George Seurat's Inspiring Journey Revealed | Perspective Special

foreign [Music] foreign six the City of Paris hosted an art event that marked the end of an era the eighth exhibition of the Impressionists just 12 years after the first impressionist show the new approach to painting adopted by Monet Renoir pisaro and others had become widely accepted [Music] artists like Renoir and Monet were now able to exhibit independently and neither displayed work at the 1886 exhibition which would prove to be the last of the great impressionist events [Music] significantly the show that did take place featured the work of a 26 year old Parisian George Surat by 1886 Surat had already developed his own painting technique it was an approach even more radical than that of the Impressionists an art unlike anything ever seen before tragically George Surat would die at the age of just 31. but in his brief life he produced a body of work that influenced some of the greatest artists of his day over a century later Surat is recognized as one of the greatest Geniuses to emerge from the impressionist age [Music] it was in Paris on the 2nd of December 1859 that George Surat was born the third of the four children of Antoine and Ernestine Surat Antoine suret was a legal officer with a position sufficiently well paid to provide a comfortable middle class upbringing for his children in the family home on the magenta Boulevard we know that George suret's artistic leanings appeared early in his life as a boy he developed a passion for visiting the great artworks on display in the Louvre at the age of 15 he began to take formal drawing lessons while his family wealth enabled him to enter the ikol De Beau arts in 1877. there he began his formal training under the tutelage of Henri Layman an artist who had been a pupil of the great neoclassical painter Ingress Surah was an artist of a very much more classical temperament than an artist like Monet for example and because of that he dutifully studied at the cold Bulls are he absorbed a a good deal of this classical training into his own ideas but they were then expressed in a rather separate way than than the normal academic uh system required he is the most um academic of the impressionist artists this is seen initially I think in the fact that he concentrated like academic training on on drawing he spent a couple of years just drawing [Music] the young Surat found much to admire in the work of Ingress with its emphasis on line and draftsmanship it was an admiration that would continue throughout his career but from an early age Surat was also prepared to seek out his own sources of inspiration like many art students he copied dozens of the Old Masters in the Louvre but he also studied the ancient art of the Egyptians and the Assyrians on display there he was fascinated by images from outside the domain of Fine Art perhaps because of this suret failed to impress his tutors at the occur in 1879 he was classed a lowly 47th in his class of 80. later that year still only 19 he found himself away from the Parisian art World altogether when he was conscripted into military service when he was able to buy himself out of the army after a Year's service he returned to Paris convinced of his future as a great artist [Music] to know what he looked like we must rely on just one photograph and the often eloquent testimony of his associates Edgar dega noted the conservative mode of dress that Surat inherited from his father describing him as the notary while another acquaintance described him as a tall young fellow timid as could be significantly however he added that Surat was one of those people whom you expect to be frightened of everything and whom in reality nothing can deter though he was already thinking about the approach he would eventually bring to color in his paintings surat's adult life as an artist began withdrawing in black and white and Suraj drawings are very different really from almost anyone else he tended to draw with contact crane which is a form of black crayon rather hard and slightly greasy and it creates a very very dark velvety black and so he drew in masses rather than rather than than a linear form of drawing that we see with someone like dega drawing was represented in masses of dark contrasted against areas of brilliant light and brightness and he developed the forms as this contrast between dark forms and light forms sometimes the one form in front of the other or silhouetted in some measure so that the forms have a a monumentality to them and this underlay the way how his later work developed so that his drawing simplified the basic structures of the people who he drew or the landscape that he drew and allowed him then to create much more simplified rather classical paintings in his later work Sarah's drawings were done mostly in Black Conte which is a greasy kind of charcoal medium so he has great variations in the Grays and the blacks and that and that's it and that it's a very soft medium and you can see the paper through it and they were his drawings were very important for his paintings there's a whole series for example for like Round Shot and his drawings are actually naturalistic of course he doesn't use a dot in them at all um neither does he in his Preparatory paintings and what his drawings developed for Sierra was the tonality of the work he was working on as well as the position of the figures the relationships between figures and their surroundings um his use of materials was interesting because at some point he was using a very rough surface right like the reverse of hardboard which meant when you took