Seurat’s failure to employ the complementary color theory in his masterpiece caused the common perception of his pointillist style to revolve mainly around dots, as opposed to the combination of the dots and contrasting colors. Even Paul Gauguin, one of Seurat’s contemporary artists, saw the style as only a series of dots. He described Neo-Impressionists like Seurat as “petits jeunes chimistes qui accumulent des petits points� meaning “young little chemists who put together little points� (Broude 581). Gauguin is probably one of the most reliable sources for art criticism because of his eye for color. If he didn’t pick up on the intended contrasting colors, how could anyone else? If the public had instead been given a chance to see Seurat’s studies, they might have observed and physically experienced the effects of his intended color theory. Unfortunately, that was not the case and the 58 studies remained unexhibited until after the unveiling of Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte.
Now that we have access to the collection more than a hundred years after its conception, we have the ability to follow Seurat’s development of his style throughout his search for the precise formula. In addition to the information provided by his studies, his private letters have reminded us of Seurat’s original reasoning for his pursuit of Chevreul and Rood’s scientific color theory: to create artwork that had the ability to induce relaxation in its viewers. Yet, Seurat never reached his goal, even after years of copious research and ample understanding of the subject. His masterpiece went a step too far; he dotted layer upon layer of color, only to lose the careful planning he had done. But even though Seurat didn’t reach his goal, was it all a lost cause?
While Seurat may not have succeeded in his original goal to create the ultimate formulaic masterpiece, in the process, he unknowingly created an entirely new thread of pointillism, one that would be praised and recreated for centuries. Today, everyone recognizes Seurat as the artist who paints dots. Returning to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, it is no wonder Cameron focused on just the pointillism and not divisionism. It has become natural for the audience to enter the exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago expecting one thing: Seurat’s dots.