French Pointillist Painter, 1859-1891 Georges-Pierre Seurat (2 December 1859 ?C 29 March 1891) was a French painter and draftsman. His large work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his most famous painting, altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of 19th century painting Seurat took to heart the color theorists' notion of a scientific approach to painting. Seurat believed that a painter could use color to create harmony and emotion in art in the same way that a musician uses counterpoint and variation to create harmony in music. Seurat theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove this conjecture. He thought that the knowledge of perception and optical laws could be used to create a new language of art based on its own set of heuristics and he set out to show this language using lines, color intensity and color schema. Seurat called this language Chromoluminarism. His letter to Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 captures his feelings about the scientific approach to emotion and harmony. He says "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, considered according to their dominance and under the influence of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations". Seurat's theories can be summarized as follows: The emotion of gaiety can be achieved by the domination of luminous hues, by the predominance of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed upward. Calm is achieved through an equivalence/balance of the use of the light and the dark, by the balance of warm and cold colors, and by lines that are horizontal. Sadness is achieved by using dark and cold colors and by lines pointing downwards.  Related Paintings of Georges Seurat :. | La Manneporte near Etretat | Standing Female Nude | en sondagseftermiddag pa on la grande jatte | Study for A Bathing Place at Asnieres | a sunday on la grande jatte 1884 |
Related Artists:
Theodore Frere
French Painter, 1814-1888
marcel duchamp
marche duchamp (1887 to 1968),French painter, sculptor and writer. The art and ideas of Duchamp, perhaps more than those of any other 20th-century artist, have served to exemplify the range of possibilities inherent in a more conceptual approach to the art-making process. Not only is his work of historical importance
ROSA, Salvator
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1615-1673 Italian painter, draughtsman, etcher, poet and actor. He was one of the most original artists and extravagant personalities of the 17th century. His most popular and influential works were his landscapes, the wild and mountainous beauty of which contrasted with the pastoral scenes of Claude Lorrain. Yet Rosa also painted macabre subjects, erudite philosophical allegories and grand historical themes; he was, moreover, the most significant satirical poet of the Italian 17th century, and there is a close relationship between his poetry and painting. His earliest biographers, Filippo Baldinucci and Giovanni Battista Passeri, both of whom knew him well, described at length his fiery temperament