Two of the paintings I found to be most
interesting during my visit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art were Georges
Seurat’s Study for A Sunday on La Grande
Jatte and Paul Signac’s Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde
(La Bonne-Mere), Marseilles. Both immediately caught my eye with their
dynamic compositions and strong usage of color.
Also, I was excited to see work by Seurat because he was an artist that
we had briefly discussed in class.
Study
for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
is exactly what it sounds like. It is a
preliminary oil painting describing the overall composition for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La
Grande Jatte. The most noticeable difference between this study and the
complete painting is the way in which Seurat applied the paint to the
canvas. In the preliminary study the
colors come together by way of short, patchy brush strokes. While in the final work of art, the paint was
applied in a more purposeful and systematic manner. His style of painting has
come to be known as Pointillism or Divisionism.
It involves the placement of small touches of individual colors in close
proximity to each other. This allows the
colors to blend in the eye of the spectator, giving the painting a brilliant
and harmonious unification.
In comparison to Seurat, Signac delved
even deeper into the methodology of Divisionism. He focused on the division of light into
components of pure color, arranging rectangular brushstrokes into mosaic-like
patterns. Also, due to the fact that he
employed the use of unmixed pigments, the color of this painting is more
luminous and vibrant that those of Seurat.
Other than the style in which they were
painted, what the two paintings have in common is quite obvious. They share a fairly similar subject matter
with both depicting calm, relaxing scenes near bodies of water. Also, in areas, they demonstrate a shift in
color from dark to light, creating depth and clear points of focus.
 |
| Study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884 Georges Seurat Oil on canvas |
 |
|
Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La
Bonne-Mere), Marseilles, 1905-6Paul Signac Oil on canvas |
Ivana:
ReplyDeleteThis is excellent critical commentary! I really feel you should take as many art history classes as you can, and maybe be a curatorial studies minor. You have a natural gift for research and are also very perceptive...I am really impressed, an so glad you recalled having mentioned Seurat in the studio a few weeks back in relation to pointillism!