a a dark crayon wax crayon or whatever charcoal across it it wasn't a single line it was a dotted line and a line which was broken how far that actually affected him later I don't know but it is significant that his drawings developed using this textured background so that his drawings are in themselves uh points pointedist um but he was concerned with uh with with his skill he's developing his skill his drawing skills and also in quite clearly working out his approach and the way that he would tackle figures which would he would then bring into his paintings as he as he went on to develop those they were part of a very long compositional process for many the greatest and most moving of surat's drawings were the images he produced of his friends and family this 1883 portrait of his old friend among Zhang represented surat's first small artistic success when it was displayed at the official Salon exhibition that year but by that time he had also produced drawings with a very different subject matter the great deal of time at lazon a desolate semi-industrial suburb on the fringes of Paris there he drew images of anonymous Humanity against a background of ever hastening industrialization like Monet and Turner before him the young artist was also fascinated with the train and the railway line for Surat to concern himself with this new contemporary landscape was not surprising they're respectful of the traditions of the past he sought to incorporate them into a new modern art his own Modern Art withdrawing such as these he achieved stage one of his mission for stage two he turned to oil painting in color in the process he would revolutionize it in his priori paintings developed after his conservation on drawing uh it's almost as if that what if the emerge from his drawing the division of the of the single line into a whole series of time he was taking into his his painting um but not in the sort of way that we think of it as later which was the entirely thought out theory of divisionism um because at the same time he was being influenced by some of the other impressionist artists so what we're getting is loose brush work um color which is is is is brilliant and yet very controlled the thing that emerges from these he has a tremendous control and organization over his work even the earliest ones even the the Freer ones that he had um it seems as if he's almost in preparation for the he's yearning for for this is where the classical comes in the uh the concern for the dictats of the academic and the past to carry out his first experiments with paint suret journeyed to the forest of fontember 40 miles Southeast of Paris for 50 years it had been a popular destination for painters Monet and Renoir painted there in their twenties inspired by the Barbizon painters of the previous generation perhaps the greatest of these was Jean Francois Mille whose realist images of toiling peasants extolled what came to be known as the Dignity of Labor similarly his 1883 panel casuar de Pierre elaborate adopts the same subject matter as Gustav Kobe's great realist work the stone Breakers he was also well aware of the work of the impressionist however even in his early twenties Surat was making his own artistic discoveries Tira used impressionist brush Strokes directional short quite firm brush Strokes like the Monet paintings for example of 69. where his desire for order came in was his use of horizontals and verticals and his interest in the golden section so in for example but some of the Preparatory paintings for the bather itself scenes from The River paintings are have have this definite strong vertical also some horizontals and they are very carefully organized some more than others in some of his paintings for this of this period we have colors Reflections and as I said the impressionist brush stroke but whereas the Impressionists had concentrated on the free time of the Bourgeois classes suret chose to depict the working classes at asnier on the edge of Paris the result was the bathers a canvas three meters wide and two meters high it remained one of the most audacious debuts in the history of Art the Surah and the bathers was depicting and this is where the the problem occurred for the sandal remember the pursuit of realism was something which in 19th century the thread going through and here was Sarah depicting the ordinary worker Paris city worker uh coming in his lunch hour uh stripping off because it was hot and sitting on the banks of the river just for a bit of rest cool also included in that in the background but some industrial buildings now these were ordinary working people which was not on their industrial buildings that was none either so you had a combination of things which meant the cellar quite apart from the technique which of course was also criticized but it's mainly that this was not a respectable subject for assemble a painting the early artists of the impressionist movement artists like Monet and Runway still retained a certain romanticist element in their work Surah was opposed to this he felt that art was a scientific exploration and therefore the paintings should be constructed according to Scientific principles and that determined that the painting was in fact painted in the studio rather than outside and the brush strokes and the the way how it was systematized and put on in a very much more rigorous and thought out deterministic way created a completely different effect within the painting the idea was that the color was was to be mixed in the eye not on the planet to put it very simply if you wish to create orange you don't mix on the planet