James Baquet

    Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was a French painter known as one of the inventors of pointillism, a then groundbreaking technique which was a forerunner to today’s common printing methods.

    “Pointillism” is named for the dots, or “points,” of which the image is made. The pointillists painstakingly placed distinct dots of color one next to the other to build up the image, rather than make sweeping strokes to blend colors together, as had previously been the norm. The viewer’s eye and brain do the blending, much as today we create numerous colors while viewing a picture in a magazine or on a TV screen, when in fact there are usually only a few colors. CMYK printing uses cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow, and key (black); RGB uses red, green, and blue.

    Pointillist painting combines two somewhat contradictory skills. One is the artistic vision needed to conceive of an image; the other is the technical and scientific skill (not to mention patience!) to execute the painting in such a way that the image is successfully conveyed.

    One of Seurat’s most famous painting (which I was privileged to see on a recent visit to Chicago) is his “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” a huge canvas (about two by three meters!) which took him over two years to complete. The many figures in the painting, along with the artist himself, became the subject of a 1984 Broadway musical, “Sunday in the Park with George.”

    Alas, the artist’s life was not the stuff of musical comedy. A few years after the completion of that grand work, he began cohabiting with one of his models, Madeleine Knobloch (the subject of his painting “Jeune femme se poudrant,” or “Young Woman Powdering Herself”). Their son was born when Seurat was 30; a little over a year later, Seurat died at 31, and the child died two weeks later. While the cause of death is unknown, the two were believed to have died of the same disease — some kind of infection. At the time, Madeleine was pregnant, and this child also died at, or just after, its birth.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. the standard, the usual

    2. living together, usually means without marriage

    3. imagination

    4. something which comes before something else

    5. communicated, made known to

    6. honored, given a rare opportunity

    7. opposite in meaning

    8. mix

    9. carry out, complete

    10. the material from which something is made