Collection: Art prints by Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat was a French painter and is considered the founder and most important representative of Pointillism, one of the most influential painterly innovations of the late 19th century. He was born in Paris in 1859 and received his artistic training at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he intensively studied the works of the classical masters and developed an unusually systematic interest in the scientific principles of color perception early on. He was decisively influenced by the contemporary color theories of Michel Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood, whose findings on complementary colors and optical color mixing he translated into a new painterly method more consistently than any other artist of his time.

Seurat developed the ambition early on to put Impressionist open-air painting on a scientific footing. He was not interested in the fleeting, subjective impression of the moment, but in systematically researching the laws according to which light and color affect human perception. Instead of mixing the colors on the palette, he applied them unmixed to the canvas in tiny, even dots and left it to the viewer's eye to merge them into a luminous color effect from a distance. This new approach to painting was initially met with skepticism and opposition, but also found passionate supporters. The eighth and last Impressionist group exhibition in 1886, at which Seurat showed his main work "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte", marked a turning point and suddenly made him one of the most discussed personalities in the Parisian art world.

From the second half of the 1880s, Seurat deepened his method and increasingly expanded his theoretical framework. A central feature of his mature work is the combination of scientific precision and compositional monumentality. He subjected not only color, but also line, rhythm and pictorial composition to a strict theoretical system in which certain line directions and color contrasts were intended to create certain emotional effects. His large figure compositions in particular - the bathing men in Asnières, the Sunday strollers on La Grande Jatte, the circus scenes of his last years - illustrate his consistent examination of the fundamentals of vision and pictorial effect, which went far beyond the questions of Impressionism.

In the last years of his life, Seurat worked with undiminished intensity on the further development of his theory and its painterly realization. His circle of followers, including Paul Signac as his most important comrade-in-arms, had formed an independent Neo-Impressionist movement that gained international influence and captivated artists from Van Gogh to Matisse. Georges Seurat died of a throat infection in Paris in 1891, aged just thirty-two. Despite his short life, he left behind an oeuvre of extraordinary unity and impact. His radical combination of science and art, of analytical thinking and sensual color effects, paved the way for Fauvism, Cubism and numerous other modernist movements. Today, his works are considered icons of art history and are central components of the collections of major museums worldwide, while his masterpiece "La Grande Jatte" is one of the best-known and most reproduced paintings in Western art history.