Seurat's "Sunday" painting.(Art)(Georges Seurat)(A Sunday on the Grande Jatte)

The career of the nineteenth-century French painter Georges Seurat was lamentably short; he died in 1891 at the age of thirty-one, five years after completing his most celebrated achievement--A Sunday on the Grande Jatte (1884-1886). Yet he undoubtedly changed the course of Western art. For that remarkable feat, he wasn't always praised, however. Even for those of us who have long been inured to the idiocies that were heaped upon the heads of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters in the heyday of their achievements, some of the criticisms directed at Seurat's masterwork are still astounding.

Here is Joris-Karl Huysmans, writing in La Revue independante in 1887:

 
   Strip his figures of the colored fleas with 
   which they are covered, and underneath there 
   is nothing, no soul, no thought, nothing. 
   Nothingness in a body of which only the contour 
   exists. Thus in his pictures of the Grande 
   Jatte the human armature becomes rigid and 
   hard; everything is immobilized and congealed. 

To which he added: "I am decidedly afraid that there is only too much process, too many systems here, and not enough of the flame that ignites, not enough life!"

A younger, now forgotten critic, Emile Hennequin, while praising some of Seurat's seascapes, came down pretty hard, too, on Grande Jatte:

 
   When Monsieur Seurat uses his method to 
   paint Norman seascapes, especially as in that 
   marvelous canvas entitled Grandcamp, when 
   he describes the grey arrival of evening, he is 
   excellent. But if, as in the Grande Jatte, he attacks 
   the problem of sunlight and the fading 
   figure, he is glaringly unsuccessful, not only 
   because of the absence of light but because of 
   the absence of life in these figures whose outlines 
   have painstakingly filled in with colored 
   dots as in a tapestry. They are painted Gobelin 
   tapestries, as unpleasant as the originals. 

Yet, fortunately for Seurat, he found in a much more perceptive critic--Felix Feneon--a champion who instantly understood and admired both the radicalism of his technique and the significance of his subject n the Grande Jatte when the painting was first shown to the public in the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1886. This is how Feneon described it on that occasion: