Much of what we think of 19th century artists is influenced by today’s popular culture such as movies and performing arts. Common perception of Georges Seurat as a pointillist rather than a divisionist has been shaped significantly in the past several years by the mainstream film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and one of George Sondheim’s musicals, “Sunday in the Park with George.�
While there is only a brief reference to La Grande Jatte in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, almost everyone who has seen it remembers the part when Cameron Frye stands gazing at the painting in the Art Insititute of Chicago on his “day off� from school. The camera pans back and forth between Cameron’s perplexed facial expression and the painting, although with each shot of the painting, the camera zooms in, capturing more detail. First, we see the painting in the middle of the gallery, where it looks like an ordinary painting, and we eventually get close enough to see the lady in the pink skirt and her child, and finally, close detail of the child’s face. We see the specific colors in her lips: a spectrum of yellows, pinks, light blues and greens. Just like Cameron, we are enthralled with Seurat’s attention-grabbing dots which speckle the face of the young child’s face.
The director, John Hughes, made a noteworthy decision to zoom in on the child’s face, which contains a myriad of seemingly unrelated colors. If he had wanted to demonstrate Seurat’s ability to juxtapose complementary colors, he could have found another portion of the painting that came closer to (but not exactly like) Seurat’s ideal divisionist technique. Perhaps the director was playing up the fact that the public recognizes Seurat’s dots, not contrasting colors.
Sondheim portrays Georges Seurat the same way in Sunday in the Park with George, although he reaches the point at which he begins to mock Seurat’s obsession over methodology and science. The character George, depicting Seurat himself, sings the “Color and Light� song illustrating his extreme fixation on color:
Order. Design. Composition. Tone. Form. Symmetry. Balance. More red... And a little more red... Blue blue blue blue Blue blue blue blue Even even... Good...
Regardless of the obvious references to color, the short, choppy rhythm of his song reflects the dots he paints on the canvas. Whereas a song about Van Gogh would most likely be flowing and serene, this one illustrates Seurat’s true personality. Unlike in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, this musical actually makes reference to the combinations of colors he is using. Most people listening to the lyrics would only hear a jumble of colors, but in listening closely, we can hear that Seurat did not use complementary colors:
There's only color and light. Purple and white. And red and purple and white.
None of these colors even come close to balancing each other. Did Sondheim do this on purpose? Most likely not. He probably shared the common belief that Seurat was merely a pointillist, drawing dot after dot with total disregard to complementary colors.
By showing these misconceptions in popular culture, director John Hughes and songwriter Steven Sondheim have perpetuated the delusion of Seurat’s limited ability as an artist. Thus, he may not have accomplished his goal of becoming known as a divisionist, but as a result of these two works, he is undeniably famous for his pointillist technique.