The Life and Work of Georges Seurat

Overview

In Georges Seurat’s work, the viewer will surely never “miss the point”. The son of wealthy Parisians took modern life as his theme. Excited by recent theories of colour, he developed the technique of pointillism, whereby individual colour-dots, set side by side on the canvas, meld, in the eye of the viewer, into whole colour-surfaces. Dying suddenly at age 31, he left behind only a few large paintings, including A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. David Thompson investigates, with the aid of such artists as Henry Moore, the artistic and theoretical work of the man who founded Post-Impressionism in modern painting.

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