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82-487: The Salon de la Section d'Or , held October 1912—the largest and most important public showing of Cubist works prior to World War I—exposed Cubism to a wider audience still. After the war, with support given by the dealer Léonce Rosenberg , Cubism returned to the front line of Parisian artistic activity. Various elements of the Groupe de Puteaux would mount two more large-scale Section d'Or exhibitions, in 1920 and in 1925, with

164-480: A 1910 translation of Leonardo da Vinci 's A Treatise on Painting by Joséphin Péladan . Péladan attached great mystical significance to the golden section ( French : nombre d'or ), and other similar geometric configurations. For Villon, this symbolized his belief in order and the significance of mathematical proportions, because it reflected patterns and relationships occurring in nature. Jean Metzinger and

246-405: A form accessible to laypeople. Artists followed new discoveries in perception with great interest. Chevreul was perhaps the most important influence on artists at the time; his great contribution was producing a colour wheel of primary and intermediary hues. Chevreul was a French chemist who restored tapestries . During his restorations he noticed that the only way to restore a section properly

328-680: A general interest in mathematical harmony, whether the paintings featured in the celebrated Salon de la Section d'Or exhibition used the golden ratio itself in their compositions is difficult to determine. Analysis by Christopher Green suggests that Juan Gris made use of the golden ratio in composing works that were likely shown at the exhibition. Art historian David Cottington writes: It will be remembered that Du "Cubisme" , written probably as these paintings were being made, gestured somewhat obscurely to non-Euclidean concepts, and Riemann's theorems; as Linda Henderson has shown, these references betray not an informed understanding of modern mathematics but

410-464: A horse) , and many more works by Gleizes, Metzinger and others. The main exception is for the works of Juan Gris, since no titles are given for his submissions in the catalogue. However, it is now known, from published correspondence between the artist and the dealer Léonce Rosenberg that 13 paintings by Gris were shown, most of which have been identified by their titles, dates, and dimensions. Albert Gleizes exhibited Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) at

492-413: A new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, colour intensity and colour schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism . In a letter to the writer Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 he wrote: "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of colour and of line. In tone, lighter against darker. In colour,

574-448: A shaky hold on some of their principles, culled (indeed plagiarised) from Henri Poincaré's La Science et l'Hypothèse. The authors themselves had little clear idea of how such mathematics related to their art, except as a vague synecdoche for "modern science". Camfield writes that the use of the golden section at La Section d'Or is rather tentative: A few of these paintings were moreover based on simple geometrical compositions. Yet, not

656-656: A single artist there displayed a serious commitment to geometrical proportions with the one exception of Juan Gris. [...] Although all of the Puteaux artists were interested in mathematics (Marcel Duchamp, interview with the author, April 4, 1961), neither Marcel Duchamp nor Jacques Villon, who suggested the title for "La Section d'Or" believes that the golden section was actually used in their paintings. And in Du "Cubisme" Gleizes and Metzinger chastise those painters who would rely on mathematics for certitude. Camfield says that neither of

738-424: A third distinctive colour. He also pointed out that the juxtaposition of primary hues next to each other would create a far more intense and pleasing colour, when perceived by the eye and mind, than the corresponding color made simply by mixing paint. Rood advised artists to be aware of the difference between additive and subtractive qualities of colour, since material pigments and optical pigments (light) do not mix in

820-416: A wide audience (art critics, art collectors, art dealers and the general public). Undoubtedly, due to the great success of the exhibition, Cubism became recognized as a tendency, genre or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal: a new avant-garde movement. There is some debate on the extent to which works exhibited at the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or employed the golden ratio , or not. Despite

902-403: Is that Seurat never used the 'divine proportion'. Parade is divided horizontally into fourths and vertically into sixths. The 4 : 6 ratio corresponds to the dimensions of the canvas (one-half times wider than its vertical dimension). The ratio of Seurat's painting/stretcher corresponded to a ratio of 1 to 1.502, ± 0.002 (as opposed to the golden ratio of 1 to 1.618). The compositional axes in

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984-596: The Color Field painters. Art historian Peter Brooke referred to Robbins as "the great pioneer of the broader history of Cubism". Daniel Robbins attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, receiving an A.B. in 1951 at age 19. He then attended Yale University receiving an M.A. in Art History in 1955. He had initially applied at Yale to study painting, but switched to art history when he realized

