The Art Mysteries episode 2: Hanging in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Seurat’s Les Poseuses is probably his least-known painting. It is also a picture brimming with codes and hidden meanings. It shows three nudes in the artist’s studio, but included in the background is Seurat’s famous masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Why is it there? What is it trying to say? Why two pictures at once? Waldemar Januszczak investigates.
The Art Mysteries episode 2
Georges Seurat
Georges Pierre Seurat was a French post-Impressionist artist. He is best known for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. While less famous than his paintings, Seurat’s conté crayon drawings have also garnered a great deal of critical appreciation.
Seurat’s artistic personality combined qualities that are usually thought of as opposed and incompatible: on the one hand, his extreme and delicate sensibility, on the other, a passion for logical abstraction and an almost mathematical precision of mind. His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-Impressionism, and is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.
Where the dialectic nature of Paul Cézanne’s work had been greatly influential during the highly expressionistic phase of proto-Cubism, between 1908 and 1910, the work of Seurat, with its flatter, more linear structures, would capture the attention of the Cubists from 1911. Seurat in his few years of activity, was able, with his observations on irradiation and the effects of contrast, to create afresh without any guiding tradition, to complete an esthetic system with a new technical method perfectly adapted to its expression.
“With the advent of monochromatic Cubism in 1910–1911,” writes art historian Robert Herbert, “questions of form displaced color in the artists’ attention, and for these Seurat was more relevant. Thanks to several exhibitions, his paintings and drawings were easily seen in Paris, and reproductions of his major compositions circulated widely among the Cubists. The Chahut was called by André Salmon ‘one of the great icons of the new devotion’, and both it and the Cirque (Circus), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, according to Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘almost belong to Synthetic Cubism’.”
The concept was well established among the French artists that painting could be expressed mathematically, in terms of both color and form; and this mathematical expression resulted in an independent and compelling “objective truth”, perhaps more so than the objective truth of the object represented.
Les Poseuses
Models, also known as The Three Models and Les Poseuses, is a work by Georges Seurat, painted between 1886 and 1888 and held by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Models was exhibited at the fourth Salon des Indépendants in spring of 1888.
The piece, the third of Seurat’s six major works, is a response to critics who deemed Seurat’s technique inferior for being cold and unable to represent life. As a response, the artist offered a nude depiction of the same model in three different poses. In the left background is part of Seurat’s 1884-1886 painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Models is considered distinctive because of its pointillist technique and the political implications of its depiction of the nude female body.
