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Georges Seurat, one of the most popular and admired of post-Impressionist painters, has been the focus of much attention in recent years. This book by Paul Smith views the artist in a new context and explodes some of the myths that have grown up about him. Challenging the assumption that Seurat's work was scientific or that it expressed a serious commitment to anarchism, Smith instead traces the painters involvement with the various factions of the avant-garde and shows that he was perhaps the earliest exponent of Idealism in modern art. Smith studies contemporary interpretations of Impressionism and analyzes how the groups surrounding Seurat constructed meaning from his art. From this investigation he creates a portrait of Seurat as one who was willing to accept, even encourage, interpretations of his art that he may not have intended. Smith shows, for example, that the "scientific" account of Seurat's color first developed by Félix Fénéon actually represents the theory and practice of Pissaro. He examines Seurat's involvement with anarchist critics and concludes that he merely posed as a painter with left-wing sympathies in order to benefit from the publicity these writers gave him. He explains that Seurat was sympathetic to Symbolism from its very inception and that he and his early Symbolist critics developed a theory of his art that was founded on Schopenhauer and Wagner's ideas on art. And he explores the ways that Seurat focused on the musicality of art and on incorporating certain "musical" features in his work. Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, this book presents a convincing new interpretation of the work of a major artist.
This revelatory study of Georges Seurat (1859–1891) explores the artist’s profound interest in theories of visual perception and analyzes how they influenced his celebrated seascape, urban, and suburban scenes. While Seurat is known for his innovative use of color theory to develop his pointillist technique, this book is the first to underscore the centrality of diverse ideas about vision to his seascapes, figural paintings, and drawings. Michelle Foa highlights the importance of the scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, whose work on the physiology of vision directly shaped the artist’s approach. Foa contends that Seurat’s body of work constitutes a far-reaching investigation into various modes of visual engagement with the world and into the different states of mind that visual experiences can produce. Foa’s analysis also brings to light Seurat’s sustained exploration of long-standing and new forms of illusionism in art. Beautifully illustrated with more than 140 paintings and drawings, this book serves as an essential reference on Seurat.
Georges Seurat (1859–1891) created just six major figure paintings during his lifetime, one of which, the alluring Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque), has remained the most challenging to interpret since it first intrigued viewers at the 1888 Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Unlike Seurat’s earlier sunlit scenes, Circus Sideshow presents a nighttime tableau depicting a parade—a street show enticing passersby to purchase tickets. With its geometrically precise composition, muted colors, and elements of abstraction, the painting stands apart as a masterpiece of Neo-Impressionism and heralds Seurat’s subsequent depictions of popular entertainments. This book, the first comprehensive study of Circus Sideshow, situates the painting in the context of nineteenth-century Paris and of the many social changes France was undergoing. Renowned art historian Richard Thomson illuminates the roles of caricature, naturalist and avant-garde painting, and circus advertising; examines Seurat’s use of contemporary aesthetic theory; and discusses how artists ranging from Rouault to Picasso mined the sideshow theme into the twentieth century. Illustrated with Seurat’s related drawings, works by other artists, and period posters and broadsides, Seurat’s Circus Sideshow delves into the history of traveling circuses and seasonal fairs in France, exploring the ongoing appeal of this traditional form of popular entertainment through the fin de siècle. Two additional essays describe the painting’s enthusiastic reception in New York upon its 1929 debut and present the results of a fresh technical examination of the canvas, making this volume the definitive resource on one of Seurat’s most captivating works.
By addressing key issues in visual culture and the politics of representation, this book provides a reference and an analysis of the work of Orton and Pollock, internationally acknowledged as the leading exponents of the social history of art.
Known as "the notary" by his contemporaries for his very proper disposition, Georges Seurat (1859-1891), was nonetheless a trailblazing artist, who devised mesmerizing effects in paint, creating what Museum of Modern Art, New York director Alfred Barr described as a "strange, almost breathless poise." Seurat's most famous painting, "La Grande Jatte" (1884), exemplifies the airy suspension of which "Pointillism" (as his style of painting-by-dabs was named) is uniquely capable, a sensation well suited to evoking in paint the sedate pace of Paris' new leisure class. For Seurat, Pointillism was also a way to attain for painting the mathematically explicable harmony of music: "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," he declared in a letter to a friend. Seurat's style lent itself especially well to the portrayal of figures in space, and the endowing of those figures with volume and atmosphere. No other visual theme so well illustrates the tremendous innovations in Seurat's paintings and drawings as this handling of the figure, a theme which is at the heart of this new appraisal.
Martha Ward tracks the development and reception of neo-impressionism, revealing how the artists and critics of the French art world of the 1880s and 1890s created painting's first modern vanguard movement. Paying particular attention to the participation of Camille Pissarro, the only older artist to join the otherwise youthful movement, Ward sets the neo-impressionists' individual achievements in the context of a generational struggle to redefine the purposes of painting. She describes the conditions of display, distribution, and interpretation that the neo-impressionists challenged, and explains how these artists sought to circulate their own work outside of the prevailing system. Paintings, Ward argues, often anticipate and respond to their own conditions of display and use, and in the case of the neo-impressionists, the artists' relations to market forces and exhibition spaces had a decisive impact on their art. Ward details the changes in art dealing, and chronicles how these and new freedoms for the press made artistic vanguardism possible while at the same time affecting the content of painting. She also provides a nuanced account of the neo-impressionists' engagements with anarchism, and traces the gradual undermining of any strong correlation between artistic allegiance and political direction in the art world of the 1890s. Throughout, there are sensitive discussions of such artists as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, as well as Pissarro. Yet the touchstone of the book is Pissarro's intricate relationship to the various factions of the Paris art world.
Georges Seurat died in 1891, aged only 32, and yet in a career that lasted little more than a decade he revolutionized technique in painting, spearheaded a new movement, Neoimpressionism, and bought a degree of scientific rigour to his investigations of colour that would prove profoundly influential well into the 20th century. As a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Seurat read Chevreul's 1839 book on the theory of colour and this, along with his own analysis of Delacroix' paintings and the aesthetic observations of scientist Charles Henry, led him to formulate the concept of Divisionism. This was a method of painting around colour contrasts in which shade and tone are built up through dots of paint (pointillism) that emphasise the complex inter-relation of light and shadow.
A volume which embodies an entire generation of scholarship on the artist. Seurat's brief but brilliant career is traced from his early academic drawings of the 1870s to the paintings of popular entertainments and the serene landscapes of his final years.
A beautifully illustrated investigation of Neo-Impressionism in late 19th-century Paris and Brussels This stunning catalogue explores the creative exchange between Neo-Impressionist painters and Symbolist writers and composers in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Symbolism, with its emphasis on subjectivity, dream worlds, and spirituality, has often been considered at odds with Neo-Impressionism's approach to portraying color and light. This book repositions the relationship between these movements and looks at how Neo-Impressionist artists such as Maximilien Luce, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Henry van de Velde created evocative landscape and figural scenes by depicting emptiness, contemplative moods, Arcadia, and other themes. Beautifully illustrated with 130 color images, this book reveals the vibrancy and depth of the Neo-Impressionist movement in Paris and Brussels in the late 19th century.
An anthology of essays exploring the work of Georges Seurat (1859-1891). Sections are devoted to technique and theory, Seurat's engagement with social issues, irony regarding the paintings' content, aesthetic effects, and the relation of his work to literary symbolism.