ABSTRACT
The paint application is matter-of-fact, a near-or would-be mechanical reiteration of the functional "dot" of pigment. In Georges Seurat's painting, there is almost no interaction among the figures, no sense of them as articulate and uniquely full human presences: there is no sense of a deep inner core to these painted personages. Nothing could be more revealing of Seurat's deliberate rejection of charming spontaneity in favor of incisive distancing than a comparison of elements from the large final sketch for La Grande Jatte with those of the final version. Seurat's figuring of the child as hope, active in the midst of a sea of frozen passivity, brings to mind a similar figuration: the child artist busily at work, hidden away in Courbet's The Painter's Studio of 1855, subtitled "a real allegory." More materially related to Seurat's anti-Utopian project than Dominique Papety's obscure Utopian image is the work of his older contemporary Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
