his art is much more than a scientifically based system.La Grande
Jatte reveals Seurat’s recognition of the tenuous and shifting social
and class relationships at the time. La Grande Jatte (The Big Bowl) is
an island in the Seine River near Asnières, one of Paris’s rapidly
growing industrial suburbs. Seurat’s painting captures public life on
a Sunday—a congregation of people from various classes, from the
sleeveless worker lounging in the left foreground to the middle-class
man and woman seated next to him. Most of the people wear their
Sunday best, making class distinctions less obvious.
VINCENT VAN GOGHIn marked contrast to Seurat,Vin-
cent van Gogh(1853–1890) explored the capabilities of colors and
distorted forms to express his emotions as he confronted nature. The
son of a Dutch Protestant pastor, van Gogh believed he had a reli-
gious calling and did missionary work in the coal-mining area of
Belgium. Repeated professional and personal failures brought him
close to despair. Only after he turned to painting did he find a way
to communicate his experiences. When van Gogh died of a self-
inflicted gunshot wound at age 37, he considered himself a failure as
an artist. He felt himself an outcast not only from artistic circles but
also from society at large. The hostile reception to his work, both
from fellow artists and the general public, no doubt reinforced thisperception. He sold only one painting during his lifetime. Since his
death, however, his reputation and the appreciation of his art have
grown dramatically. Subsequent painters, especially the Fauves and
German Expressionists (see Chapter 35), built on the use of color
and the expressiveness of van Gogh’s art. This kind of influence is an
important factor in determining artistic significance, and it is no ex-
aggeration to state that today van Gogh is one of the most revered
artists in history.
NIGHT CAFÉ After relocating to Arles in southern France in
1888, van Gogh painted Night Café (FIG. 31-16). Although the sub-
ject is apparently benign, van Gogh invested it with a charged energy.
As he stated in a letter to his brother Theo (see “The Letters of Vin-
cent van Gogh,” page 834), he wanted the painting to convey an op-
pressive atmosphere—“a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad,
or commit a crime.”^9 The proprietor rises like a specter from the edge
of the billiard table, which the painter depicted in such a steeply tilted
perspective that it threatens to slide out of the painting into the
viewer’s space. Van Gogh communicated the “madness” of the place
by selecting vivid hues whose juxtaposition augmented their inten-
sity. His insistence on the expressive values of color led him to de-
velop a corresponding expressiveness in his paint application. ThePost-Impressionism 83331-15Georges Seurat,A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,1884–1886. Oil on canvas, 6 9 10 . Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (Helen Birch
Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926).
Seurat’s color system—pointillism—involved dividing colors into their component parts and applying those colors to the canvas in tiny dots.
The forms become comprehensible only from a distance.1 ft.31-16AVAN
GOGH, The
Potato Eaters,
1885.