Points to consider

Chicago — It’s Friday morning at the Art Institute of Chicago’s most popular gallery. A white-haired docent stationed in front of Georges Seurat’s masterpiece, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -- 1884,” tells a group of elementary school students that a little girl in the painting is looking straight at them. The kids’ eyes dart around the 7-by-10-foot canvas as they search for other figures depicted from the same viewpoint.

As the youngsters depart, other visitors move in to gaze at Seurat’s vision of Parisians taking their leisure on an island in the Seine. These folks know the painting through everything from art history books to reproductions on T-shirts and Christmas tree ornaments; Stephen Sondheim’s 1984 Broadway musical, “Sunday in the Park with George”; and a tableau vivant at Laguna Beach’s 1996 Pageant of the Masters. But this is the real thing.

More than an image of 48 people, eight boats, three dogs and a monkey, the tapestry-like composition of thousands of dots, dashes and blobs of pigment is the quintessential Pointillist painting. And it never loses its fascination for the public. But what meets the eye is merely the surface of a multilayered artwork created over a five-year period. The full story of its gestation and realization may never be known, but a major new chapter is about to be revealed.

“Seurat and the Making of ‘La Grande Jatte’ ” -- an exhibition with a hefty scholarly and technical catalog, opening June 19 at the institute -- is the result of an ambitious research project conducted by a team of curators, conservators and scientists. Excavating the painting with X-rays, infrared imagery, microphotography, color analysis and computer technology, they have dispelled myths about the artist and shed new light on his creative process.

RESEARCH BREAKTHROUGH

It might seem that nothing new could be said about Seurat’s scene of idyllic stillness where the sun always shines, the wind only blows on sailboats and the people are perfectly groomed statues. In the limelight since 1886, when the artist first exhibited it in Paris, “La Grande Jatte” has been a major attraction in Chicago since its arrival in 1924. It was a gift to the institute by trustee Frederic Clay Bartlett, who bought it in Paris for $20,000 (about $215,000 in today’s dollars).

Seurat painted “La Grande Jatte” in three stages, known as “campaigns.” In the initial session, from May 1884 to the following spring, he made dozens of sketches and small paintings, worked out the composition and executed it in an Impressionistic style -- with short brush strokes, not dots or “points” of color. He planned to show the painting with the Societe des Artistes Independants in 1885, but the exhibition was canceled, and Seurat set his ambitious project aside.

Returning to it a few months later, he left the horizontally brushed water intact but covered much of the remaining composition with dots and dashes of pigment in a system inspired by his readings of color theory. As he transformed “La Grande Jatte” into what would be called a Pointillist work, Seurat placed contrasting hues side by side to heighten optical vibration and created a stylized tableau of shimmering light and bourgeois contentment.

He introduced the painting to the Parisian public in 1886, in the eighth and last exhibition organized by the Impressionists -- and set off a controversy. Some critics denounced Seurat’s “primitive” figures and strange technique, while others praised his innovative approach. A review by George Moore, a friend of Impressionist Edouard Manet, singled out Seurat as the most talented artist in the show and likened his large picture to “a modernised version of ancient Egypt.”

Around 1888-89 Seurat undertook the third campaign, creating a border of colored dashes and dots from the canvas that had been folded around the stretcher bars. The idea, he said, was to provide a visual transition between the painting and its frame.

None of this is news to Seurat scholars. Neither is that some colors in the painting have shifted. An 1892 review of Seurat’s memorial exhibition noted that greens had turned olive and oranges had gone dark. Twenty-two years ago, institute conservator Inge Fiedler determined that the culprit was zinc yellow, applied during Seurat’s second campaign. All the places where he had added pure yellow or mixed it with other colors had darkened.

Still, there was a lot to be learned about “La Grand Jatte.” Like other major art museums with conservation departments, the institute puts a great deal of effort into researching and examining its collection. It published a book on “La Grande Jatte” in 1935 and a journal, including papers delivered at a scholarly symposium, in 1989. But the painting had not undergone an extensive analysis since 1982, when Fiedler took 180 microscopic pigment samples to study the color changes. No one had X-rayed the painting to determine the chronology of the preparatory works or used infrared photography and other technical processes to do a thorough study of the difference between the first and second versions of the painting. And no one knew how much the color had changed or what difference it made.

The lapse is partly a matter of the painting and its audience. Moving large, relatively fragile works is a dangerous process, no matter how carefully it’s done. And people come to the institute to see “La Grand Jatte” -- along with Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris Street; Rainy Day.” Removing the Seurat from its gallery could be a public relations disaster. But the spirit of investigative research prevailed. The institute’s curatorial, conservation and imaging staff would work with Seurat scholar Robert L. Herbert and color scientist Roy Berns, of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory in Rochester, N.Y.

