ABSTRACT
‘The Last Time I Saw Paris,’ the 1940 song by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II responding to the German occupation of Paris, begins this essay on Sunday in the Park with George. Sondheim and Lapine’s 1984 musical utilises two paintings of Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and (to a lesser extent) The Bathers, to examine the conflict between the demands of artistic production and the needs of human beings. The next section of the essay examines the contrast between Seurat’s choice of a suburban Parisian park for his painting and the everyday concerns of the bourgeoisie during the belle époque through two minor figures from Act I, the American tourists. The chapter then illustrates Seurat’s relation to Impressionist paintings of the Seine, the development of the art market and the consequent dispersal of his paintings to the United States and the United Kingdom. The final section explores the depiction in Act II of the monetisation of art (and the ironies of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte at the Art Institute of Chicago) with reference to a lecture by Chicago novelist Saul Bellow, before concluding with a return to that Parisian park, now transformed by suburban sprawl, but still a residuum of creative and personal integrity.
