Georges Seurat, Part 2

Are you feeling well rested? Good! I have plenty more information to share with you about Georges Seurat and Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. If you missed yesterday’s post, go read it before you read on. Just to make things easier, I re-posted La Grande Jatte below so you won’t have to keep flipping between posts.
And now, back to Seurat’s biography, where we left off yesterday. In 1883, and it took all of 1883, Seurat painted his first large masterpiece, Bathing at Asnieres, shown below. The Paris Salon didn’t like it, though, and wouldn’t let Seurat show it at their exhibition. As you can imagine, this frustrated Seurat and he and other artists formed their own group, the Societe des Artistes Independants.
In 1884 he began his best known piece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (shown at the beginning of this post). He finally finished it in 1886, two years later. This painting is now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago and has been since 1926. It is a massive piece of about 10 feet wide by 6 feet tall and is worth the trip. If you do get the chance to see the painting up close, notice that there is a shadow in the distant trees that looks like someone lurking. Also look closely at the skirt of the woman with the monkey. In person, you can see that Seurat made the skirt larger after the painting was finished. This painting is a great example of why it’s important and preferable to view original paintings than photos of paintings on glossy pages.

Incidentally, the Art Institute of Chicago is offering free admission to its permanent collection during February 2008. Two excellent exhibitions will be opening in February, Edward Hopper, who painted the famous Nighthawks (shown below), and Winslow Homer, on whom I’ve already posted. If you’re interested in Winslow Homer don’t forget to check out the review I posted on Anna Kirwan’s Of Flowers and Shadows. (If you visit, you will have to pay for the special exhibitions, but not the permanent collection which includes La Grande Jatte.)

Seurat lived a short life which ended in 1891 when he was just 31 years old. He had two sons, one of whom was born after Seurat’s death. Nothing is known of the children.

EDITED TO ADD: Paint Your Own Pointillist Picture

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Georges Seurat, Part 1

Today marks a bit of a landmark: the first time I had to search my website to see if I’d already done a specific post. Luckily I had not. I have been oddly mute on the subject of Georges Seurat, especially considering that I’ve been studying him and his masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, for nearly two years. But not to worry, I won’t dump too much information on you.

Seurat studied art briefly at Ecole de Beaux-Arts. When he moved to Paris in 1880 he decided that before he complicated things with color, he would master the art of black and white drawing. You can find these black and white sketches scattered around the world. Seurat did many black and white studies for his large paintings, as well. Shown below is a study for La Grade Jatte. Notice this woman fishing on the left hand side of the painting, shown above.
In the 1800s, a lot of research was done on color. This research was extremely scientific and only scientists could understand the studies. A group of writers were able to interpret the research and make it clear to others, including painters. The color wheel was designed around this time which shows how different colors blend. This new information was of great interest to Seurat who experimented with the idea of color blending not on the palette or canvas but in the eye.

Seurat’s style of painting was called pointillism because he used the point of his brush to dab small dots of unmixed color onto his canvas that, when viewed from a distance, blended into a picture. Seurat was not the first to experiment with this. It was an old concept which many artists had discarded before him, including Johannes Vermeer in the 1500s. Seurat was dedicated to it, though, and continued to work in the pointillist style until his death. He also shared the idea with other artists, like Paul Signac who painted the Red Buoy (shown below).
If you really want to be correct when talking about Seurat’s style, you should call it “chromoluminarism” or “divisionism” rather than the better known “pointillism.” It is true that Seurat formed images using many tiny dots of paint (pointillism) but really he was trying to achieve something even more difficult. To color a tree using dots of many different shades of brown is a far easier thing to do than choosing white, red, and yellow and arranging many dots in such a way that the colors blend in the viewer’s eye to create brown. La Grande Jatte is really an astonishing achievement.

Because I’ve probably already overloaded you with information and I’m only halfway through, I’ll continue this tomorrow. Don’t forget to check back!

EDITED TO ADD: Georges Seurat, Part 2

EDITED TO ADD: Paint Your Own Pointillist Picture

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Create Your Own Art Nouveau Doll House

I won’t give you step by step instructions on how to make your own Art Nouveau doll house, but I will give you guidelines.

