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 :. | Two Stonebreakers | La Manneporte near Etretat | Die Seine bei Courbevoie | La Parade | The Samll Peasant in blue |
Related Artists:
HERRERA, Francisco de, the Younger
Spanish painter/architect (b. 1622, Sevilla, d. 1685, Madrid).
Barthel Bruyn
1493-1555 German German Renaissance painter, active in Cologne from 1515. Known especially for his portraits, which combine Northern realism with Italian-inspired monumentality and breadth, Bruyn also painted religious works such as the high altar at Essen Cathedral (1522). A portrait of a man and three religious works are in the Philadelphia Museum; many of his works are in Germany.
Anton Azbe
(30 May 1862 - 6 August 1905) was a Slovene painter and teacher. He was born in a peasant family in the small Carniolan village of Dolenčice near Škofja Loka in Austria-Hungary (today, in Slovenia). At first he studied art in Ljubljana under the supervision of Janez Wolf who introduced him to the style of the Nazarene movement. At the age of twenty he went to Vienna, where he attended the Akademie der bildenden K??nste. In 1884 he moved to Munich. Initially he attended the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, but in 1885 he left it in order to join the private painting school of Ludwig von Löfftz. In 1892, he established his own school which soon became known under the name of Azbe-Schule and became one of the most renowned painting schools for young artists in the Bavarian capital. Several famous painters, particularly those who arrived to Munich from Slavic countries, attended Ažbe's school, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Rihard Jakopič and Nadežda Petrović.