yellow paint and red paint you put a series of yellow dots and then in this person with a series of red dots and they will then mix in the eye they will become a vibrant color they've become a cutter which is not a surface color but which operates between the Surface and The Spectator becomes much more alive and of course you can see that developing in the batherness it doesn't mean to say you have primary colors I mean you can have what but you are creating the sensation of color not on the surface but between the Surface and The Spectator when Sarah paint the bathers his color theory wasn't as fully developed as it was in his later painting So in the grass for example you have different color greens and yellows but you don't in fact have so much reflection and his figure of the bather the main figure is quite self-contained you have Reflections in the water of course because you can't really avoid that if you're painting water and he certainly used a small brush stroke but not a DOT precisely so it was an experimental painting I think that when the babies was first exhibited it was very much the the star of the show if you like the painting that attracted the most attention um and uh it caused a considerable degree of argument not simply within the people at large but within the impressionist movement that began to be an argument uh that uh the earlier form of impressionism which Monet was still continuing with was a rather outdated mode of painting and that if artists wanted to be retain their avant-garde status they would have to move into Suraj camp and so that certain artists like pissarro became divisionists in the way that Surat was but it led inevitably away from this appreciation of a snapshot of the world surah's paintings were not snapshots of the world they were very carefully constructed images that had a classical underlying structure to them and so they were much more statements of of a philosophy rather than a quick impression of uh daily life that the first ideas of impressionism had generated encouraged by Pizarro Surak took his scientific approach one step further whereas the bathers had been executed in small brush Strokes suret now began to use individual dots or points of paint painstakingly constructing the canvas Point by point to produce an extraordinarily vibrant image of intense luminosity in the summer of 1885 he journeyed to the Normandy coastal town of grand camp there he began to use the point-by-point technique in the first of his so-called Marine paintings before he left Paris however he had already begun to create what has come to be regarded as his masterpiece its subject matter was already depicted in the bathers at the edge of the canvas a small boat containing three people can be seen crossing the river sane destination is the grand jet a River Island popular at the time as a place of Sunday Leisure for the people of industrial Suburbia this would be the subject of surat's next great work as before he prepared his new canvas meticulously preliminary sketches and studies indicate a Riverside setting defined by the verticals of trees and the diagonal of the riverbank serat then peopledled the setting with a myriad of individuals at leisure on a typical Sunday the result was a painting similar in size to the bathers but even greater in its ambition Sunday afternoon on the eel De La Grange [Music] by May 1886 the painting was at last ready for display although the new technique did not yet have an established name Felix finnion referred to it as neo-impressionism others use the term divisionism but for most people La Grande is the first great example of quantilism science at that time had developed a great deal towards the idea of how Optics operated and this was very much in tune with the way how Surah wanted to work within his own work so he took their ideas and put them into his own painting and developed this divisionist technique where the color is much more systematically and scientifically divided up into its constituent parts and then when it's put onto the canvas the eye Blends it back together impressionism per se adopted that sort of a technique we see it in early pages of money in Renoir but it's not quite so orchestrated in the way that it is with Surah he wanted to use peel color dots of pure color first of all it was brush Strokes of Pure Color which he refined into a DOT which would enable the Pure Color to mix in these Spectators I because in this way so he'd read the dots of color would reflect the maximum amount of light for that color so you'd have a very intense green next to say a very intense red whereas if you mix the two colors you'd only have half the intensity and in order to get the maximum amount of intensity he developed the pointillys thought and he limited himself to various colors and used a lot of complementary colors especially some of his paintings like the show only use well mostly use complementary colors in that one it's yellowy green and violet for example so he was disciplining him his eye and his hand very much Le Grand jet went on show at the final impressionist exhibition which opened in May 1886 at the Maison Dore on the ruler feet its inclusion was largely at the insistence of Pizarro who described himself as personally convinced of the progressive character of surat's work as well as lagrangeat the exhibition included work from Surat stay on the coast the previous summer alongside them in the same room were canvases by sinyak and Pizarro himself all executed in the new style pioneered by Surat but it was suret's magnificent canvas that stole the show many appreciated the