Seurat and the Avant-garde

by Paul Smith

Georges Seurat, one of the most popular and admired of post-Impressionist painters, has been the focus of much attention in recent years. This book by Paul Smith views the artist in a new context and explodes some of the myths that have grown up about him. Challenging the assumption that Seurat’s work was scientific or that it expressed a serious commitment to anarchism, Smith instead traces the painters involvement with the various factions of the avant-garde and shows that he was perhaps the earliest exponent of Idealism in modern art.

Smith studies contemporary interpretations of Impressionism and analyzes how the groups surrounding Seurat constructed meaning from his art. From this investigation he creates a portrait of Seurat as one who was willing to accept, even encourage, interpretations of his art that he may not have intended. Smith shows, for example, that the "scientific" account of Seurat’s color first developed by Félix Fénéon actually represents the theory and practice of Pissaro. He examines Seurat’s involvement with anarchist critics and concludes that he merely posed as a painter with left-wing sympathies in order to benefit from the publicity these writers gave him. He explains that Seurat was sympathetic to Symbolism from its very inception and that he and his early Symbolist critics developed a theory of his art that was founded on Schopenhauer and Wagner’s ideas on art. And he explores the ways that Seurat focused on the musicality of art and on incorporating certain "musical" features in his work. Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, this book presents a convincing new interpretation of the work of a major artist.

Genres: Art

224 pages, Hardcover

First published July 21, 1997

About the author

Paul Smith is Professor of History of Art at the University of Warwick. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a visiting scholar and a scholar at the Getty Research Institute.

Paul Smith studied for his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art under the supervision of Robert Ratcliffe, the eminent but obscure Cézanne scholar. Before that, he took his undergraduate degree at University College London, where he was taught aesthetics by the philosopher, Richard Wollheim. Both have had a lasting influence on his research.

Paul Smith works mostly on later 19th century French painting, and the theories that help explain it. He is also interested in the literature of the period, particularly recherché novels about art.

Reviews

[Servabo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seurat's work is nowadays widely regarded as a variety of realism that was 'scientific' in character and left-wing in its critique of social injustice. Anarchists embraced Seurat's work because they thought it was both scientific and critical of social reality in a way that was broadly consistent with their own beliefs. Seurat therefore succeeded in left-wing circles because, for all his Idealism, his style was highly ambiguous and difficult for his contemporaries to categorize. As so, when the artist entered the highly heterogeneous avant-garde of the mid 1880s with the thoroughly Neoplatonic Baignande à Asnières, it was still able to appeal to Impressionists, Naturalists and Anarchists. Once Seurat found an audience in the Symbolists who were sympathetic to his Idealism, and was in a position to er-launch his career as a Wagnerian painter in the later 1880s under their sponsorship, he no longer needed to keep quiet about his intentions, and he came clean about their real character.

To suggest that Seurat's art was scientific because he intended it to be not simply an error of fact, it is also a theoretical error, since paintings produce and accumulate meaning in many ways. The issue is how Seurat's intentions gave meaning to his work in some circumstances and no in others. What makes Seurat's work so interest is the ambiguity it presented and the fact that, for some time during his early career, critics did not divine the artist's intentions. His paintings remained beyond interpretation unless the critic could divine the rules and conventions governing it, or have some other access to the artist's intentions. It was the same set of principles that meant Seurat could confuse the reception of his paintings among the various interest groups of the avant-garde merely by remaining silent.

The greatest obstacle to the idea that Seurat's intentions were Idealist is the enduring belief that his color was scientific - in the sense that the epistemological framework of his ideas on color and his understanding of its behaviour were derived from Positivist science. This idea has been revised lately, but it would be fair to say that William Homer's view, that Seurat considered he was 'extending and correcting' Impressionist techniques with the aid of modern science still prevails.

Seurat capitalized on the succes de scandale created by the Grande Jatte at the eighth Impressionist exhibition among the avant-garde by showing it again with the Societe des artistes independants in August and September 1886, and by exhibiting it a third time at the prestigious exhibition of Les XX in Brussels. According to Signac, it was a manifesto painting of the style that was eventually christened 'Neo-Impressionism' and Seurat himself became seen as the leader of the group of Neo-Impressionist artists. But this can give a misleading impression because Seurat was not an Impressionist painter. His social allegiances were so numerous and diverse that he did not belong unequivocally to any one group. Instead, he moved easily among Impressionist painters and Naturalist writers. The broad range of Seurat's social allegiances meant he launched his public practice as an avant-garde artist without an identifiable programme. Doing this was all the easier for a young artist like Seurat, since the term 'avant-garde' signified radical politics only to a few artists and critics.

To suggest that Seurat's art gave expression to a set of strongly ideological fictions expressive of an alienated consciousness is one way of describing the meanings it generated in deploying Idealist theories of various sorts. At least to the extent that Seurat's work had meanings among his community only within the limits of this sort of theory, it is a fair judgement upon the public sense of his art that it lacked the very autonomy that the theory claimed for it. This is very much Pissarro's complaint about Seurat's work, that it was too scientific. He was articulating his growing dissatisfaction with a Science that no longer appeared to be a means towards self-expression, or a means of expressing his sensation, but which had become a constraint.

Seurat's landscapes also use performative signs. In Entree du port, Honfleur of 1886, the real landscape is rearranged so that it takes on a curiously animated quality. Moreover, it is clear from comparison of the painting with the preparatory drawing for it, that this effect is a function of the painting's features. One effect of Seurat's transformation of the landscape is that this can look as if it possesses the feeling the picture expresses. The landscape thus looks as though it has a mood, or is happy, or sedate. The idea that the painting is expressive performatively is therefore a useful supplement to the theory of correspondance as it now stands.

The idea that Seurat's paintings are expressive because they exhibit an aspect of the phenomenology of expressive features also makes it possible to appreciate how Seurat and his colleagues could see painting as 'musical'. Combinations of colors in paintings also have metaphorical moods, as melodies, harmonies and timbre in music do: warm colors are normally perceived as happy, and cool colors as sad, when they dominate painting. So many objective and subjective factors are involved in how colors are seen expressively, however, that it is very difficult to define these effects. For example, we react differently to colors depending on the visual context they occur in, and according to our mood and physical disposition, our culture, our familiarity with conventions of color in art in general, and our knowledge of a particular artist's characteristic color preferences. The surfaces of objects depicted in paintings can also borrow the colors of other things, and phenomena, towards which we have feelings but the exact quality of these metaphorical references is difficult for the painter to stabilise. In addition, colors contribute to the performative dimension of a painting's drawing, since in combination they seem to expand and contract, and advance and recede, as a result of how they affect one another's apparent size and position in depth. All in all, therefore, colors in paintings certainly do metaphorise feelings, although in very complex ways. It would therefore seem likely that, when Seurat and his colleagues describe color as musical, this was simply another instance of their taking the common metaphorical properties of the two art forms too literally - as a demonstration of some deeper truth about the root similarities between phenomena - when it came to offering a verbal explanation.

Drawing these arguments together suggests that Seurat's art expresses feelings and thoughts, and a vision of sociality, which could not be represented visually, nor expressed verbally. However, they also suggest that if the form of life expressed in the painting were to be realised, it might be possible to speak about the expressive content of the work, since language could then be used in a new way in its new context. In so far as the expressive content of Seurat's paintings demands or elicits verbal description, it actually solicits its spectators to develop new forms of life.