Monday, April 30, 2007

Georges Seurat -- Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte (1886)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In anticipation of summer, here's a lovely (and justifiably famous) painting by the French neo-impressionist/pointillist Georges Seurat. (There are different English versions of the title, which is why I'm going with the original French here.)

You may remember that Cameron admires this painting (fixating on the child in white in the center) during Ferris Bueller's day off in 1986 -- one hundred years after its completion. It's at The Art Institute of Chicago.

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posted by Michael J.W. Stickings at 1:09 AM

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2 Comments:

  • Michael, I am glad to see that your taste in art is as good as your politics.

    I have aways adored Seurat's work. Pointilism. Can you imagine actually painting that way? Not only impressionist, but just very impressive. And gorgeous.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 12:35 PM  

  • Thank you, Matthew. I appreciate that. My taste in art runs more to expressionism than impressionism, but I find much to like in the neo- or post-impressionism of Seurat.

    One interesting point is that some experts contend that there are prostitutes among the women in this painting, which, if true, would undermine its reputation as a wholesome bourgeois scene. It's still a bourgeois scene, of course, it's just that the bourgeois weren't nearly as wholesome as they pretended to be. And this biting, if subtle, social and moral criticism makes me like the painting -- and Seurat -- all the more.

    (And Cameron's identification with the child in white is hilarious. I just wonder if John Hughes knew the painting was a century old in 1986.)

    By Blogger Michael J.W. Stickings, at 3:00 PM  

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