First, glue shoe boxes together to form rooms. You can make your doll house many stories tall or one long floor. Use extra cardboard to make a roof at the top. Let the glue dry. When you look at the room I made, you’ll notice that I used the box top to lengthen the floor. You can do this to your rooms as well. Just make sure to glue everything together.
Go look at the furniture pictures in my post on Henry van de Velde. Then, do a google image search for “Art Nouveau furniture.” This should provide all the inspiration you need. To make my chair and lamp, I used pipe cleaners. Pipe cleaners are good materials for this because much of the Art Nouveau furniture has twisty, curvy lines that are easy to make with pipe cleaners. I made my desk out of card board, construction paper, and pipe cleaners. The lamp shade is little piece of tissue paper that I decorated with crayon. It’s supposed to look kind of like a Tiffany lamp.
You can spend as much time as you want on your doll house. Maybe design and create one room a day for a week. Don’t forget to make a kitchen, living room, dining room, and a few bedrooms. Also, staircases are a great way to make the room itself look “Art Nouveau.” If you really want to get creative, try wallpaper the insides of your rooms with decorative paper or wrapping paper. You could even paint the “walls” if you make sure to do it well in advance of gluing your boxes together and arranging your furniture.

Have fun with this! I would love to hear from anyone who tries this project.

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Art Nouveau: Henry van de Velde

Yesterday I posted about Art Nouveau in Paris and I mentioned Henry van de Velde who designed furniture for Siegfried Bing’s art gallery. Van de Velde was not from France but rather Belgium. It is not surprising that Bing would choose a foreign artist to design for his art gallery; he was an importer/exporter of art, after all.
Van de Velde was born in 1863. He studied painting from 1881 to 1884 and was influenced by such artists as Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a painting by van de Velde and the one shown below was all I could dig up on google. In 1892 he stopped painting altogether, turning his attention, instead, to interior design.
He designed and built his own house and several more prominent buildings, including the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo. You can see pictures of many of these buildings by clicking here.

What is especially important about van de Velde (as far as Art Nouveau) is that he was the first designer to use curved lines in an abstract style. This style is basically the definition of Art Nouveau.
Van de Velde did not design in the Art Nouveau style for his whole life. Art Nouveau went out of fashion around 1910 and he lived for another 42 years. As he evolved, he taught art to others, thus spreading his vision to a new generation of artists.
The furniture shown throughout this post was designed by van de Velde. Notice the curving lines and the elements drawn from nature.

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Siegfried Bing and Art Nouveau in Paris

Art Nouveau, which I posted about all last week, began in Paris thanks to art dealer, Siegfried Bing. He was born in 1838 in Germany but moved to France in 1854 with his family. When his brother died, Siegfried inherited the family business which he developed into a hugely successful import-export business.

By importing Japanese art into France and exporting French artworks to Japan, Bing spread different artistic styles. This allowed artists to be influenced by works that they wouldn’t otherwise have come into contact with. This is how Art Nouveau began.

In 1895 he opened a gallery, the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, where he showed works by Art Nouveau artists, though they weren’t yet called that. The building was a sight to behold. The interior included furniture designed by Henry van de Velde and stained-glass windows by Tiffany.

An important development that allowed architects to venture into Art Nouveau was the creation of new building materials, such as steel, iron, and concrete. By using these materials, architects could build delicate, intricate facades rather than just building walls to protect the insides of their buildings. This helped the development of architectural Art Nouveau.

Art Nouveau was an artistic style that could be applied to all aspects of life. You could live in an Art Nouveau house with Art Nouveau furniture, decorated with Art Nouveau paintings and sculpture. When in Paris, if you keep your eyes open, you will see buildings in the Art Nouveau style. If you need some direction, visit Peter Olsen’s post on ceramic buildings in Paris. Even if you aren’t planning a trip to Paris, check out the amazing photos he has posted.

Also on Peter’s blog is an excellent post on Hector Guimard and his famous Paris Metro entrances. In my first post on Art Nouveau, I included a poor photo of one of these entrances that I took when I went to Paris. Peter has many beautiful images on his site that you should rush to look at, lest you believe that my photo does justice to Guimard’s work.

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