1066-634: The Fogg Museum at Harvard University . At Harvard he continued to champion modern art, including leading the restoration of the Mark Rothko murals in the penthouse of Harvard University's Holyoke Center. In the fall of 1972 he conducted a seminar on Jacques Villon , and collaborated with the students to organize the first major Villon retrospective held in the U.S. (at the Fogg Museum) from 17 January to 29 February 1976. After resigning from

1148-648: The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and the University of Iowa (1985), where he co-authored a catalogue created for an exhibition of works by Cubist artist Jean Metzinger . In 1980 Robbins accepted a permanent position as the Baker Professor of the Arts at Union College , where he directed a catalogue raisonné on Albert Gleizes . Robbins had not contented himself to merely enrich

1230-579: The Rhode Island School of Design Museum from 1965 to 1971. As director of The RISD Museum he curated shows of new art, notably one called Raid the Icebox , for which Andy Warhol participated in choosing works from the museum's collection. At RISD, Robbins made exhibiting and collecting contemporary art a priority, something the Museum had not done for six decades. He then became director of

1312-625: The Salon , the Salon des Indépendants , Les XX in Brussels, the eighth Impressionist exhibition, and other exhibitions in France and abroad. Posthumous exhibitions: Daniel Robbins (art historian) Daniel J. Robbins ( pseudonyms , Jeremiah Drummer and George Gregory Dobbs ; January 15, 1932 – January 14, 1995) was an American art historian , art critic , and curator , who specialized in avant-garde 20th-century art and helped encourage

1394-417: The Salon de la Section d'Or . The inauguration was held from nine until midnight, for which the only precedent was the opening of the 1903 Salon d'Automne . Invitations were widely diffused prior to the show, and many of the guests had to be turned away on opening night (9 October 1912). Lectures by Apollinaire, Hourcade and Raynal were advertised, and a review, La Section d'Or , was published to coincide with

1476-515: The Vernissage ; with contributions by Guillaume Apollinaire , Roger Allard , René Blum , Olivier Hourcade , Max Jacob , Maurice Raynal , Pierre Reverdy , André Salmon , André Warnod and others. The fact that the 1912 exhibition had been curated to show the successive stages through which Cubism had transited, and that Du "Cubisme" had been published for the occasion, indicates the artists' intention of making their work comprehensible to

1558-534: The 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or (catalogue no. 40). The proportions of the canvas correspond exactly to the golden rectangle (a ratio of 1 to 1.618 ± 0.01). This work has a rare dimension of 105 x 171 cm. Gleizes, as most artists at the time, generally used standard format chassis (stretchers), which are not golden rectangles. In Du "Cubisme" it was argued that Cubism itself was not based on any geometrical theory, but that non-Euclidean geometry corresponded better than classical, or Euclidean geometry, to what

1640-487: The Center of Cubism , placed Metzinger at the intersection between the gallery cubists and the salon cubists. In a 1910 publication Note sur la peinture Metzinger explicitly relates, for the first time, the interest in representing objects as remembered from successive and subjective experiences within the context of both space and time. Metzinger's Note sur la peinture not only highlighted the works of Picasso and Braque, on

1722-714: The Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1959, a position he would hold through 1961. Robbins moved to New York City in 1961 and worked as a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum . There he curated Albert Gleizes, 1881–1953: a Retrospective Exhibition and wrote a seminal text on the artist for the exhibition catalogue. He left the Guggenheim to become Director of

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1804-734: The Cubists found attractive, according to Apollinaire, was the manner in which Seurat asserted an absolute "scientific clarity of conception." The Cubists observed in his mathematical harmonies, geometric structuring of motion and form, the primacy of idea over nature (something the Symbolists had recognized). In their eyes, Seurat had "taken a fundamental step toward Cubism by restoring intellect and order to art, after Impressionism had denied them" (Robert Herbert, 1968). The golden section does not govern Georges Seurat 's Parade de Cirque (Circus Sideshow) geometric structure. Modern consensus

1886-413: The Cubists were doing: "If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's theorems." The 1912 compositions of Juan gris, according to art historian Christopher Green , were often "modular and regular... easily fitted to the demands of Golden Section composing in

1968-508: The Duchamp brothers were passionately interested in mathematics. Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris and possibly Marcel Duchamp at this time were associates of Maurice Princet , an amateur mathematician credited for introducing profound and rational scientific arguments into Cubist discussions. The name 'Section d'Or' represented simultaneously a continuity with past traditions and current trends in related fields, while leaving open future developments in

