Seurat and the Present

While reading Shapiro and Eisenman’s pieces about Seurat, I was struck by how eerily Seurat’s art seems to speak to and predict conditions and technologies of today’s world. For example, Seurat’s art strongly resembles current graphic art with its simple shapes and use of gradients and shading; in the Grande Jatte it looks as if you could move each figure around like clip art. Thus, both modern graphic art and Seurat’s painting brings up issues about the relationship between science and art because on the one hand the art feels more mechanical and the artistic process is described by Seurat as just a “method,” and yet it is still possible to infuse the work with individual expression and cultural significance. This relates to a larger cultural dichotomy that exists today, in which our world becomes more and more mechanized while “creativity” is more valued than ever.
In addition, Seurat’s pointillism technique can be seen as a forbearer of modern ideas about how small points make up a whole. For instance, Seurat’s dots are analogous to the atoms that we now know make up all matter, computer binary codes that combine to form what we see on the computer, pixels that make up electronic screens, and color dots used to make color copies. In Seurat’s time, ideas about how individual people related to society as a whole were taking shape, as ideas of capitalism, socialism, and democracy were further contemplated, and mass culture developed. Today, people are feeling the same sense of “alienation and freedom” depicted by Seurat because even though we are acquiring more leisure activities and becoming more connected with the world, people tend to feel a sense of alienation in their virtual environments. Thus, the dichotomies and paradoxes that embody Seurat’s work meaningfully describe both his own time and ours.