what are the three color theories that seurat used in sunday afternoon park
However, the critics applauded such elements as the controlled surface of the painting, the use of aerial perspective, which gives an impression of space, and Seurat’s deeply shadowed foreground that leads into a light, bright distance.
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Un dimanche après-midi à l’Ile de la Grande Jatte), Georges Seurat, 1884-1886.
For an interpretation of other pictures from the 19th and 20th centuries, see: Analysis of Modern Paintings (1800-2000).
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-6)
By Georges Seurat. One of the greatest modern paintings of the 19th century.
Color is depicted in so many different ways a person would not expect. Whether it is applied in a different fashion makes the whole picture a lot different. Color can turn an insignificant, dull subject to a symbolic enigma. Color can be vivid. Color can be light. It can be opaque as well as transparent. Color can symbolize emotion, information, or even a material. Color is a visual factor which in turn makes humans a visual society. Moreover, color is a necessity; a necessity applied by an ingenious post-impressionist painter, Georges Seurat.
Georges Seurat, Circus, oil on canvas, 1890-1891(3)
Seurat’s painting was a mirror impression of his own painting, Bathers at Asnières, completed shortly before, in 1884. Whereas 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 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 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 a 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. [8]
In conceptual artist Don Celender’s 1974–75 book Observation and Scholarship Examination for Art Historians, Museum Directors, Artists, Dealers and Collectors, it is claimed that the institute paid $24,000 for the work [18] [19] (over $354,000 in 2018 dollars [20] ).
For his understanding of the interweaving of related or opposing tints that excite the eye“divided color”Seurat first looked to the Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix. Later his attention turned to the high-hued palette and brushwork of the Impressionists Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet.
Seurat’s Color Theory
When Seurat began painting in the early 1880s he looked to the earthy colors of Jean-François Millet and other Barbizon artists, whose rustic realism preceded the urban themes and bright colors of the Impressionists by several decades. Seurat produced his paintings from this period, such as Stone Breaker and Wheelbarrow, Le Raincy, on small panels that he carried with him in a slotted box. More sketches than finished works, they convey the immediacy and freshness of having been painted quickly on the spot.
References:
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/paintings-analysis/sunday-afternoon-on-grande-jatte.htm
http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/andrewpacio/summer-academy/ingenuity-of-georges-seurat/
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte
http://archive.artic.edu/seurat/seurat_themes.html
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~djbromle/modern-art/02/Georges-Braque/index.htm