2050-541: The Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-Impressionism , and is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting . Seurat was born on 2 December 1859 in Paris, at 60 rue de Bondy (now rue René Boulanger). The Seurat family moved to 136 boulevard de Magenta (now 110 boulevard de Magenta) in 1862 or 1863. His father, Antoine Chrysostome Seurat, originally from Champagne ,

2132-399: The Island of La Grande Jatte . The painting shows members of each of the social classes participating in various park activities. The tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint allow the viewer's eye to blend colors optically, rather than having the colors physically blended on the canvas. It took Seurat two years to complete this 10-foot-wide (3.0 m) painting, much of which he spent in

2214-470: The Neo-Impressionist painters. Chevreul also realized that the "halo" that one sees after looking at a colour is the opposing colour (also known as complementary color ). For example: After looking at a red object, one may see a cyan echo/halo of the original object. This complementary colour (as an example, cyan for red) is due to retinal persistence. Neo-Impressionist painters interested in

2296-538: The Park with George and played a significant symbolic role in John Hughes ' Ferris Bueller's Day Off . Seurat concealed his relationship with Madeleine Knobloch (or Madeleine Knoblock, 1868–1903), an artist's model whom he portrayed in his painting Jeune femme se poudrant . In 1889, she moved in with Seurat in his studio on the seventh floor of 128 bis Boulevard de Clichy . When Madeleine became pregnant,

2378-465: The Salon Cubists who exhibited in the public salons (e.g., Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants ), unlike Picasso and Braque, was that they often worked on a large scale, and they had an interest in large "epic" subjects. Daniel Robbins had coined the term Epic Cubism to distinguish their work from the more intimate painting of Picasso and Braque. Robbins completed his course work for

2460-407: The advent of monochromatic Cubism in 1910–1911," writes art historian Robert Herbert, "questions of form displaced color in the artists' attention, and for these Seurat was more relevant. Thanks to several exhibitions, his paintings and drawings were easily seen in Paris, and reproductions of his major compositions circulated widely among the Cubists. The Chahut [Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo]

2542-405: The age of 31. The cause of his death is uncertain, and has been variously attributed to a form of meningitis , pneumonia , infectious angina, and diphtheria . His son died two weeks later from the same disease. His last ambitious work, The Circus , was left unfinished at the time of his death. On 30 March 1891 a commemorative service was held in the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul . Seurat

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2624-481: The artists of Gleizes's circle, writes Cottington, "were registered by the commonalities of subject matter that Robbins identified in their paintings". These involved the interaction of vast space with speed and action, with simultaneous work, commerce, sport and flight; with the modern city and the ancient country, with the river, the harbor and the bridge and above all, with time, for the sense of time—involving memory, tradition, and accumulated cultural thought—created

2706-485: The arts. Art historian Daniel Robbins argued that in addition to referencing the mathematical golden section , the term associated with the Salon Cubists also refers to the name of the earlier Bandeaux d'Or group, with which Albert Gleizes and other former members of the Abbaye de Créteil had been deeply involved. The 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or was arguably the most important pre-World War I Cubist exhibition. In

2788-450: The avant-garde were fond—the Cubists' rediscovered an underlying mathematical harmony: one that could easily be transformed into mobile, dynamical configurations. Whereas Cézanne had been influential to the development of Cubism between 1908 and 1911, during its most expressionistic phase, the work of Seurat would attract attention from the Cubists and Futurists between 1911 and 1914, when flatter geometric structures were being produced. What

2870-611: The boulevard Magenta, which was run by the sculptor Justin Lequien. In 1878, he moved on to the École des Beaux-Arts where he was taught by Henri Lehmann , and followed a conventional academic training, drawing from casts of antique sculpture and copying drawings by old masters. Seurat's studies resulted in a well-considered and fertile theory of contrasts: a theory to which all his work was thereafter subjected. His formal artistic education came to an end in November 1879, when he left

2952-463: The burgeoning movement than those generally accepted. He boldly charged 'an historical tradition which regards the Demoiselles as the origin of cubism' to be unhistorical. As pointed out by Cottington, Robbins "insisted on both a distinct set of interests, and a separate artistic genealogy, for the group of artists within which Gleizes' work and ideas developed". The lack of history consisted in