significance of the quantities technique but the value of the painting derives from more than its innovative brush work its overall sense of geometry balance and sheer monumentality are just some of the themes that continue to be discussed in artistic circles to this day perspective in its traditional sense of the single Viewpoint or the aerial or linear perspective of academic training simply was ignored we are here focusing upon particular groupings and when I one's eye is Led from one group to another that is led by the very severe very contrived composition there is still existing his preliminary studies which include a painting of that landscape that is the trees and the grass without any figures on it at all so it's almost as if he had sort of cardboard cutout figures which he then began to dispose around a pre-existing scene was very ambitious painting and it was huge reverting therefore to the typical Salon production painting it also had a kind of Serenity and Stillness about it people are actually reduced almost to to mannequins and we can actually see how Surah very deliberately constructed the paintings so that uh arms and things that might have intruded are held within the main body of the person so the person seen from a particular point of view which exemplifies a complete entity that represents a person it's not so much A visual representation as an intellectual representation of what people are but this sense of Stillness and timelessness which we see in Piero in which we in fact seen in things like Egyptian tomb painting comes out in surah's art and this set it apart from the other work that was being done at the time ostensibly it appears to be a very respectable scene one analyzes it one begins to realize that there are under terms here of hinting at the hypocrisy of the Contemporary Society there was a movement away on the part of the Impressionists themselves in fact in some cases from impressionism and towards a more orderly way of painting and Surah just summed this up at the appropriate time Surat became established as a major figure amongst Progressive artists Vincent van Gogh was impressed writing that the prontalists had found something new when surat's great work was displayed in Brussels at the annual independent exhibition known as levanc the response was also favorable siniak a fellow exhibitioner wrote that the pontalist technique intrigues visitors and makes them think they realize that there must be something in it [Music] by himself Surat had initiated a great debate within artistic circles but we know little of his own views on his Newfound celebrity we know that he was concerned that too many of his fellow artists would slavishly adopt his own approach but in the summer of 1886 he was once again away from the city painting at the Port of onfleur in Marine paintings like lambusha de lasane on soir on Fleur and Andre du Pro Alf Fleur sirat embraced fully the quantilist technique deliberate and utterly methodical Marine paintings such as these continued to present the viewer with a scene of almost Timeless Harmony Surat continued to make summer visits to the coast until the end of his life for many his Marine paintings represent the peak of his achievements after La Grange in 1888 he summered at Porton Bassam and painted several canvases depicting the harbor for the kenoid viewer these paintings reveal not only is surat's cool scientific Mastery of light contrast and Design but also a new innovation that he had first employed two years previously painting the borders of the canvas what he did in his border paintings which only happened in his later work was he took the color combination from some of the Shadows in the painting so he was taking a small amount of color really that the smaller areas of color and putting them around the painting to contain the painting and to also relate to those areas of color within the painting and these areas for example could be the the blues and purples in certain Shadow areas enlivened of course by their complementaries of acidy yellow and green one of the most curious things was uh about the way that um one thing he didn't produce for him any works but some of his Works after the the bathers and the LaGrange at um took him in directions which um must have seemed very odd at the time but have subsequently been seen to be very relevant and taken up by a number of artists in 20th century and one of these was to tackle the problem of the frame is a frame separating off the thing within the frame the canvas from the world outside then becomes a sort of gallery picture or something which separates off it's or a window through which you see a world well of course that window was the the way that Renaissance charity was going through in in terms of perspective um in an attempt to sort of connect what Sierra had done that is the painting itself to the external world he then should like attempted to get rid of the frame by painting on the frame never quite sure precisely the reason but that's certainly one which was taken up later as breaking down division between the painting and the external world the other thing was it also acted as yet another dimension to an inclusion in the composition and certainly there's some evidence that some of those that is what he's doing he's creating for instance a dark color to contrast against a night color within the canvas but I don't think yet anyone's completely understood uh why he was doing it except that it has had a very strong influence on some artists subsequent who got rid of the frame or who used the frame as as something which was indeed painted