Art: THE SCIENCE OF SEURAT

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AN aura of epic (and of late, cinematic) drama hovers over the struggles, achievements and major breakthroughs of such 19th century greats as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Cezanne, on whose vision modern art largely rests. Less known but of no less importance was Georges Seurat, born in 1859, who made it his goal to weld science and art into a technique of dot, dab and stitch strokes that would not only challenge the glowing canvases of the impressionists but be a compendium of what was known in his day of optics, color and psychology.

At last coming up for reappraisal, the works of Seurat are about to have their first major museum showing, opening this week at the Chicago Art Institute and moving in March to Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. To stage the show, the Chicago Institute, which owns Seurat's key masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (now valued at more than $1,000,000), drew on 86 collections in the U.S. and abroad, brought together a total of 150 sketches and paintings. Of the seven major works that Seurat painted in his brief lifetime, four (from London, France, The Netherlands and Chicago) are present at the show. One indication of their value: both the director of The Netherlands' Rijksmuseum Kröller-Muller and the curator of France's Louvre insisted on accompanying their Seurat loans to the U.S.

Dots in the Eye. Even to his contemporaries, who did not know until after Seurat's death that the dark, aloof painter had taken one of his models as mistress and fathered a son, the pointillist was a distant, mysterious yet compelling figure. Born the son of a well-to-do but highly eccentric Paris bailiff (who astonished dinner guests by screwing knives and forks into his artificial arm to do the carving), young Seurat got only passing marks from his drawing teacher. On his own, he delved into weighty scientific treatises. Haunting the Louvre's galleries, he tried to analyze the color alchemy of the old masters. What Seurat was working toward was a system that would break down color into its components; then he set these down in minute dots so that the result, seen from a distance, would fuse in the retina of the viewer's eye, rather than be muddled on the painter's palette.

Seurat went about his mission with a thoroughness that Louvre Curator Germain Bazin compares only to Leonardo da Vinci's own scientific preparations. To ready his first painted manifesto, La Grande Jatte, Seurat went daily for six months to the island to sketch and make quick color studies, worked for months in his studio making life studies of the 40 figures he intended to place in his finished canvas. Only after two arduous years did Seurat, then 26, finish the work—thousands of minute dots of paint, some three layers in depth, on a canvas measuring nearly 7 ft. by 10 ft.