3034-646: The chapter on painting, and he had read Charles Blanc 's Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867), which cites Chevreul's work. Blanc's book was directed at artists and art connoisseurs. Because of colour's emotional significance to him, he made explicit recommendations that were close to the theories later adopted by the Neo-Impressionists. He said that colour should not be based on the "judgment of taste", but rather it should be close to what we experience in reality. Blanc did not want artists to use equal intensities of colour, but to consciously plan and understand

3116-457: The colour theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting. He believed that a painter could use colour to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music. He theorized that the scientific application of colour was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create

3198-410: The complementary, red-green, orange-blue, yellow-violet. In line, those that form a right-angle. The frame is in a harmony that opposes those of the tones, colours and lines of the picture, these aspects are considered according to their dominance and under the influence of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations". Seurat's theories can be summarized as follows: The emotion of gaiety can be achieved by

3280-628: The continuing impact of his neoclassical training; the critic Paul Alexis described it as a "faux Puvis de Chavannes ". Seurat also departed from the Impressionist ideal by preparing for the work with a number of drawings and oil sketches before starting on the canvas in his studio. Bathers at Asnières was rejected by the Paris Salon, and instead he showed it at the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants in May 1884. Soon, however, disillusioned by

3362-577: The contrary, felt that only its preliminary phase had been investigated. In addition to Cubists works (which already represented a wide variety of styles), the second edition of the Section d'Or held at the Galerie La Boétie from 5 March 1920 included De Stijl , Bauhaus , Constructivism and Futurism . It was the revival of the Section d'Or which ensured that Cubism in general would become Dada 's preferred target. The new polemic resulted in

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3444-457: The couple moved to a studio at 39 passage de l'Élysée-des-Beaux-Arts (now rue André Antoine). There she gave birth to their son, who was named Pierre-Georges, on 16 February 1890. Seurat spent the summer of 1890 on the coast at Gravelines , where he painted four canvases including The Channel of Gravelines, Petit Fort Philippe , as well as eight oil panels, and made a few drawings. Seurat died in Paris in his parents' home on 29 March 1891 at

3526-608: The degree in 1958 in the joint Certificate of Museology program under A. Hyatt Mayor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art . Robbins continued to paint, exhibiting under the pseudonym Jeremiah Drummer, and wrote art criticism for the Village Voice under the name of George Gregory Dobbs. Following a stay in Paris as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Paris in 1958, Robbins became research assistant to

3608-687: The directorship of the museum in 1974 he lectured in Fine art at Harvard, completed his dissertation (delayed due to professional demands and responsibilities), and in 1975 received his degree from New York University . Robbins held a professorship at Dartmouth College from 1975 to 1980 and became a Senior Fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities (1976). He lectured at a variety of institutions including Yale University (1977), Williams College (1978–79), Hunter College (1984),

3690-445: The domination of luminous hues, by the predominance of warm colours, and by the use of lines directed upward. Calm is achieved through an equivalence/balance of the use of the light and the dark, by the balance of warm and cold colours, and by lines that are horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark and cold colours and by lines pointing downward. Where the dialectic nature of Paul Cézanne 's work had been greatly influential during

3772-533: The formation of Les Artistes de Passy in October 1912 was an attempt to transform the Passy district of Paris into yet another art-centre; a further sign of a growing emphasis on communal activity that would culminate in the Section d'Or exhibit. The idea of the Section d'Or originated in the course of conversations between Gleizes, Metzinger and Jacques Villon. The group's title was suggested by Villon, after reading

3854-492: The goal of revealing the complete process of transformation and renewal that had transpired since the onset of Cubism. The group seems to have adopted the name "Section d'Or" as both an homage to the mathematical harmony associated with Georges Seurat , and to distinguish themselves from the narrower style of Cubism developed in parallel by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the Montmartre quarter of Paris. In addition,

3936-455: The group formed by Le Fauconnier, Metzinger, Gleizes, Léger and R. Delaunay expanded to include several other artists; Alexander Archipenko , Joseph Csaky , Roger de La Fresnaye , Juan Gris , and Jean Marchand , who were virtually unknown to the public before the Salon des Indépendants of 1911, began to frequent Puteaux and Courbevoie. František Kupka had lived in Puteaux for several years in

