Golding, "Cubism, A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914":

"[I]n the spring of 1911 Braque introduced a new element into one of his paintings which was of vital
significance. Across a painting entitled 'Le Portugais' Braque stencilled the letters BAL, and under them
numerals. Braque had first introduced letters into a still life, probably of early 1910, but they are
blended into the composition and have no function other than that of identifying as a newpaper the
object over which they are painted...

"The stencilled letters and numebrs are assertions of [the realistic intentions of Cubism] - 'as part of a
desire to come as close as possible to a certain kind of reality, in 1911 I introduced letters into my
paintings', Braque has said - but the implications are wider. In 'Le Portugais' they fulfill several obvious
functions. In the first place, in a style in which one of the fundamental problems had always been the
reconciliation of solid form with the picture plane, the letters written or stenciled across the surface are
the most conclusive way of emphasizing its two-dimensional character; Braque has stressed this when
he said of the letters: 'they were forms which could not be distorted because, being quite flat, the
letters existed outside space and their presence in the painting, by contrast, enabled one to
distinguish between objects situated in space and those outside it.' In other words, Braque is in effect
saying 'My picture is an object, a flat surface, and the spatial sensations it evokes are a painter's space
which is intended to inform and not deceive.'...Secondly, the letters in Cubist painting always have
some associative value;...Here the letters D and BAL (the D must be the last letter of the word GRAND)
were probably suggested by a dance hall poster hanging in a bar, and help to convey a 'cafe'
atmosphere. Then, in the 'Portugais' the letters have a purely compositional value, providing a
terminal note for a system of ascending horizontal elements. Fourthly, they have a certain decorative
value.

"But the stencilled letters and numbers have yet another effect on the paintings in that they serve to
stress their quality as objects...For in the same way in which the number or title of a painting in an
exhibition catalogue gives it an identity as a material object different from all others of the same type,
so the letters and numbers on a Cubist painting serve to indiviualize it, to isolate it from all other
paintings. Then, again, and in this they point ahead to the invention of collage, the letters and
numerals stress the material existence of the painting in another way: by applying to a canvas or
sheet of paper letters, other pieces of paper or fragments of glass or tin - elements generally
considered to be foreign to the technique of painting or drawing - the artist makes the spectator
conscious of the canvas, panel or paper as a material object capable of receiving and supporting other
objects."

The answer is provided by The Portuguese. In this canvas, everything was fractured. The guitar player
and the dock was just so many pieces of broken glass. By breaking these objects in to smaller
elements Braque and Picasso are able overcome the unified singularity of an object and instead
transform it into an object of vision. At this point the class began to look quite confused, so I turned
back to the paper cup and began to rip it into pieces (I had finished the coffee). If I want to be able to
show you both the back and front and inside and outside simultaneously, I must fragment the object.
Basically this is the strategy of the Cubists.

Examples—showing how similar the two artists were in style at this date—are Braque's The
Portuguese (1911, Kunstmuseum, Basle) and Picasso's The Accordionist (1911, Guggenheim Mus., New
York). At times they worked in such close harmony—‘like mountaineers roped together’ in Braque's
memorable phrase—that even experts can have difficulty in differentiating their hands. In The
Portuguese, Braque introduced the use of stencilled lettering, and by the following year he was
experimenting with mixing materials such as sand and sawdust with his paint to create interesting
textures. He refined this notion again by imitating the effect of wood graining. Later in the same year,
1912, Picasso took this a stage further when he produced his first collages, and Braque quickly
followed with his own type of collage—the papier collé. These developments—marking a move away
from the very cerebral near-abstraction of Analytical Cubism to a more relaxed and decorative art in
corporating everyday ephemera—ushered in Synthetic Cubism

