Georges Seurat’s most famous painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884), hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, where visitors jostle forward and back to observe the composition as a whole before moving in to the study the technique—pointillism—that’s made this work an art historical icon.
It’s well known that Seurat used dabs of separate hues that coalesced to create images when viewed from afar while dematerializing into abstract patterns upon close inspection. But the crowd around La Grande Jatte may also become aware that they’re being mirrored by those within it, a cross section of Parisians enjoying the views on the island in the Seine from which the painting takes its name. Other museumgoers may register the contrast between their own constantly shifting selves and the scene’s nearly total absence of movement, a preternatural stillness designed to recall the decorated walls of temples and tombs. “I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes,” Seurat once wrote, “and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color.” Yet Seurat’s stated wish to fix transient moments for eternity obscures the radical nature of both the painting and Seurat’s art in general.
Seurat was hardly alone in painting contemporary life during la belle epoque, as the examples of Manet, Renoir, and Caillebotte attest. But while the Impressionists tended to gravitate toward the “new” Paris of boulevards plowed through its old medieval clutter, Seurat often used the city’s industrialized suburbs as a backdrop. He leveraged the era’s studies on optics to suffuse his subjects within clouds of dots lofted by the larger social and technological transformations of the late 19th century (echoing, for example, the color-separation process of chromolithography, the most advanced form of commercial printing in his day). And he atomized the continuity of the picture plane, a move exceeding anything his coevals attempted.