4018-513: The highly expressionistic phase of proto-Cubism , between 1908 and 1910, the work of Seurat, with its flatter, more linear structures, would capture the attention of the Cubists from 1911. Seurat in his few years of activity, was able, with his observations on irradiation and the effects of contrast, to create afresh without any guiding tradition, to complete an esthetic system with a new technical method perfectly adapted to its expression. "With

4100-533: The historical account of the beginnings of Cubism, as might have art historians John Golding (1929–2012) and Robert Rosenblum (1927–2006). He "challenged its very scope", writes David Cottington. In his PhD on Albert Gleizes , with access to the Gleizes published memoirs and unpublished papers, and following from personal interviews with the artists widow, Juliette Roche Gleizes , Robbins began to reveal an account of Cubism that pointed towards other influences within

4182-521: The ideals which were verbally realized in the Abbaye poetry. (Robbins, 1964) Capitalizing on the occasion presented by the first major retrospective of a prominent salon cubist, Robbins' Guggenheim essay greatly opened the field of Cubist studies to novel approaches, and, writes Cottington, his example was invaluable for a rising generation of historians of modernism. Notwithstanding, the impact of Robbins radical conclusions remained somewhat overshadowed by

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4264-507: The interplay of colours made extensive use of complementary colors in their paintings. In his works, Chevreul advised artists to think and paint not just the colour of the central object, but to add colours and make appropriate adjustments to achieve a harmony among colours. It seems that the harmony Chevreul wrote about is what Seurat came to call "emotion". It is not clear whether Seurat read all of Chevreul's book on colour contrast, published in 1859, but he did copy out several paragraphs from

4346-489: The name Salon de la Section d'Or at the Galerie La Boétie in Paris, October 1912. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger , in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, published a major defense of Cubism, resulting in the first theoretical essay on the new movement, entitled Du "Cubisme" (published by Eugène Figuière in 1912, translated to English and Russian in 1913). Following the 1911 Salon exhibitions,

4428-409: The name was to highlight that Cubism, rather than being an isolated art-form, represented the continuation of a grand tradition; indeed, the golden ratio , or golden section ( French : Section d'Or ), had fascinated Western intellectuals of diverse interests for at least 2,400 years. The Puteaux Group (an offshoot of la Société Normande de Peinture Moderne ) organized their first exhibition under

4510-538: The objective truth of the object represented. Indeed, the Neo-Impressionists had succeeded in establishing an objective scientific basis in the domain of color (Seurat addresses both problems in Circus and Dancers ). Soon, the Cubists were to do so in both the domain of form and dynamics; Orphism would do so with color too. On 2 December 2021, Google honored Seurat with a Google Doodle on his 162nd birthday. From 1883 until his death, Seurat exhibited his work at

4592-448: The one hand, Le Fauconnier and Delaunay on the other, but it was also a tactical selection that highlighted the fact that only Metzinger himself was positioned to write about all four. Metzinger, uniquely, had been closely acquainted with the gallery cubists and the burgeoning salon cubists simultaneously. Robbins focused on the question of Picasso and Braque's influence, if any, on the work of Gleizes, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier and Delaunay;

4674-773: The painting correspond to basic mathematical divisions (simple ratios that appear to approximate the golden section). After World War I, with the support given by the dealer Léonce Rosenberg , Cubism returned as a central issue for artists. With the Salons dominated by a return to classicism, Albert Gleizes attempted to resuscitate the spirit of the Section d'Or in 1920 but was met with great difficulty, despite support by Fernand Léger , Alexander Archipenko , Georges Braque , Constantin Brâncuși , Henri Laurens , Jacques Villon , Raymond Duchamp-Villon , Louis Marcoussis and Léopold Survage . Gleizes' organizational efforts were directed towards

4756-472: The painting department was overshadowed by the painter Josef Albers . After graduating from Yale in 1955 he taught at Indiana University for one academic year (1955–1956). He then began doctoral work at New York University Institute of Fine Arts . In 1958, at the instigation of his professor Robert Goldwater , Robbins began writing a PhD dissertation on the Cubist artist and theoretician Albert Gleizes . At

4838-440: The painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism and used conté crayon for drawings on paper with a rough surface. Seurat's artistic personality combined qualities that are usually thought of as opposed and incompatible: on the one hand, his extreme and delicate sensibility, on the other, a passion for logical abstraction and an almost mathematical precision of mind. His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon on

