Seurat's Ideas and his development of Divisionism

Seurat was inspired to abandon Impressionism, and instead wanted to render what he regarded as the essential and unchanging in life. However, he borrowed many of his approaches from Impressionism, due to his love of the modern subject matter and scenes of urban leisure. Seurat wanted to avoid depicting only the "local", or apparent, color of depicted objects, and instead wanted to capture all the colors that interacted to produce  their appearance.

Seurat was fascinated by the range of scientific ideas about color, form and expression. He believed that lines tending in certain directions, and colors of a particular warmth or coolness, could have particular expressive effects. He pursued the discovery that contrasting or complementary colors can optically mix to show more vivid tones, that could be achieved by mixing only paint. He called his technique Chromoluminism, which later became known as Divisionism.

Pointillism and Chromoluminarism

Chromoluminarism, or Divisionism, was a style of painting in which colors were separated into individual patches or dots that created an optical interaction with the viewers eye. The colors used were very pure and appeared mixed to the viewers eye. Pointillism uses similar patches and dots, but the key differences between the two styles is that Divisionism uses longer brush strokes, making small comma like dots, like Seurat's Grandcamp, Evening, whereas Pointillism uses much smaller brush strokes which result in very tiny dots and points. The other key difference is usually in the subject matter. Pointillism focuses around urban life and secular themes like the Bathers at Asnieres or A Sunday on la Grande Jatte. While Divisionism focuses on social themes and used Christian symbolism.

Who was Georges Seurat (A brief overview)

Georges Seurat was born into a rich family in Paris. Seurat first began to study art with a sculptor named Justin Lequiene. From there Seurat began to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from 1878 to 1879, and from there he served in the Brest Military Academy for another year before finally returning to Paris in 1880. For the next two years he devoted himself to his master of the black and white drawing, and spent 1883 on his first major painting titled, Bathers at Asnieres, which was rejected by the Paris Salon. Afterwards he turned away from such establishments and began to ally himself with the independent artists of Paris.