Georges Seurat Quotes | Famous Quotations About Art & Life
Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism.
Georges Seurat Famous Quotations:
Georges Seurat Quotes About Art
“Harmony is the analogy of contrary and similar elements of tone, of color, and of line, conditioned by the dominant key, and under the influence of a particular light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations.” ― Georges Seurat
“Painting is the art of hollowing a surface.” ― Georges Seurat
“The purity of the spectral element being the keystone of my.... searching for an optical formula on this basis ever, since I held a brush 1876 - 1884.... having read Charles Blanc in school and therefore knowing Chevreul's laws and Eugene Delacroix's precepts, having read the studies by the same Charles Blanc on the same painter.” ― Georges Seurat
“The means of expression is the optical mixture of tones, of tints (of local color and the illuminating color: sun, oil lamp, gas, etc.), that is, of the lights and of their reactions (shadows) following the laws of contrast, of gradation, of irradiation.” ― Georges Seurat
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A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat
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Georges Seurat Quotes About Himself
“Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.” ― Georges Seurat
“Let's go and get drunk on the light again – it has the power to console.” ― Georges Seurat
“They see poetry in what I have done. No. I apply my methods, and that is all there is to it.” ― Georges Seurat
“I painted like that because I wanted to get through to something new - a kind of painting that was my own.” ― Georges Seurat
“I have told him nothing [an art-journalist in Paris who wrote in 1887: 'Seurat sees his paternity of the theory Neo-Impressionism contested by misinformed critics and unscrupulous comrades'], but what I have always thought: the more of us [the Neo-Impressionists] there are, the less originality we will have, and the day when everyone this technique, it will no longer have any value and people will look for something new as is already happening...It is my right to think this and to say it, since I paint in this way [ Neo-Impressionistic ], only to find a new approach which is my own.” ― Georges Seurat
Georges Seurat Quotes About Life
“Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.” ― Georges Seurat
“Under a blazing mid-afternoon summer sky, we see the Seine flooded with sunshine . . . people are strolling, others are sitting or stretched out lazily on the bluish grass.” ― Georges Seurat
Quotes About Georges Seurat
“Yesterday I had a violent run-in with Monsieur Eugene Manet [brother of Édouard Manet and married with Berthe Morisot ] on the subject of Seurat and Paul Signac....I beg you to believe me when I say that I rated Manet roundly... I explained to Monsieur Manet, who probably didn't understand anything I said, that Seurat had something new to contribute....that I was personally convinced of the progressiveness of his art, which would yield, at a given moment, extraordinary results...We shall see. Monsieur Manet would also have liked to prevent Seurat from showing his figure painting.
I protested against this, telling Manet that in that case, we would make no concessions, that we were ready, if space were lacking, to limit our paintings ourselves [at the coming eight Impressionist exhibition in Paris], but that we [the Neo-Impressionists] would fight against anyone who sought to impose his choice on us. Things will arrange themselves somehow, parbleu!” ― Camille Pissarro
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“The impressionist paintings of Manet, Cezanne, and Monsieur Degas express with exemplary sincerity the new sensations, the new world our eyes experience. Now here the successors to these artists [Seurat & Pissarro ] are trying to perfect the forms created by them.
They found in the notes of Delacroix, in the scientific discoveries of Chevreul and Rood, the suggestion for a type of painting in which color impressions are ordered by the combining of little multi-colored brush strokes. But while they were attentive to such improvement of the means, they forgot the true end of art, the sincere and complete expression of vivid sensations. The works of these painters - Pissarro and Seurat are the most notorious - are interesting only as of the exercises of highly mannered virtuosos. Their paintings are lifeless for the painters did not strive for sincerity, being too taken up with external formulas” ― Teodor de Wyzewa
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“As a student, Seurat had begun to read scientific treatises on the visual perception of color, and had become fascinated with the proposition he read in a textbook by Charles Blanc, an art critic, that 'color, which is controlled by fixed laws, can be taught like music'...Seurat studied research on color theory that had begun with the discovery by Michel Eugène Chevreul, a chemist at the tapestry workshops of 'Les Gobelins', that the perceived intensity of color did not depend so much on the pigmentation of the material used as it did on the color of the neighboring fabric – a finding that had subsequently been developed by others, including an American physicist, Ogden Rood, who published a treatise on chromatics in 1879.” ― David Galenson
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“Seurat... had been for several years... a pupil of Ingres' disciple Lehmann, who had infused him with a pious devotion to his master. Yet... Seurat had also carefully analyzed the paintings of Delacroix, had read with avidity the... Goncourt brothers and had studied scientific treatises on color harmonies by Chevreul...
This had led him to conceive the idea of reconciling art and science, an idea inseparable from the general trend of the time to replace intuition by knowledge and... research... Seurat limited his palette to Chevreul's circle of four fundamental colors and their intermediate tones: blue, blue-violet, violet, violet-red, red, red-orange, orange, orange-yellow, yellow, yellow-green, green, green-blue and blue again. These he mixed with white, but to assure... luminosity, color, and harmony, he did not mix the colors among themselves. Instead, he chose to employ tiny dots of pure color, set next to each other, and to permit the mixture to be accomplished optically... in the eye of the onlooker, placed at a proper distance. This method he called divisionism.” ― John Rewald
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