He saw no barriers to doing so because his own ways of working along with his understanding of how the world worked lead him to view the world through a sort of bifocals. He viewed everything through both art and science -- through both fact and metaphor.
But while this is an essential perspective on Seurat and his work, there are other lenses through which his work must be viewed and understood. Analyses of both Seurat and generally of Impressionism and Neo-Impression tend to write about their marriage of science and art were a foregone conclusion. As if embracing the scientific and the new were the most natural pathway for artists to take.
But French artists might well have gone the way of a number of their British contemporaries and near-contemporaries. They might have tried to find a language for their generation that carried the past more gently with them. The Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists -- and of this group perhaps most especially Seurat -- were eager to turn away from both artistic and artisanal traditions. They set aside both art and craft, lured by science and progress and technology like a siren.
Across the channel, artists like William Morris would look at the world around them that was being transformed by the Industrial Revolution and decide to make art that was very different. The artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement were not Luddites:They did not attempt to turn back time or to deny the changes that were occurring around them. But -- and perhaps this was because England was a far more industrialized nation than...
I would like to explore the choices that Seurat made to embrace the scientific in two distinct contexts. The first is one that has been explored before -- Seurat's scientific, even mathematical approach to art. But I work like to add to this analysis a consideration of the road not taken by Seurat.
Neo-Impressionism tends to be analyzed in relative isolation, or in conjunction with other French artists. I believe that analyzing Seurat in contrast to the distinctly non-scientific artistry of William Morris will provide a richer context in which to understand Seurat's art. Seurat was both attracted to science and pushed away from artisanship and the local, both dazzled by the new and scientific and disregarding of the natural and agrarian. It is far too easy to view Seurat teleologically, to view the choices that he made as inevitable. But they were not. The artist he become were as much the result of being socially and culturally French of as being Seurat. Had he been English, he might have become burdened by the past. Had Morris been French he might have been blinded by the future. Playing with such alternative possibilities will help us understand Seurat with much greater nuance.