During the two weeks the painting spent in the laboratory, in February 2003, every day was a seminar for the staff and visiting experts, many of whom had not seen the painting without its frame and shock-resistant, anti-ultraviolet glass. What they observed was an early Modern masterpiece in a near virginal state. The painting was never varnished or stiffened with a lining, a process that flattens the surface.

The conservators and scientists took infrared and X-ray images of the painting, fed them into a computer and compared them to the final composition. They extracted tiny paint samples, including cross sections that disclosed multiple layers of paint. Examining the samples under specially equipped microscopes, they identified pigment used in each of the layers. Photomicrographs of the painting’s surface magnified details of the brush strokes.

Comparisons and overlays of various kinds of images helped to establish the sequence of Seurat’s brushwork and composition, conservator Frank Zuccari says. Some contours of the original figures showed up clearly, while others required extremely close study. But it eventually became clear that as Seurat added tiny dabs of paint to the original composition during his second campaign, he altered and enlarged the main figures and emphasized their outlines.

“We saw how the figures started out tall and narrow, and went through several revisions,” Zuccari says. “They ended up being wider and more curvilinear in outline.” Other characters -- including a pair of small figures and a leaping dog -- were added during the second phase.

The investigation also confirmed suspicions that Seurat used some sort of grid to enlarge and transfer sketches to the large canvas, Zuccari says. Among the discoveries was a series of marks and holes corresponding to a grid on three sides of the original edge of the painting. A small, red, horizontal line, found under magnification on a thinly painted area, suggests that other parts of a grid are covered by paint.

To create a color-corrected version of the painting, Berns and his associates determined the degree of yellowing and other relatively minor color changes that had occurred throughout the painting over a long period of time. Then they focused on the unstable zinc yellow and calculated its deterioration. Finally, they re-created Seurat’s paint mixtures by making digital photographs of the painting, editing them on a computer and printing the results.

The painting’s reputation hasn’t suffered from changes in its colors over the last century. The digital re-creation isn’t likely to change that, specialists say.

“The changes are very subtle because Seurat only used zinc yellow in certain areas,” says institute curator Gloria Groom, who has worked on the show with her colleague Douglas Druick and Herbert, the guest curator and primary catalog author. “There’s just a slight lightening or brightening, particularly in the grassy area, but we wanted people to see how the painting looked when Seurat first exhibited it.”

That will happen when the exhibition opens. Part art history and sociology, part science and technology, it will reassess the painting from its conception to its Modernist legacy. The assembly of about 130 paintings, drawings and sketches will include Seurat’s early work, preparatory studies for “La Grande Jatte” and related pieces by his colleagues.

A short film and a couple of high-tech attractions will put some of the research into accessible form. A high-definition plasma monitor, for example, will offer a tour of the painting’s surface that zooms into some of the brush strokes.

“We are really excited about that,” Groom says. “It allows you to fly through the painting and go into a dot that is magnified. You see Seurat’s Impressionist brushwork and how he applied other strokes that look like dots but are not really dot-like.”

Dispelling wrong impressions

For those who are more interested in art than science, the most compelling point made by the research project may be that the artist does not conform to popular conceptions.

Born in Paris in 1859 to a bourgeois family that supported him throughout his short career, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1878, left to do a year of military service in 1879-80 and painted independently until his death from diphtheria, at 31, in 1891. As his work evolved from academic drawing to Impressionistic painting, he found inspiration in Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro. Like those artists, Seurat took his subjects from modern life, but he adapted the discipline of academic tradition to a distinctive new way of painting. While “La Grand Jatte” is his best-known work, he also painted scenes of popular urban entertainment, including cabarets, circuses and sideshows.

“People think Seurat is the anti-Impressionist,” Groom says. “They think he represents everything that Impressionism isn’t. That’s true, but he got there through Impressionism.” Rigorous and methodical, he did not embrace the Impressionists’ love of improvisation, spontaneity and fleeting effects of light. But the standard characterization of him as a scientist who developed a rigid system for building form from tiny dots of color is inaccurate, she says. Seurat was an empiricist whose masterpiece evolved by trial and error as he added, subtracted and reworked ideas, outdoors and in his studio.

“The thing is that ‘La Grand Jatte’ did not become ‘La Grand Jatte’ automatically,” Groom says. “A lot of thinking and rethinking went on. People see this painting and read from the surface out. But if you think about how it was actually constructed, it’s pretty complicated. Art historians weren’t able to figure it out. It took the full force of these conservators and color scientists.”