Bathers at Asniers

It is difficult to say why Georges-Pierre Seurat was taken up  with the idea of points. We can only guess that it was an obsessive inspiration that compelled him to study the works of contemporary scientists on this subject before applying them painstakingly in his paintings. It was perhaps one of those stray threads in Nature's immense evolutionary gossamer that she did not bother to tie up in the end and left dangling: for that particular genre did not have any lasting effect in the field of art except to make Seurat known, and to gift to the art-loving world the La Grande Jatte.

The La Grande Jatte may be his most famous work, but I like his Bathers at Asniers best. The painting powerfully transports the viewer to an experience of the white heat of an afternoon that has put the earth as if into a trance. That trance is not broken, but rather strangely intensified, by the cooing of the boy in the water. Looking long at it sends one into a reverie...

La Grande Jatte: it took Seurat two whole years to complete

I cant say, not being an art critic, why La Grande Jatte is considered to be a masterpiece. Two generations of critics and art-lovers must have had their valid reasons for it. However it seems to me that to approach art with a scientific mind is to land up with a blend that serves neither supremely. Then, as in Seurat, the technique becomes all important pushing the inspiration and the idea to the backburner. Then the work loses beauty at the cost of technical accomplishment.
 
Let me quote Sri Aurobindo in this matter:
" There have been periods of artistic creation, ages of reason, in which the rational and intellectual tendency has prevailed in poetry and art;... At their best these periods have achieved work of a certain greatness, but predominantly of an intellectual greatness and perfection of technique rather than achievements of a supreme inspired and revealing beauty."

Then he goes on to say: "But great art is not satisfied with representing the intellectual truth of things, which is always their superficial or exterior truth; it seeks for a deeper and original truth which escapes the eye of the mere sense or the mere reason, the soul in them, the unseen reality which is not that of their form and process but of their spirit."

Sometimes a too much obsession with technique can render the art work into "a cold and mechanical workmanship" and "it ceases to be art". However, the Bathers, my favourite, can be exculpated from this defect as it is from a pre-pointillism era of Seurat's life, a painting done when he was twenty-four. It was created with the same kind of brush strokes that other artists use. There were complicated techniques even in that, like the balaye, among others, but it was a normal oil-on-canvas painting above everything else. The touchstone of its excellence is that it can convey the viewer to a long bygone summer's day with all its concomitant mesmerising timelessness.

Or is it the painting that has such power, and not something or someone else in the viewer that remembers? Who can say?...