Georges Seurat painted his first masterpiece, Bathers at Asnières, in 1884. He painted what proved to be his last masterpiece, Le Cirque, in 1891. The intervening years saw a garbling of the taxonomy of French painting. We call it “Neo-Impressionism” thanks to the term’s 1886 coinage by the astute Félix Fénéon, but the actual workings of the movement entailed several competing arguments about the future of art. Pointillists were getting into spats with Cloisonnists. Symbolists crossed rhetorical swords with Naturalists. Soon after, the Nabis arrived on the scene. One might have been tempted to call it a circus.
The curious thing about Pointillism is how little talent it enabled.
The curious thing about Pointillism is how little talent it enabled. Remove Seurat and you’re left with figures like Henri-Edmond Cross and Charles Angrand—fine painters, but neither of whom gave us anything to compare with La Grande Jatte. Major artists, Camille Pissarro and Pablo Picasso included, gave the style a go before they eventually threw their hands up and returned to techniques that don’t require sitting in front of a canvas for long hours with one’s hand in a controlled tremor. That was the end of it as far as the history books are concerned, unless someone wants to try to connect it to Yayoi Kusama.
It may be that you had to be Seurat to get everything that one could get out of Pointillism: scientific of mind and uninterested in