Georges Seurat's Pointillism of View

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Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French Post-Impressionist painter, as well as a fine draftsman. He was born and raised in a wealthy family in Paris on December 2, 1859. He lived a short life of thirty-one year of age, and in his time, Seurat not only invented his style of pointillism, but he also became the first Neo-Impressionist. In pointillism, Seurat used miniscule dots of various colors on a base color to produce the local color. This creates an optical mixture from afar for the viewer and makes the image livelier. As the first Neo-Impressionist, he systematically painted his works instead of the rough brushworks of the earlier Impressionists (Chu 410-411, Gage 452, Georges). Since Seurat first started to dig deep into the arts when he was merely sixteen, he really changed the modern art world within 15 years; barely half of his life! Seurat truly worked hard to get the reputation he has today and his works are unquestionably phenomenal through his techniques he used.
A great example of his systematic approach is his Le Chahut painting (Fig. 1) that shows various forms of repetition, geometric and symmetric forms as well as the use of color theory. The four dancers all have the same repetitive stance with their legs equally and symmetrically separated at an equal 45° to be exact for its geometric structure, and they travel in the same upper-left direction. The dancers’ faces are also repetitively tilted in the same upward left direction as the legs. The female dancers have similar folds and geometric curves in their clothing. There are also repeating lights in the top of the painting as well as the use of diagonal lines that sweep upwards to both top corners and sides of the painting. As seen in the images in Figur...

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...nded his range of Post-Impressionistic work and draftsmanship to the art of pointillism and became the founding father of Neo-Impressionism. There is no definite explanation for this revolutionary’s death, but in his death, he opened a door for all other future artists of the world (Georges).

Works Cited

Chu, Petra ten. Nineteenth-century European art. 3rd ed. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2012. Print.

Gage, John. ". " JSTOR. N.p., n.d. Web. .
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"Georges Seurat Biography." Georges Seurat Biography. N.p., n.d.
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Herbert, Robert L.. Seurat: Drawings and Paintings. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2001. Print.

Seurat, Georges, and Jodi Hauptman. Georges Seurat: The Drawings.
New York: Museum of Modern Art ;, 2007. Print.

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