedagogical Guide offers you another template for download, the Mill. - Invite students to discuss the question: "What do all these paintings have in common?" Perhaps, during the discussion, questions of this kind will be useful to you: