People From Paris

"There is not a canvas of that time that does not foreshadow the overthrow of the foundations on which the human race thought itself firmly established, where it felt itself secure. At the moment when the Ballets Russes were at their height, when the Neo-Impressionists and Fauves had dispensed with the drawing style of the Renaissance because it could not contain the purity of the colour - these humbly painted, angular, grey, ascetic pictures were, really, an unwelcome sight. It was not any upheaval of a geological nature that they prefigured, but a cataclysm in the human order. No tremor of the earth was registered, but a tremor of the spirit that disturbed the intellect of civilised man, too long the slave of his immobilised senses. At last he was beginning to suspect that something dangerous was approaching."

"In [his article] La Peinture et ses lois ['Painting and its Laws', 1924] Gleizes deduced the rules of painting from the picture plane, its proportions, the movement of the human eye and the laws of the universe. This theory, later referred to as translation-rotation, ranks with the writings of Mondrian and Malevich as one of the most thorough expositions of the principles of abstract art, which in his case entailed the rejection not only of representation but also of geometric forms.""

"Never had the critics been so violent as they were at that time. From which it became clear that these paintings - and I specify the names of the painters who were, alone, the reluctant causes of all this frenzy: Jean Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and myself - appeared as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever."

"Some maintain that such a tendency distorts the curve of tradition. Do they derive their arguments from the future or the past? The future does not belong to them, as far as we are aware, and one be singularly ingenuous to seek to measure that which exists by that which exists no longer."

"Unless we are to condemn all modern painting, we must regard cubism as legitimate, for it continues modern methods, and we should see in it the only conception of pictorial art now possible. In other words, at this moment cubism is painting."

"Let the picture imitate nothing; let it nakedly present its raison d'être. We should indeed be ungrateful were we to deplore the absence of all those things flowers, or landscape, or faces whose mere reflection it might have been. Nevertheless, let us admit that the reminiscence of natural forms cannot be absolutely banished; not yet, at all events. An art cannot be raised to the level of a pure effusion at the first step."

"To understand Cézanne is to foresee Cubism. Henceforth we are justified in saying that between this school and previous manifestations there is only a difference of intensity, and that in order to assure ourselves of this we have only to study the methods of this realism, which, departing from the superficial reality of Courbet, plunges with Cézanne into profound reality, growing luminous as it forces the unknowable to retreat."

"People crowded into our room, they shouted, they laughed, they got worked up, they protested, they luxuriated in all kinds of utterances."

"We laugh out loud when we think of all the novices who expiate their literal understanding of the remarks of a cubist and their faith in absolute truth by laboriously placing side by side the six faces of a cube and both ears of a model seen in profile."

"If we wished to relate the space of the [Cubist] painters to geometry, we should have to refer it to the non-Euclidean mathematicians; we should have to study, at some length, certain of Riemann's theorems."

"A terrible thing has happened to me: I believe I am finding God."

"We do not mechanically connect the sensation of white with the idea of light, any more than we connect the sensation of black with the idea of darkness. We admit that a black jewel, even if of a dead black, may be more luminous than the white or pink satin of its case. Loving light, we refuse to measure it, and we avoid the geometrical ideas of the focus and the ray, which imply the repetition-contrary to the principle of variety which guides us-of bright planes and sombre intervals in a given direction. Loving colour, we refuse to limit it, and subdued or dazzling, fresh or muddy, we accept all the possibilities contained between the two extreme points of the spectrum, between the cold and the warm tone."

"We are frankly amused to think that many a novice may perhaps pay for his too literal comprehension of the remarks of one cubist, and his faith in the existence of an Absolute Truth, by painfully juxtaposing the six faces of a cube or the two ears of a model seen in profile."

"Divisionism is a complex system of harmony, an aesthetic rather than a technique. The point is only a means. To divide is to seek the power and harmony of color, through representing colored light by pure elements, and through employing the optical mixture of these pure elements, separated and proportioned according to the essential laws of contrast and graduation."

"..it [the large painting 'Bathers at Asnieres', by Georges Seurat was painted in great flat strokes, brushed one over the other, fed by a palette composed, like Delacroix's, of pure and earthy colors. By means of these ochres and browns the picture is deadened, and appears less brilliant than those the impressionists paint with a palette limited to prismatic colors. But the understanding of the laws of contrast, the methodical separation of elements — light, shade, local color, and the interaction of colors — and their proper balance and proportion, give this canvas its perfect harmony."

"The Neo-Impressionist does not stipple, he divides. And dividing involves... guaranteeing all benefits of light."

"The Pointillist chooses a means of expression by which he applies colour on a canvas in small dots rather than spreading it flat."

"Seurat's letter to Fénéon was written on 20 June 1890, six years after he had started to use the pointillist technique and it seems that it was written to establish his primacy in all areas concerned with pointillism. It is perhaps hard to understand today but when Fénéon wrote the first serious review of the works of the Neo-Impressionists after the 8th Impressionists Exhibition of 1886 he mentions: 'Messieurs Georges Seurat, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Dubois-Pillet, and Paul Signac divide the tone in a conscious and scientific manner'. By 1890 other artists had joined the bandwagon and I believe Seurat must have felt that he was in danger of being undervalued or overlooked as the true originator of the movement."

"At the Salon des Indépendants in 1888 Seurat demonstrated the versatility of his technique by exhibiting 'Circus Sideshow', a nighttime outdoor scene in artificial light, and Models, an indoor scene by daylight (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia). This is Seurat's first nocturnal painting and also his first depiction of popular entertainment. It represents the parade or sideshow of the Circus Corvi, which had set up near the Place de la Nation in Paris in the Spring of 1887. Sideshows were held on the street, for free, to entice passersby to purchase tickets. The onlookers at the far right are queued on stairs leading to the box office."

"But as this exhibition emphasizes Seurat first formulated his ideas about color and atmosphere on paper, in drawing, working in black and white. Applying his beloved black conté crayon to the specially textured Michallet paper that he almost always used, he created an impressive tonal range of velvety blacks, gossamer veils, crazy all-over scribbles, porous grids, methodical cross hatchings and uncrossed hatchings."

"Seurat read Delacroix's journals and made notes on his use of colour mixing in his paintings. Delacroix's puzzlement over why blobs of blue and yellow failed to produce green could have prepared Seurat to see in his French translation of Rood's Modern Chromatics an answer to the problem. He [Seurat] mentions in his letter to Fénéon that Ogden Rood's book had been brought to his attention in 1881 (the year it was published in France).. .w:Ogden Rood's chief lesson was to make clear the distinction between coloured lights and coloured pigments.. .However, as [w:Herbert, Robert L.|Herbert]] points out, in 1881 and 1882 Seurat's oil paintings were still in the Barbizon tradition and it was not until 1883 that his palette lightened and not until he started 'Grande Jatte|A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte|Grande Jatte' in 1884 that he started to use separate blobs of complementary colour in a clear, conscious manner.."

"Neo-Impressionist method is an attempt is made to achieve the richness of the sunlight spectrum with all its tones. An orange that blends with yellow and red, a violet that tends toward red and blue, a green between blue and yellow are, with white the sole elements. Through mixture (in the eye of the observer) of these pure colours, whose relationship can be varied at will, from the most brilliant to the greyish. Every brush stroke that is taken from the palette remains pure on the canvas."

"Frankly, this is my position: I have been painting for two years, and my only models have been your [ Monet's ] own works; I have been following the wonderful path you broke for us. I have always worked regularly and conscientiously, but without advice or help, for I do not know any impressionist painter who would be able to guide me, living as I am in an environment more or less hostile to what I am doing. And so I fear I may lose my way, and I beg you to let me see you, if only for a short visit. I should be happy to show you five or six studies; perhaps you would tell me what you think of them and give me the advice I need so badly, for the fact is that I have the most horrible doubts, having always worked by myself, without teacher, encouragement, or criticism."

"The Impressionists had discovered the advantages of optical mixture – allowing the eye to mix adjacent colors [directly on the canvas] rather than mixing them on the palette.. .Seurat would determine the placement of adjacent colors, placed on the canvas in the form of small dots, according to principles of the optical perception of color, developed by [[w:Ogden Rood|[Ogden] Rood]] in laboratory experiments."

"[Seurat had made] the great innovation of that day. This new technique Neo-Impressionism made a great impression on me. Painting had at last been reduced to a scientific formula; it was the secession from the empiricism of the preceding areas."

"Standing on his ladder, he patiently covered his canvas with those tiny multicolored strokes, which give it, from a distance, that intense life and luminosity which are the secrets of his style. At his task, Seurat always concentrated on a single section of the canvas, having previously determined each stroke and color to be applied. Thus he was able to paint steadily without having to step back from the canvas in order to judge the effect obtained.. .Nothing was left to change, to some happily inspired brush stroke."

"Seurat's art is an astonishing achievement for so a young painter. At thirty-one - Seurat's age when he died in 1891 - Degas and Cézanne had not [yet] shown their measure. But Seurat was a complete artist at twenty-five when he painted the 'Grande Jatte'."

"I had been in Paris for three years, I had been to all the museums, to Durand-Ruel's gallery and to all the last exhibitions of the old guard impressionists, when Seurat's art was revealed to me [in Paris, 1884] by [his large painting] 'The Bathers (Une Baignade) (Asnieres)', which I saw in the canteen of the Salon des Artistes Independants. Although I did not commit myself in writing, I then completely realized the importance of this painting; the masterpieces which were the logical consequences of it followed without bringing me again the spice of surprise. I think it was at the famous 'Eight Exhibition of Paintings' in the rue Laffitte [in Paris] that I first saw and became acquainted with Seurat and the painters he influenced."

"Seurat... had been for several years... a pupil of Ingres' disciple Lehmann, who had infused him with a pious devotion to his master. Yet... Seurat had also carefully analyzed the paintings of Delacroix, had read with avidity the... Goncourt brothers and had studied scientific treatises on color harmonies by Chevreul... This had led him to conceive the idea of reconciling art and science, an idea inseparable from the general trend of the time to replace intuition by knowledge and... research... Seurat limited his palette to Chevreul's circle of four fundamental colors and their intermediate tones: blue, blue-violet, violet, violet-red, red, red-orange, orange, orange-yellow, yellow, yellow-green, green, green-blue and blue again. These he mixed with white, but to assure... luminosity, color and harmony, he did not mix the colors among themselves. Instead, he chose to employ tiny dots of pure color, set next to each other, and to permit the mixture to be accomplished optically... in the eye of the onlooker, placed at a proper distance. This method he called '."

"While the small oil sketches Seurat painted out-of-doors in preparation for his compositions often show an impressionist technique, his large canvasses were done in the studio. ...[H]e avoided the sensuous charms which had fascinated the impressionists and sacrificed instantaneous sensations to an almost rigid stylization."

"At the age of just twenty-five Seurat set out to produce a masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his famous and large [3 x 2 meter]] painting, Seurat made in 1885-86 – a painting more than sixty square feet in size – a definitive illustration of the systematic use of scientific color theory [[w:Divisionism|[Color-divisionism] ]] in painting."

"Not only did he [Seurat] never begin his paintings without knowing where he was going, but his concern went even beyond their success as individual works. They had no great meaning for him if they did not prove some rule, some truth of art, or some conquest of the unknown."

"As in summer the grass grew high on the bank [in the Seine] and prevented Seurat from seeing the boat which he had put in the very forefront - and he complained of this mischance - I helped him by cutting the grass; for I was almost certain that he was going to sacrifice the boat. Although he was not the slave of nature, he was respectful of it, for he was not imaginative. His concern centered most of all on tints, tones and their interactions."

"Yesterday I went to Seurat's funeral. I saw Signac who was deeply moved by this great misfortune. I believe you are right, pointillism is finished, but I think it will have consequences which later on will be of the utmost importance for art. Seurat really added something."

"Coming from Paris, turning to the right, close to the spot where they go bathing on Sundays, on the great arm of the river that goes by Courbevoie and Asnieres, one often saw Seurat painting. He told me sadly that the boys who played or bathed in the neighborhood, when they saw his picture, picked up stones.."

"Of the three primary colors, the three binary ones are formed. If you add to one of these the primary tone that is its opposite, it cancels it out. This means that you produce the required half-tone. Therefore, adding black is not adding a half-tone, it is soiling the tone whose true half-tone resides in this opposite me have just described. Hence the green shadows found in red. The heads of the two little peasants. The yellow one had purple shadows; the redder and more sanguine one had green ones."

"Terrible news to report: Seurat died after a very brief illness. I heard the cruel news only this morning. He had been in bed for three days with a disturbance of the throat. Improperly treated, the illness developed with ruinous speed. It is my impression that the malady was the very one told me about some time ago: diphtheria. The funeral takes place tomorrow. You can conceive the grief of all those who followed him or were interested in his artistic researches. It is a great loss for art.. .There is a splendid exhibition of that unfortunate Seurat [at the exhibition of the Independants, March 1891]; some marines, as delicate as ever, somewhat white and weak in coloration, but very artistic, and a large canvas, a 'Circus' which is excellently composed; a clown cut on the foreground dissatisfies us, but the work as a whole has the stamp of an original artist, it is something!"

"Confronting his subject, Seurat, before touching his little panel with paint, scrutinizes, compares, looks with half shut eyes at the play of light and shadow, observes contrasts, isolates reflections, plays for a long time with the cover of the box which serves as his palette; then, fighting against matter as against nature, he slices from his little heap of colors arranged in the order of the spectrum the various colored elements which form the tint destined best to convey the mystery he has glimpsed. Execution follows on observation, stroke by stroke the panel is covered.."

"As a student Seurat had begun to read scientific treatises on the visual perception of color, and had become fascinated with the proposition he read in a textbook by Charles Blanc, an art critic, that 'color, which is controlled by fixed laws, can be taught like music'.. .Seurat studied research on color theory that had begun with the discovery by Michel Eugène Chevreul, a chemist at the tapestry workshops of 'Les Gobelins', that the perceived intensity of a color did not depend so much on the pigmentation of the material used as it did on the color of the neighboring fabric – a finding that had subsequently been developed by others, including an American physicist, Ogden Rood, who published a treatise on chromatics in 1879."

