During a summer Sunday, have you ever felt forced to leave the house and go to very popular places, victims of the social conventions typical of the period? That’s what happened to Georges Seuratwhen, in 1886, he painted “A Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte” (A summer’s day on La Grande Jatte), a work in which he denounces the sadness of the holiday as a social convention, the boredom of forced fun. But let’s analyze the work in detail.
A Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte
The work is Seurat’s second large canvas. It is a declarative work, a program. Seurat purposely works on the Impressionists’ favorite subject: a sunny and holiday day on the banks of the Seine. But the way he processes it is completely different.
No notes caught “live”, no sensations, no fun. Space is a plane, bodies and their shadows form right angles. The characters are geometrized mannequins, almost as if they were pawns on a chessboard. We see a lady dressed up fishing with a line, a man with a monkey on a leash, a guy playing the trumpet. It is clear that it is a society of dummies, that is, a very elegant work of satire of that era of the industrial bourgeoisie.
Thanks to artists like Seurat, this summer we can avoid being part of a society of mannequins by choosing a holiday that is truly regenerating and not a mere social convention.
The “dark side” of summer
With the arrival of the beautiful season we begin to plan our holidays and, after the long autumn, winter and spring months, we have forgotten that we too, like Seurat, saw men who took a little monkey for a walk on the beach who perhaps even played a accordion, we too, like the painter, on hot summer afternoons found ourselves in the midst of the din of Sunday musicians, hyperactive children and irrepressible young people who crowded around us, who just wanted to enjoy the summer. Therefore, naively and candidly, our thoughts wander more and more often between dream beaches and pristine mountain paths, and we are happy that soon our minds will be able to relax a little.
But, almost imperceptible at first, then more and more evident, between one thought and another a slight annoyance appears, which initially we cannot identify, thinking it is the legacy of discomfort carried over from the months of work that have just passed. But, no, we soon understand that that worm, that little out-of-the-box thought that annoys us, doesn’t come from the memory of the past months, but from the prospect of the future holiday.
Let’s analyze this graceful and benevolent “disease” better and understand that, from the bottom of its almost non-existence, it shouts at us that it is the anxiety of the crowd, of the crowd, of social conventions, the torment of forced fun. So we understand that, if not in summer, in what other period of the year could this anxious thought assail us?
If you too have felt this discomfort and you too hear voices out of the chorus, don’t worry, these thoughts haunt all of us. Sometimes it also happens that ideas of this sort invade the mind of an artist and he turns them into a work of art. This is what happened to Georges Seurat when, in 1886, he painted “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (A summer’s day on La Grande Jatte)a work in which he denounces the sadness of the holiday as a social convention, the boredom of forced fun, but let’s see it in detail.
Georges Seurat
Georges Seurat, born on 2 December 1859 in Paris, was a French painter and engraver, famous for being the founder of pointillism, an innovative technique based on color theory. Seurat came from a bourgeois family and, after attending the École des Beaux-Arts, he began to develop a deep interest in the scientific theories of light and color, influenced by the studies of Michel Eugène Chevreul and Charles Blanc.
Seurat is known for his meticulous painting technique, which involved the use of small dots of pure color which, when viewed from a distance, combine optically to create a range of bright, vibrant hues. This method, known as “divisionism” or “pointillism”, is clearly visible in his most famous masterpiece, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande-Jatte” (1884-1886). This monumental work, first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1886, represents a scene of leisure along the Seine and symbolizes the culmination of his research into light and color.
Despite his short career, interrupted prematurely by his death on 29 March 1891 in Paris at the age of just 31, Seurat left an indelible mark on the artistic panorama. His work profoundly influenced modern art, heralding movements such as Fauvism and Cubism. His dedication to scientific research and technical experimentation positions him as one of the most innovative and rigorous artists of his era.
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