A jury-free Salon
In 1884, a group of younger Paris painters, exhausted by the official Salon’s rejections, founded the Société des Artistes Indépendants: no jury, no prizes, no medals. Anyone who paid dues could hang. The first Salon des Indépendants ran from 15 May to 1 July 1884 in a temporary exhibition pavilion on the Champs-Élysées. Among the founders were Paul Signac, Odilon Redon, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Henri Edmond Cross — and a 24-year-old painter whose first major canvas, a six-and-a-half-by-ten-foot picture of working-class Parisians sunbathing on the Asnières riverbank, had just been rejected by the official Salon. They hung his rejected picture instead. The 24-year-old was Georges Seurat.
A short life, a long method
Georges-Pierre Seurat was born in Paris on 2 December 1859. He trained academically — first a free local drawing school, then in 1878 at the École des Beaux-Arts under Henri Lehmann, a pupil of Ingres. So Seurat, alone among the Post-Impressionist anchors, came up through the official system. He drew the way they had drawn it at the École for fifty years — patient, meticulous, the figure constructed out of clearly modelled tonal values.
The trick that names the chapter
The pointillist trick (the term comes later — Seurat preferred divisionism, “dividing” each tone into its components) is built on what the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul had worked out half a century earlier as the law of simultaneous contrast. Place a pure red dot beside a pure green dot on the canvas. At reading distance, your eye doesn’t see two dots; it averages them, and the resulting muddy brown looks brighter and more alive than the same brown mixed on a palette. Physically the pigment is still pigment; optically, the light bouncing off the canvas does the mixing in your eye. The canvas becomes, in effect, a primitive projector.
Seurat read the rest of the theory — Chevreul’s 1839 book, Charles Blanc’s Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867), the American physicist Ogden Rood’s Modern Chromatics (1879, translated into French in 1881). Out of these he built his method. The critic Félix Fénéon named it Néo-Impressionnisme in 1886; outsiders called it Pointillism. The principle: do scientifically, by formula, what the Impressionists had been doing by gut instinct. La Grande Jatte is a 7-by-10-foot demonstration of the idea.
The pictures came out slowly. Seurat would spend two summers and a winter on a single canvas, with dozens of preparatory studies before the first dot. The big ones are Bathers at Asnières (1884, National Gallery, London; about 6 ft 7 in × 9 ft 10½ in, the rejected canvas from the first Salon des Indépendants); La Grande Jatte (1884–86, Art Institute of Chicago; about 6 ft 9½ in × 10 ft 1 in, the picture from Chapter 1); and The Circus (1890–91, Musée d’Orsay), unfinished at his death.
He died suddenly on 29 March 1891, age 31, of an infection variously identified as meningitis, pneumonia, infectious angina, or diphtheria — the record is unclear. His infant son by his common-law partner Madeleine Knobloch died of the same illness days later. The career was seven years long.
Open at the canvas
Start with the picture. At the Moulin Rouge (1892–95, Art Institute of Chicago; about 4 ft 0½ in × 4 ft 7¼ in). The famous Moulin Rouge at its tables. Five regulars sit around a center table; in the background a small group walks toward us, with Lautrec himself painted in — the short top-hatted man beside his tall cousin Gabriel. In the right foreground a face looms up close, sliced by the canvas edge, lit a lurid pale green from below: the English dancer May Milton. The off-square cropping is straight out of a Japanese print. This is the chapter’s other half: the dance hall at midnight, lit by green gaslight, painted by an aristocrat 5 ft tall who lived in it.
Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was born in Albi on 24 November 1864, into one of the oldest families in Europe (descendants of the medieval Counts of Toulouse). His parents were first cousins; consanguineous marriage repeated over generations is the accepted cause of the inherited disorder that defined his life. At 13 he broke his left femur; at 14, the right. The legs stopped growing. His adult height was around 5 ft 0 in on a normal adult torso. The modern diagnostic guess (inferred, not proven) is pycnodysostosis, a rare recessive bone-density disorder.
He went to Paris, studied briefly under Fernand Cormon (where he met Van Gogh and Émile Bernard in 1886), and by 1884 had moved to Montmartre for the rest of his short life. He painted the working Montmartre: the cabaret at midnight, the dancers on stage, the bored prostitutes between customers. He borrowed from Japanese prints the flat color, the hard contours, the off-center cropping.
The poster Moulin Rouge: La Goulue (1891, color lithograph; MoMA, the Met, the V&A, the BNF) made the medium. Three flat zones of color: yellow ground, La Goulue’s white frilled bloomers at the center, the silhouettes of the audience as a black frieze behind her. The entire 20th-century commercial graphic look descends from this single sheet of paper, glued to a Paris wall in November 1891.
The brothel pictures: in the early 1890s Lautrec moved more or less into a series of legal brothels and painted the women off-shift. In the Salon at the Rue des Moulins (1894, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi) shows three women on red plush sofas, dressed in long camisoles, bored, waiting. There is no leer. The women are people, off the clock.
He drank himself to death — absinthe mostly, with syphilis on top. He died at his mother’s Château Malromé, in Gironde, on 9 September 1901, age 36. The Musée Toulouse-Lautrec in Albi opened in 1922 and holds the largest single collection of him on earth.
Seurat and Lautrec are linked here not because they were friends (they were barely acquainted) but because they died young, in Paris, having between them shown two opposite ways out of Impressionism: science on the one hand, the modern Parisian night on the other.