Georges Seurat

French, 1859-1891

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -- 1884, 1884-86

Oil on canvas
81 3/4 x 121 1/4 in. (207.5 x 308.1 cm)
Inscribed at lower right: Seurat
Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926.224
Let us look at the painting Un Dimanche a la Grande Jatte. The painting represents a Sunday on the
island of the Grande Jatte. The work is often referred to as his “Manifesto Painting,” and is even noted
as such by contemporary critics. It was large in size, the first painting to be executed entirely in the
Pointillist technique and the first to include a great many people playing a major role.
Every detail is carefully planned. The work required sketches on panel, 25 drawings and three
important preliminary studies. Look at the illustration to see the contrast in technique with the slightly
earlier painting (1884). Instead of workers enjoying themselves, this is strangely formal; figures are
mostly seen in profile or frontal position. They seem rather like toy soldiers, an artificiality noted at the
time. One critic wrote that the painting showed, “The banal promenade that people in their Sunday
best take… in the places where it is accepted that one should stroll on a Sunday.”
Also, note the use of color and technique of using “the dot.” The skirt of the woman in the center with
a parasol is painted in an orange-pink hue. It casts a blue shadow. Her red jacket is seen against bright
green grass. The orange dress of the young girl running (to the right) has a blue-tinted shadow. The
skirt of the woman with a parasol walking beside a man is predominantly purple — so it seems — but is
made up of a myriad of hues. Notice the lighter yellowish “halo” separating the skirt from the
foreground grass, particularly just behind her skirt. At the same time, Seurat defines form by
brushstrokes: close, parallel strokes define the contour of the woman’s bustle. He continuously
experiments in his manner of applying paint; in the sunlit grass, for example, short, even strokes are
laid over one another. It is clear that Seurat never followed any of the popular theories rigidly.
His paintings are also intended to convey social commentary. The Grande Jatte makes use of symbols.
A monkey in French (and female) is known as “singesse,” denoting a prostitute. The smartly dressed
woman is fishing — but for what? Then, as now, spectators have questioned Seurat’s meaning.
Whether Seurat intended the Bathers and this painting to be considered as pendants (a pair) is still
debated; certainly he contrasts the natural world with the unpleasant artificiality of bourgeois life, as
these artists saw it.
However, the critics applauded such elements as the controlled surface of the painting, the use of
aerial perspective, which gives an impression of space, and Seurat’s deeply shadowed foreground that
leads into a light, bright distance.
Seurat's Grande Jatte is one of those rare works of art that stand alone; its transcendence is
instinctively recognized by everyone. What makes this transcendence so mysterious is that the theme
of the work is not some profound emotion or momentous event, but the most banal of workaday
scenes: Parisians enjoying an afternoon in a local park. Yet we never seem to fathom its elusive power.
Stranger still, when he painted it, Seurat was a mere 25 (with only seven more years to live), a young
man with a scientific theory to prove; this is hardly the recipe for success. His theory was optical: the
conviction that painting in dots, known as pointillism or divisionism, would produce a brighter color
than painting in strokes.

"Seurat spent two years painting this picture, concentrating painstakingly on the landscape of the park
before focusing on the people; always their shapes, never their personalities. Individuals did not
interest him, only their formal elegance. There is no untidiness in Seurat; all is beautifully balanced.
The park was quite a noisy place: a man blows his bugle, children run around, there are dogs. Yet the
impression we receive is of silence, of control, of nothing disordered. I think it is this that makes La
Grande Jatte so moving to us who live in such a disordered world: Seurat's control. There is an
intellectual clarity here that sets him free to paint this small park with an astonishing poetry. Even if
the people in the park are pairs or groups, they still seem alone in their concision of form - alone but
not lonely. No figure encroaches on another's space: all coexist in peace.
"This is a world both real and unreal - a sacred world. We are often harried by life's pressures and its
speed, and many of us think at times: Stop the world, I want to get off! In this painting, Seurat has
"stopped the world," and it reveals itself as beautiful, sunlit, and silent - it is Seurat's world, from which
we would never want to get off."
Creating La Grande Jatte

For A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 Seurat converted a well-known Impressionist site into an open
stage. Across his canvas he positioned a variety of characters that he had developed in his many
drawn and painted studies for the work. From these “auditions,” Seurat eventually selected the
performers for the final production, combining the functions of both playwright and director.

