Georges Seurat - Artwork, Relationship with Van Gogh

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Youth of Georges Seurat

Seurat was born into a wealthy family in Paris. His father, Antoine Chrysostom Seurat, was a legal official and a native of Champagne. His mother, Ernestine Faivre, was Parisian.

Georges Seurat first studied art with Justin Lequien, a sculptor. Seurat attended the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. After a year of service at Brest Military Academy, he returned to Paris in 1880.

He shared a small studio on the Left Bank with two student friends before moving to a studio of his own. For the next two years he devoted himself to mastering the art of black and white drawing.

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Seurat took to heart the color theorists

Seurat took to heart the color theorists notion of a scientific approach to painting. Seurat believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music.

Seurat theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism.

Georges Seurat : the emotion of gaiety can be achieved by the domination of luminous hues, by the predominance of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed upward.

The famous A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte shows members of each of the social classes participating in various park activities.

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Grandcamp, Evening - Powered by Google

Some say they see poetry in my paintings, Seurat wrote. Dissatisfied with the technique of the Impressionists, which he considered spontaneous and unmethodical, Seurat turned to color theory and optics to develop his own method of painting, which he called Divisionism.

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Georges Seurat and Van Gogh

It was in 1886 and 1887, the years Van Gogh lived in Paris, that Seurat became a principal figure in the avant-garde. Vincent recognized his importance and, later, referred to Seurat as undoubtedly the leader of the Petit Boulevard artists, his own name for a new generation of young artists.

Some of these painters met in November 1887, and began exhibiting together shortly thereafter. Seurat?s influence on Van Gogh is unmistakable: the latter experimented with the same subjects, painting techniques and color combinations. Although Van Gogh later developed his own style, he continued to admire Seurat.

In one of his letters from the south of France he expressed a wish for one of his painted studies. Seurat and Van Gogh made together some paintings. One is The Seine with the Pont de la Grande Jatte.

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