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You are here: Home Life in Lifestyle Georges Seurat at the Kunsthaus Zürich

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05/11/2009Georges Seurat at the Kunsthaus Zürich

Visit the exhibit ‘Figure in Space’ through January 2010.

The Kunsthaus Zürich presents work by Georges Seurat until 17 January 2010. A colleague of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh’s, Seurat brought a scientific precision to Impressionist painting. He introduced rationality to figures and space, seen in the 60 paintings and drawings the Kunsthaus Zürich has assembled from collections in London, Paris, New York and Washington.

Father of Pointillism
Together with Cézanne, van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat (1859-1891) is considered one of the ‘fathers’ of modern art. He was also the most original of France’s avant-garde artists in the late 19th century. Seurat was born in 1859 in Paris, and by the time he died at age 31 he had developed a basic theory for Impressionism. Stimulated by contemporary colour theories, Seurat began to cover canvases with systematic dots of pure colour. This process, which would come to be known as ‘Pointillism’, soon inspired other artists.




Figure in space
Seurat was a recognised master during his own lifetime, with contemporary artists fascinated by his choice of colours and his technique. His use of figures in space played a key role in his career, and is the central theme of the show. Seurat captured contemporary society in severely calculated drawings and paintings. While he occasionally varied a particular figure, he always gave his subjects an individual, isolated appearance.

Geometric landscapes
Seurat began his career with drawing. The exploration of the human form that was characteristic of the mature artist was visible in his attempts as a student. Dark and light effects, accentuate his drawn figures, as in ‘At the Concert Européen’ (1886-88), from New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In Seurat’s paintings, too, the representation of people in space is of central importance. In works such as ‘The Gardener’ (c 1882), from the Kunsthaus Zürich collection, and ‘Stone Breaker and Wheelbarrow, Le Raincy’ (1882-83), from The Phillips Collection, Washington, Seurat began painting his subjects with a new technique and setting them in innovative compositions.
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