French Pointillist Painter, 1859-1891 Georges-Pierre Seurat (2 December 1859 ?C 29 March 1891) was a French painter and draftsman. His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his most famous painting, altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of 19th century painting Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting. Seurat believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music. Seurat theorized that the scientific application of color 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 a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism. His letter to Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 captures his feelings about the scientific approach to emotion and harmony. He says "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, 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 the domination of luminous hues, by the predominance of warm colors, 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 colors, and by lines that are horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark and cold colors and by lines pointing downwards.  Related Paintings of Georges Seurat :. | Impresstion Figure | Impression Figure | Walk with the Monkey | Morgenspaziergang | The Grand Jatte of Sunday afternoon |
Related Artists:
Alfred Seifert
(September 6, 1850 Praskolesy, Bohemia - February 6, 1901, Munich, Germany) was a Czech-German painter, famous for his female portraits. He was born in Praskolesy (present-day Czech Republic) but within a few months, his family moved to nearby Hořovice. As a child, he fell seriously ill, could not walk for four years and spent two years in an orthopedic institution. Instead of playing, he started to draw pictures and his artistic talent soon started to emerge. His first teachers were Karel Werbs, inspector of Estates Gallery at Prague Castle, and Alois Kirnig, landscape painter.
Chevannes, Pierre Puvis de
French Symbolist Painter, 1824-1898
Marie Laurencin
French Painter, ca.1885-1956 French painter, stage designer and illustrator. After studying porcelain painting at the Sevres factory (1901) and drawing in Paris under the French flower painter Madelaine Lemaire (1845-1928), in 1903-4 she studied at the Academie Humbert in Paris, where she met Georges Braque and Francis Picabia. In 1907 she first exhibited paintings at the Salon des Independants, met Picasso at Clovis Sagot gallery and through Picasso was introduced to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Laurencin and Apollinaire were soon on intimate terms, their relationship lasting until 1912.