"Great as was my wonderment [visiting the 8th Impressionist Exhibition, May/June 1886, at 1, rue Laffitte in Paris] it was tenfold increased on discovering that only six of these pictures were painted by the new man, Seurat, whose name was unknown to me; the other five were painted by my old friend Pissarro.. .The pictures were hung low, so I went down on my knees and examined the dotting in the pictures signed Seurat, and the dotting in those that were signed, Pissarro. After a strict examination I was able to detect some differences, and I began to recognize the well-known touch even through this most wild and most wonderful transformation. Yes, owing to a long and intimate acquaintance with Pissarro and his work, I could distinguish between him and Seurat, but to the ordinary visitor their pictures were identical."

"A canicular sky, at four o'clock, summer, boats flowing by to the side, a group of chance Sunday visitors enjoying the fresh air among the trees; and these forty-odd persons [in the painting 'La Grande Jatte' are fixed in a hieratic and simplified composition, they are rigorously drawn, of some we see the backs, some we see full-face, some in profile, some are seated at right angles, some are stretched out horizontally, some are standing up straight. The atmosphere is transparent and singularly vibrant; the surface seems to fluctuate. Perhaps this sensation, which is also experienced in connection with other paintings in the same room, can be explained by the theory of Dove: the retina, expecting distinct rays of light to act on it, perceives in rapid alternation both the disassociated colored elements and their resultant color."

"Yesterday I had a violent run-in with Monsieur Eugene Manet [brother of Édouard Manet and married with Berthe Morisot ] on the subject of Seurat and Paul Signac.. .I beg you to believe me when I say that I rated Manet roundly.. .. I explained to Monsieur Manet, who probably didn't understand anything I said, that Seurat had something new to contribute.. ..that I was personally convinced of the progressiveness of his art, which would yield, at a given moment, extraordinary results.. .We shall see. Monsieur Manet would also have liked to prevent Seurat from showing his figure painting. I protested against this, telling Manet that in that case we would make no concessions, that we were ready, if space were lacking, to limit our paintings ourselves [at the coming eight Impressionist exhibition in Paris], but that we [the Neo-Impressionists] would fight against anyone who sought to impose his choice on us. Things will arrange themselves somehow, parbleu!"

"Degas is a hundred times more loyal [than other impressionist artists, then]. - I told Degas that Seurat's painting was very interesting. [Degas:] 'I would have noted that myself, Pissarro, except that the painting is so big!' Very well - if Degas sees nothing in it so much the worse for him. This simply means there is something precious that escapes him. We shall see."

"I painted like that because I wanted to get through to something new - a kind of painting that was my own."

"The art of painting is the Art of hollowing out a canvas."

"Among these independent artists there is one, Monsieur Seurat, who must be singled out. At the time of the Salon of 1882 I praised an excellent portrait of his, done in charcoal, which I was happy to see again. It is accompanied by a series of sketches and a landscape of striking aerial transparency, over which the lively light of a hot summer sun plays freely; all this is done in a sincere and candid style and reveals a depth of conviction which one regrets not to find among certain converts to Impressionism."

"The impressionist paintings of Manet, Cezanne and Monsieur Degas, express with exemplary sincerity the new sensations, the new world our eyes experience. Now here the successors to these artists [Seurat & Pissarro ] are trying to perfect the forms created by them. They found in the notes of Delacroix, in the scientific discoveries of Chevreul and Rood, the suggestion for a type of painting in which color impressions are ordered by the combining of little multi-colored brush strokes. But while they were attentive to such improvement of the means, they forgot the true end of art, the sincere and complete expression of vivid sensations. The works of these painters - Pissarro and Seurat are the most notorious - are interesting only as the exercises of highly mannered virtuosos. Their paintings are lifeless for the painters did not strive for sincerity, being too taken up with external formulas."

"Gaiety of tone is the luminous dominant, of tint, the warm dominant, of line, lines above the horizontal Calmness of tone is the equality of dark and light; of tint, of warm and cool, and the horizontal for line. Sadness of tone is the dark dominant; of tint, the cool dominant, and of line, downward directions."

"The means of expression is the optical mixture of tones, of tints (of local color and the illuminating color: sun, oil lamp, gas, etc.), that is, of the lights and of their reactions (shadows) following the laws of contrast, of gradation, of irradiation."

"Opposites are: for tone, a more luminous/lighter one for a darker one. for tint, the complementaries, that is, a certain red opposed to its complementary, etc. Red — Green Orange — Blue Yellow — Violet for line, those making a right angle."