| A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Georges-Pierre Seurat |
| Year | 1884–1886 |
| Type | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 207.6 cm × 308 cm (81.7 in × 121.25 in) |
| Location | Art Institute of Chicago[1] |
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884 (French: Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte – 1884) is one of Georges Seurat's most famous works, and is an example of pointillism.
In 1879 Georges Seurat enlisted as a soldier in the French army and was back home by 1880. Later, he ran a small painter’s studio in Paris, and in 1883 showed his work publicly for the first time. The following year, Seurat began to work on La Grand Jatte and exhibited the painting in the spring of 1886 with the Impressionists.[2] With La Grande Jatte, Seurat was immediately acknowledged as the leader of a new and rebellious form of Impressionism called Neo-Impressionism.[3]
Seurat spent over two years painting A Sunday Afternoon, focusing meticulously on the landscape of the park. He reworked the original as well as completed numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. He sat in the park, creating numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on the issues of colour, light, and form. The painting is approximately 2 by 3 meters (7 by 10 feet) in size.
Inspired by optical effects and perception inherent in the color theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul, Ogden Rood and others, Seurat adapted this scientific research to his painting.[4] Seurat contrasted miniature dots or small brushstrokes of colors that when unified optically in the human eye were perceived as a single shade or hue. He believed that this form of painting, called divisionism at the time but now known as pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brush strokes. The use of dots of almost uniform size came in the second year of his work on the painting, 1885–86. To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In creating the picture, Seurat employed the then-new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), most visibly for yellow highlights on the lawn in the painting, but also in mixtures with orange and blue pigments. In the century and more since the painting's completion, the zinc yellow has darkened to brown — a colour degeneration that was already showing in the painting in Seurat's lifetime.[5]
The island of la Grande Jatte is located at the very gates of Paris, lying in the Seine between Neuilly and Levallois-Perret, a short distance from where currently stands La Défense business district. Although for many years it was an industrial site, it is today the site of a public garden and a housing development. When Seurat began the painting in 1884, the island was a bucolic retreat far from the urban center.
The painting was first exhibited in 1886, dominating the second Salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, of which Seurat had been a founder in 1884. Seurat was extremely disciplined, always serious and private to the point of secretiveness, and for the most part, steered his own steady course. As a painter, he wanted make a difference in the history of art and with La Grand Jatte succeeded.[6]
Seurat's painting was a mirror impression of his own painting, Bathers at Asnières, completed shortly before, in 1884. While the bathers in that earlier painting are doused in light, almost every figure on La Grande Jatte appears to be cast in shadow, either under trees or an umbrella, or from another person. For Parisians, Sunday was the day to escape from the heat of the city and head for the shade of the trees and the cool breezes that came off the river. And at first glance, the viewer sees many different people relaxing in a park by the river. On the right, a fashionable couple, the woman with the sunshade and the man in his top hat, are on a stroll. On the left, another woman who is also well dressed extends her fishing pole over the water. There is a strangely small man with the black hat and thin cane looking at the river, and a white dog with a brown head, a woman knitting, a man playing a horn, two soldiers standing at attention as the musician plays, and an woman hunched under an orange umbrella. Seurat also painted a man with a pipe, a woman under a parasol in a boat filled with rowers, and a couple admiring their infant child.[7]
Some of the characters are doing curious things. The lady on the right hand side has a monkey on a leash. A lady on the left near the river bank is fishing. The area was known at the time as being a place to procure prostitutes among the bourgeoisie, a likely allusion of the otherwise odd "fishing" rod. In the painting's center stands a little girl dressed in white (who is not in a shadow), who stares directly at the viewer of the painting. This may be interpreted as someone who is silently questioning the audience, "what will become of these people, and their class?" Seurat paints their prospects bleakly, cloaked as they are in shadow and suspicion of sin.[8]
Notable Marxist historian and philosopher Ernst Bloch was one of the forerunners of drawing social and political significance from Seurat’s La Grande Jatte. The historian’s focal point was Seurat’s mechanical use of the figures and what their static nature said about the French society at the time. Afterwards, the work received heavy criticism by many that centered on the artist’s mathematical and robotic interpretation of modernity in Paris.[7]
The border of the painting is, unusually, in inverted color, as if the world around them is also slowly inverting from the way of life they have known. Seen in this context, the boy who bathes on the other side of the river bank at Asnières appears to be calling out to them, as if to say "we are the future, come and join us".[8]
In 1923, Frederick Bartlett was appointed trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago. He and second wife, Helen Birch Bartlett, loaned their collection of French Post-Impressionist and Modernist art to the museum. It was Mrs. Bartlett who had an interest in French and avant-garde artists and influenced her husband's collecting tastes. Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was purchased on the advice of the Art Institute of Chicago's curatorial staff in 1924.[9]
In conceptual artist Don Celender's 1974–5 book Observation and Scholarship Examination for Art Historians, Museum Directors, Artists, Dealers and Collectors, it is claimed that the Institute paid $24,000.00 for the work[10][9] (over $328,000 in 2013 Dollars[11]).
In 1958 the painting was loaned out for the only time – to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. On 15 April 1958, a fire there, which killed one person on the second floor of the museum, forced the evacuation of the painting which was on a floor above the fire in the Whitney Museum which adjoined MoMA at the time.[12]
The January 1974 Playboy magazine featured Nancy Cameron, its Playmate of the Month, on its cover superimposed on the painting in similar style.[13][14]
The painting was the basis for the 1984 Broadway musical Sunday In The Park With George by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. Subsequently the painting is sometimes referred to by the misnomer "Sunday in the Park".
The painting is prominently featured in the 1986 comedy film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. This use is parodied, among others, in Looney Tunes: Back in Action and an episode of Family Guy.
At the Old Deaf School Park in Columbus, Ohio, sculptor James T. Mason recreated the painting in topiary form;[15] the installation was completed in 1989.
The painting was the inspiration for the commemorative poster printed for the 1993 Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix, with racing cars and the Detroit skyline added.
In 2011, the cast of the U.S. version of The Office recreated the painting for a poster to promote the show's seventh season finale.[16]