4920-469: The paintings he analyses "can be definitively identified with "La Section d'Or" paintings", only that the "stylistic evidence" places them in that period and they "would almost certainly have been shown" there. From the titles, dates and previous exhibitions listed in the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or catalogue, many painting have since been identified, for example, Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) and Le goûter (Tea Time) , La Femme au Cheval (Woman with

5002-521: The park sketching in preparation for the work. There are about 60 studies for the large painting, including a smaller version, Study for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1885), which is now in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago . The full work is also part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting was the inspiration for James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim 's musical Sunday in

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5084-519: The pictures of the summer, such as Man in a Café and The Watch. " The "synthetic and analytic were visibly fused. In the Golden Section paintings... he laid the grids like systems of fault-lines across things, faut-lines on either side of which view-points switch. The Section d'Or group founded by some of the most prominent Cubists was in effect an homage to Georges Seurat . Within the works by Seurat—of cafés, cabarets and concerts, of which

5166-577: The poor organization of the Indépendants, Seurat and some other artists he had met through the group – including Charles Angrand , Henri-Edmond Cross , Albert Dubois-Pillet and Paul Signac – set up a new organization, the Société des Artistes Indépendants . Seurat's new ideas on pointillism were to have an especially strong influence on Signac, who subsequently painted in the same idiom. In summer 1884, Seurat began work on A Sunday Afternoon on

5248-586: The previous year the Cubists and a large number of their associates had exhibited at the Galerie de l'Art Contemporain (rue Tronchet, Paris) under the auspices of the Société Normande de Peinture Moderne . This exhibition had received some attention in the press ( l'Autorité and Paris Journal ), though due to the diversity of the works presented it had been referred to as an exposition des fauves et cubistes . The Salon de la Section d'Or , however,

5330-436: The publication of Du cubisme et des moyens de le comprendre by Albert Gleizes, followed in 1922 by La Peinture et ses lois . Georges Seurat Georges Pierre Seurat ( UK : / ˈ s ɜːr ɑː , - ə / SUR -ah, -⁠ə , US : / s ʊ ˈ r ɑː / suu- RAH ; French: [ʒɔʁʒ pjɛʁ sœʁa] ; 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was a French post-Impressionist artist. He devised

5412-533: The re-establishment of a European-wide movement of Cubist and abstract art in the form of a large traveling exhibition; the Exposition de la Section d’Or . The idea was to bring together a collection of works that revealed the complete process of transformation and renewal that had taken place. It was not the success he had hoped for. Cubism was seen as passé for emerging artists and other established artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Picabia, although Gleizes, on

5494-535: The reality of the world. (Robbins, 1964) Robbins argued that such iconography partially explained why there was no period in the work of Gleizes, Robert Delaunay , Fernand Léger or Henri Le Fauconnier closely corresponding to the analytic cubism of Picasso or Braque. It explained too, as Cottington points out, the move by Gleizes and Delaunay into abstraction , "and their sympathy with the theoretical motions of artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian ". The parallel genealogy Robbins extracted from Gleizes's memoirs

5576-438: The reductivism and exclusivism of a view that, placing Picasso's picture at the beginning of cubism's formal development, under-acknowledged or ignored the symbolists' interest in geometry, the particular structure and subject matter of neo-impressionism paintings and the parallel concerns of writers and social thinkers, and misread the relation of Braque's fauvism to his subsequent work. (Cottington, 219) The distinct interests of

5658-413: The role of each hue in creating a whole. While Chevreul based his theories on Newton's thoughts on the mixing of light, Ogden Rood based his writings on the work of Helmholtz. He analyzed the effects of mixing and juxtaposing material pigments. Rood valued as primary colors red, green and blue-violet. Like Chevreul, he said that if two colours are placed next to each other, from a distance they look like

5740-466: The same complex as Jacques Villon. Francis Picabia was introduced to the circle, perhaps by Guillaume Apollinaire (usually accompanied by Marie Laurencin ) with whom he had recently become friendly. Most importantly was the contact established with Metzinger and the Duchamp brothers, who exhibited under the names of Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp and Duchamp-Villon. The opening address was given by Apollinaire. The participation of many of these artists in