and become part of the composition [Music] of all the paintings that Surat produced on his annual visits to the coast it is those that He executed in 1890 that are perhaps the finest of them all that summer he stayed at Gravely and executed four small canvases depicting the canal as it flowed into the sea Carl Serene with color almost bleached out of existence surat's gravelene's work perhaps provides the greatest contrast with the impressionism of Monet and Renoir if those artists sought to take the instant out of the passage of time then surat's work takes the passage of time out of the instant but these remarkable canvases Surat succeeded in capturing scenes from a late 19th century summer and freezing them for all eternity during his Winters in Paris however Surat had turned his attention to different genres of painting following the success of La Grange in 1886 Felix fenion had argued that the plantilist approach could be applied not only to outdoor scenes but to other forms of painting notably the nude that Autumn Surat began an ambitious attempt to prove his friend right he chose to execute not one but three Newtons one scene from the front one from the side and one from the back in a large canvas called Le poses the models eventually completed in the spring of 1888 Le preserves proved that quantilism could be applied to this most traditional of artistic genres but surat's achievement with this canvas went beyond his Mastery of the human form the feature most immediately apparent to the viewer is the artist's dramatic decision to position his models in the corner of his studio with his own LaGrange at hanging on the left hand side the great classical artist of the middle of the 19th century the artist who everyone was supposed to emulate was the artist angra and he was the artist to whom everyone should Aspire when angra met the very young dega angra's Soul piece of advice to degal was draw lines my boy angra was the epitome of classicism Surah at the end of the 19th century uh reinvigorated classicism and yet he took some of the uh Notions that angra had so I used uh figures um as major statements of Art in the way that angler did but they were in a in a rather more uh intimate sense and anger and also rather interestingly in the painting like Le posias we see uh the painting of the grand shaft in the background so Surah was not only using the people as elements of the classical type painting within itself but he was using the technique the the way how divisionism operated to explore how to paint a divisionist painting of a divisionist painting and I think that he found some of these ideas um rather interesting in themselves aside from his main concern with a a scientific way of seeing things there's clear indication of of wishing to return which we should like a timelessness um and this is one of the things I think about Surah he was seeking for unlike Monet which was the ephemeral he was seeking for timelessness and a connection with the past and yet taking it forward and the actual figures themselves you can see Echoes of works from the past 300 years Le poser is a painting where Syrah like anger is concentrating on a group of nude or near nude women and this enables him in fact to use the same sorts of colors that Renoir used in some of his nude paintings Blues greens pinks whites yellows there is an emphasis on outline which is something that he has in common with and his composition is not as tight as it is in some of his other paintings the figures are just standing around in a way a flattened approach to figures was also evident in surat's second great canvas to appear in 1888. La Parada there can be little doubting the major influence in the layout of this scene of a Parisian concert performance we know that from an early age Surat was fascinated by the Egyptian rooms at the Louvre with La Parada Cirque he executed an image with far too much in common with an Egyptian freeze for it to be a coincidence oh but there is more to La parad than its influence and its technique a mysterious melancholic painting it is perhaps a reflection of surat's own mood at the time we know that around this time he felt intensely lonely and the theme of isolation can be detected in the canvas though at First Sight it's a scene of entertainment and pleasure the performers and audience appear not only isolated from each other but isolated amongst themselves but the overall mood of the picture completed by the trombonist too many viewers have seen the image of the Executioner in this forbidding figure for it to have been an accident on surat's part [Music] suraj's latest paintings like the parade in them he began to explore new ideas so are curious enough didn't just have one theory of art he actually developed two theories uh his second theory was based on ideas that came from a mathematician called Charles Henry um and that was based more on a linear ideology where lines that were parallel to the picture indicated a sense of calmness lines that that radiated upwards in indicating the sense of happiness and and geology whereas lines that descended from the diagonal indicated a sense of sadness it seems rather a a strange philosophy now almost quaint but sir I pursued it quite vigorously but he's playing trying to play on people's emotions he thinks this outward movement will affect people's emotions so he's moved on really from the purely scientific application of paint in the dot and the color system to trying to assess these these techniques in in an emotional way so that he can influence his observer in that way as well the late 1880s was a time when Surat