Riley began her first Op Art pieces, sticking to shades of black and white and the simplest of geometric shapes. She based these paintings on the illusion she felt in her own eye. She wasn’t painting from theory, she was experimenting, until she found an image she wanted to share. Ascending and Descending Hero is among her important early works, culminating in bold, hypnotic canvases. These works were purely instinctive and, consequently, enticing to us.
Op Art made its way into pop culture because of Bridget Riley. Designers, even in the fashion industry, fell in love with it, as did advertisers. She became one of the art darlings of the sixties. She is today a hip eighty-four-year-old woman, still perfecting her unique artistic vision.
Is it art? Yes, it is.
SG
24. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884 (1884–86)
Georges Seurat (1859–91)
Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884, 1884–86
Oil on canvas, 207.5 x 308.1 cm
Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926.224)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Admit it! You want to share this idyllic moment, go back in time and reality and check out the scene, even to greet the woman with child stately walking toward us.
Georges Seurat painted La Grande Jatte, arguably the most influential and famous piece of his oeuvre , when he was just twenty-seven. During that time, amid the late eighties, the Impressionist movement needed a pick me up, someone with a fresh eye, new ideals, and inspiration. Georges Seurat was just that spark to steer the Impressionists in a new direction.
La Grande Jatte takes on the form Seurat envisioned and created, formally known as Pointillism, informally known as Divisionism. He wisped small brush strokes and dappled tiny dots of complementary colours onto his canvas, creating a bright, incandescent glow of colour and light. By placing small dabs next to each other, the colours blend in different ways and create an almost 3D effect.
The sophistication of modern affluence basking in the sun on this Parisian island inspired Seurat to begin his largest work. Modern life was his muse for many projects and influenced him in the creation of this piece, but while painting it, Seurat captured the natural beauty and qualities of light within nature and their interaction. Different hues cast shadows from the women’s skirts onto the ground. The mixing of greens creates a blue shadow next to them. The light greens create a yellow ring around the leaves on the trees and, most prominently, around the characters in the shaded foreground. This seamless colour creates a very realistic depiction of light and its changes, something the viewer would actually experience if they had gone to this park, or any park for that matter.
Seurat had many preconceived ideas about this painting, but fretted endlessly about its layout. As preparatory work, he completed twenty-eight drawings, twenty-eight panels, and three canvases full of sketches. After much deliberation, he depicted forty-eight people, three dogs, and eight boats in his gorgeous park setting. From a distance, the activity of people on land and off leads the viewer’s eye in all directions within the frame but doesn’t overwhelm. Yet Seurat was very mechanical when constructing this piece. “Some say they see poetry in my paintings,” Seurat said. “I see only science.”
When it debuted in 1884, critics and observers sneered at the so called pretentious characters in the scene and compared them to robots and tin soldiers. His techniques were widely rejected by the art world establishment until thirty years after his death in 1891, when he died of an undetermined disease at age thirty-one. In 1924, Frederic Clay, an avid art collector and lover, bought La Grande Jatte and loaned it indefinitely to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it still hangs. Sadly, but in a way sweetly, La Grande Jatte is among the most parodied of all time. Seen in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , Family Guy , Sesame Street , The Simpsons , The Office , Looney Tunes , and even the subject of a Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park with George , Seurat brought his vision to life and it continues to enchant us.
SG
25. Tarquin and Lucretia (1578–80)
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) (1518–94)
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), Tarquin and Lucretia, 1578–80
Oil on canvas, 175 x 151.5 cm
Art Institute Purchase Fund (1949.203)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
How do you capture the crackle of Tintoretto? Painter of perhaps the greatest Last Judgment of all. Here a rape, the scattering bouncing pearls, white skin, flashing colour — a quick brutality.
Shimmers of lightning bathing the silks and satins. This elegance, cheek by jowl with ugly rape, her hand reaching out to you, for you to rescue her. The peasant-like face of Tarquin clashes with a sprawling statue emblematic of culture all before a bejewelled wall.
Peter Schjeldahl in the February 12, 2007, edition of the New Yorker said:
He drew with his brush, light over dark — so that shadings came first, imparting a sumptuous density to forms that are lit with highlights like spatters of sun.
Baroque which took hold two decades later with Caravaggio, can seem an edited ratification of tendencies already developed by Tintoretto.
A Venetian master best seen in Venice, Tintoretto grows on you, his slashing style symphonic.
Titian, king of Venetian painting, just hated Tintoretto. Competition!
JP
26. Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando) (1887–88)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando), 1887–88
Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 161.3 cm
Joseph Winterbotham Collection (1925.523)
The Art Institute of Chicago
Photo credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Bridgeman Images
Jean Sutherland Boggs in the Expo 67 catalogue captures the message of Lautrec aptly:
The whole work of Lautrec could be interpreted as a record of man at play — in cafés, cabarets, brothels, the opera house, at the races or, as here, in the circus. It is however, a play which tends to be vicarious, passed on to spectators as apathetic as these. It is also a play which demands hard work of the performers even of the solid horse in the painting. Lautrec inevitably cut through the illusion of such a performance to reveal something as sordid and cruel as the circus master’s sadistic pleasure in his whip. Yet always surmounting this caustic vision of man wearyingly at play for the second hand enjoyment of others is a respect for man’s vitality and will.
The circus master may be wicked (look at his caricatured profile) but he is also dynamic and self-assertive. The bareback rider may be tawdry but she and the horse move with considerable conviction through space. They may have vices but among them are not maudlin self-pity nor the vacant apathy of the meagre crowd. Lautrec’s poster-like forms have this same aggressive force. It was this combination of irresistible will and energy that Lautrec found most admirable in performers giving their audience an illusion of man at play.4
After years of contemplating Lautrec, for me, Boggs has captured his special message.