5822-528: The same way: Seurat was also influenced by Sutter's Phenomena of Vision (1880), in which he wrote that "the laws of harmony can be learned as one learns the laws of harmony and music". He heard lectures in the 1880s by the mathematician Charles Henry at the Sorbonne , who discussed the emotional properties and symbolic meaning of lines and colour. There remains controversy over the extent to which Henry's ideas were adopted by Seurat. Seurat took to heart

5904-458: The study of it. Robbins' area of scholarship was on the theoretical and philosophical origins of Cubism . His writings centered on the importance of artists such as Albert Gleizes , Jean Metzinger , Henri Le Fauconnier and Jacques Villon . He was a specialist in early Modernism , writing on Salon Cubists (the Section d'Or group) and championed contemporaries such as Louise Bourgeois and

5986-510: The time when, writes art historian David Cottington, "the expansionary momentum both of the New York art market and of post-war art-historical scholarship in the USA were creating a favorable climate for the recovery of salon cubism." The year before, a section of Gleizes' memoirs were published, offering insight into the artistic milieu of pre-1914 Paris. One of the most characteristic features of

6068-432: The work of other mainstream art historians, such as Douglas Cooper , whose Cubist Epoch exhibition and 1970 publication gained in both impact and authority. During the 1980s however, Robbins began a major essay for a retrospective of the work of another key salon cubist: Jean Metzinger . This gave him the opportunity to take his thesis beyond the broad generalizations of the Guggenheim text. This text titled Metzinger, At

6150-521: The works of Eugène Delacroix carefully, making notes on his use of color. He spent 1883 working on his first major painting – a large canvas titled Bathers at Asnières , a monumental work showing young men relaxing by the Seine in a working-class suburb of Paris. Although influenced in its use of color and light tone by Impressionism, the painting with its smooth, simplified textures and carefully outlined, rather sculptural figures, shows

6232-507: The École des Beaux-Arts for a year of military service. After a year at the Brest Military Academy , he returned to Paris where he shared a studio with his friend Aman-Jean , while also renting a small apartment at 16 rue de Chabrol. For the next two years, he worked at mastering the art of monochrome drawing. His first exhibited work, shown at the Salon , of 1883, was a Conté crayon drawing of Aman-Jean. He also studied

6314-479: Was a former legal official who had become wealthy from speculating in property, and his mother, Ernestine Faivre, was from Paris. Georges had a brother, Émile Augustin, and a sister, Marie-Berthe, both older. His father lived in Le Raincy and visited his wife and children once a week at boulevard de Magenta. Georges Seurat first studied art at the École Municipale de Sculpture et Dessin, near his family's home in

6396-573: Was called by André Salmon 'one of the great icons of the new devotion', and both it and the Cirque (Circus) , Musée d'Orsay, Paris, according to Guillaume Apollinaire , 'almost belong to Synthetic Cubism'." The concept was well established among the French artists that painting could be expressed mathematically, in terms of both color and form; and this mathematical expression resulted in an independent and compelling "objective truth", perhaps more so than

6478-524: Was generally accepted as being entirely Cubist in nature. Over 200 works were displayed, and the fact that many of the artists showed artworks representative of their development from 1909 to 1912 gave the exhibition the allure of a Cubist retrospective. Though the Salle 41 Cubists had been surprised by the highly impassioned reactions generated by the 1911 Salon des Indépendants showing, they appear to have been eager to attract as much attention as possible with

6560-437: Was interred 31 March 1891 at Cimetière du Père-Lachaise . At the time of Seurat's death, Madeleine was pregnant with a second child who died during or shortly after birth. During the 19th century, scientist-writers such as Michel Eugène Chevreul , Ogden Rood and David Sutter wrote treatises on colour, optical effects and perception . They adapted the scientific research of Hermann von Helmholtz and Isaac Newton into

6642-422: Was the inspiration generated through post-symbolist literary activity around Alexandre Mercereau , Paul Fort 's Parisian review Vers et Prose and the Abbaye de Créteil . The 1964 Guggenheim essay on Gleizes developed these notions that Robbins summarized as: A synthetic view of the universe, presenting the remarkable phenomena of time and space, multiplicity and diversity, at once was his painted equivalent to

6724-404: Was to take into account the influence of the colours around the missing wool ; he could not produce the right hue unless he recognized the surrounding dyes . Chevreul discovered that two colours juxtaposed, slightly overlapping or very close together, would have the effect of another colour when seen from a distance. The discovery of this phenomenon became the basis for the pointillist technique of

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