was fascinated by the world of Parisian nightlife like many artists before and since he sought out the concert halls and bars of the Metropolis after completing his day's work for his next Parisian canvas he chose to depict the high-kicking dancers for which Paris has long been famous in a dancehall scene called Le chahu displayed for the first time in the spring of 1890. with lachahu we can again identify one of surat's earliest traits his enthusiasm for images from outside art in this case the poster the 1880s was a time when Paris began to be covered with posters notably those designed by juul cheray Surat admired the sheer modernity of Sherry's imagery and his influence can be clearly seen in lachahu whether he also intended to convey a message with the canvas remains a matter of debate [Music] who is a picture which is playing with movement which it does quite successfully if you think movement is pattern it was supposed to express happiness gaity geology a a sense of of the brightness and and frivolity of the circus but what we get are rather pictures that have a slight sand tendency to them curiously his later work has almost a kind of Mystic sense of uh of a distant World in a sense and um had he been able to live longer he might have resolved some of the problems that were beginning to develop within his work but he died really before he could take them on into a future phase the chahu appeared at the 1890s salon Des independent an exhibition which overcame its early teething troubles to grow into a lasting artistic event there Surat also exhibited a painting of his mistress Madeleine knobloch a 20 year old professional showgirl who became mother to his son the image is influenced by the artist's secretive personal life though he continued to take evening meals at his old family home sir at concealed Madeline's existence from his family even after the birth of his child only when cerad was close to death did they find out about her for this reason Surat was careful to avoid any hint of familiarity in this pseudo-erotic image of a young woman making her toilet and gave it the neutral title of Jean Pham SE poudreau an entirely divisionist image it has been argued that surat's canvas looks forward to the age of Art Nouveau with the curved lines of the table legs and the mirror that sits upon it for many lovers of Surat however his painting of Madeline is significant not for what is on the canvas but what isn't there it is known that his original intention was to include an image of himself in the wall mirror his eventual decision to depict a vas of flowers was perhaps unfortunate it has denied posterity a glimpse of a great artist's impression of his own physical being where that took him within his own personal life is I think rather difficult to ascertain he had a mistress who he painted in one of the paintings and we see some of these elements from Charles Henry's ideas in the painting of the of his mistress a painting called up who Drews um but curiously right to the very last day of his life none of this family actually knew he had a mistress so he had a very secretive separate part to his life which he kept well hidden from not only his family but all of his friends all of the other artists and how much that can be seen to imbue his art is a very difficult question to to um to answer of course Surat could have had no idea that his time was short that summer he traveled to the coast as usual where he painted his four Timeless images of The Canal at gravity they would be the last completed canvases from his brush returning to Paris he began work on less silk a depiction of the circus that continues with the approach that he bought to let charu tragically the canvas would not be fully completed on Easter Sunday March the 29th 1891 George Surat was dead struck down in a matter of days by an illness believed to be either diphtheria or a form of meningitis he was 31. to make the tragedy complete shortly afterwards his infant son died of the same disease that killed his father it is perhaps a futile exercise to imagine how surat's art would have developed had he lived many art historians visualize him becoming a great figure in the Paris of Picasso Brock and Matisse how he would have reacted to the multitude of artistic movements that sprang up in the early 20th century we can only guess but for all the tragedy of his early death the posthumous words of his great friend Paul sinyak provide a source of comfort and reassurance writing in 1894 sunyat looked back on the achievements of his colleague some critics say that Surat didn't leave a life's work behind him but it seems to me that on the contrary he gave what he had to give and gave it admirably he would certainly have painted many more pictures and made further Headway but his task was completed he had passed the painter's problems in review and said the last word more or less on all of them black and white Harmony of line composition color Harmony color contrast and even the frame what more can one ask of a painter [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you

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Keywords: Art analysis, Art documentaries, Artistic genius, Classic artists, Creative expressions, Creative process, Creative vision, Divisionism, Famous artists, Famous artworks, Famous paintings, Georges Seurat, Innovative techniques, Masterpieces exploration, Modern art history, Neo-Impressionism, Neo-Impressionist art, Seurat's legacy, Seurat's technique, Vibrant colors

Id: cWyh6Zbbue8

Length: 48min 47sec (2927 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2023