Stage:
Seurat used as his setting a small section of the elongated island in the Seine just beyond Paris’s city
limits. The many dining and dancing establishments, wine shops, and shipbuilders’ yards located at
different points on the island did not make their way into his work nor did the factories across the
river, which had undermined the island’s social cachet. Seurat focused instead on the green park at
the far northwestern tip, facing the town of Courbevoie.

Cast:
Seurat’s canvas incorporates 3 dogs, 8 boats, and 48 people who congregate on a Sunday to enjoy and
parade around in “nature.” The cast of modern characters includes soldiers, boaters, the fashionably
and casually dressed, the old and the young, families, couples, and single men and women.

Plotlines:
Unlike the setting, Seurat’s plot is not readily identifiable. La Grande Jatte conveys grand solemnity in
counterpoint with a wry sense of humor. Seurat’s stated ambition was to “make modern people in their
essential traits move about as they do on [ancient Greek] friezes and place them on canvases
organized by harmonies.” He introduced an element of irony by suggesting a sense of timelessness—in
the frozen quality of the figures—while also insisting on a very up-to-the-moment awareness of
fashion. The couple in the foreground presents a striking and elegant silhouette, but they can also be
seen as somewhat comically puffed-up fashion plates involved in the ritual of self-display.

Relationships between figures are implied, but the characters’ overt lack of interaction makes it
difficult to identify or even imagine the plot. Some have argued that the social order Seurat so
elegantly constructed is more tenuous than his rigid composition at first suggests. While the figures
appear to fit seamlessly within the whole, their exact social stations and motivations remain open to
speculation and debate.

Sets and Sources: Past and Present

Seurat was determined to create a new classicism that would remake Impressionism by eliminating
the accidental and the momentary, while preserving the vitality of life in forms that embodied
enduring ideals. He drew on a variety of sources—ancient and modern, serious and comic—to realize
his ambition through a subtle interweaving of seeming contraries. Critics recognized the divergent
visual sources that give the figures both modern flatness and anonymity and at the same time a
pharaonic (ancient Egyptian) sense of timelessness and seriousness associated with large-scale history
painting.

Seurat began La Grande Jatte in May 1884. Its preparation involved approximately 28 drawings, 28
panels, and 3 larger canvases, including one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Among the
drawings included in Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte” are a view of tree trunks and the
profile figure of a seated woman. These were executed in conté crayon, a soft black drawing tool, on
textured white paper. The flat, simplified forms of these drawings evoke a certain mystery through
Seurat's subtle handling of black and white. Painted studies of figures include the strolling woman with
the pet monkey; the seated foreground woman; the standing woman with the parasol in the center of
the final painting; and one of the soldiers in the background. The differences in the arrangement of
figures in a small study of the full composition compared to the final painting reveal the extent of
Seurat’s adjustments and reworkings during the creation of his masterpiece. Clearly, the artist’s self-
consciously ambitious project involved calculation, but as the studies show, the creative genesis also
involved intuition. They chart the process of thinking and rethinking in which Seurat created, altered,
and at times rejected different elements before arriving at his ultimate vision.
Under a blazing midafternoon summer sky, we see the Seine flooded with sunshine, smart town
houses on the opposite bank, and small steamboats, sailboats, and a skiff moving up and down the
river. Under the trees closer to us many people are strolling, others are sitting or stretched out lazily
on the bluish grass. A few are fishing. There are young ladies, a nursemaid, a Dantesque old
grandmother under a parasol, a sprawled-out boatman smoking his pipe, the lower part of his trousers
completely devoured by the implacable sunlight. A dark-colored dog of no particular breed is sniffing
around, a rust-colored butterfly hovers in mid-air, a young mother is strolling with her little girl dressed
in white with a salmon-colored sash, two budding young Army officers from Saint-Cyr are walking by
the water. Of the young ladies, one of them is making a bouquet, another is a girl with red hair in a
blue dress. We see a married couple carrying a baby, and, at the extreme right, appears a
scandalously hieratic-looking couple, a young dandy with a rather excessively elegant lady on his arm
who has a yellow, purple, and ultramarine monkey on a leash.