During the month of March in Paris, 1891, diphtheria bacterium infected the upper respiratory track of French painter Georges Seurat, where it swelled his larynx and choked him to death. The initial symptom of a sore throat developed to cause delirium and fever, and a week later the sickness ended his life on Easter Sunday, March 29. Seurat was thirty-one years old, and father of Neo-Impressionism was also secretly that of Madeleine Knobloch’s first child, Georges Pierre. Georges Pierre sadly died two weeks after his father at the age of thirteen-months. Madeleine Knobloch was a working-class woman, and pregnant with her second child at the time. Seurat’s father died several months after the life of his son and grandchild had been swept by transmissions of the infectious disease.

Airborne particles of the diphtheria bacteria were commonly symptomatic to the indoor living and public spaces of Paris during the indoor-seasoned months of his death. Touching on the greatness of the revolutionary artist, Richard Thomson suggests evidence that the artistic life of Georges Seurat was influenced by his need of private space and of secrecy – traits inherited from his father. The following transition will contrast types of inherited family traits, and frame an introduction proper of the artist responsible for the collaborative painting, “The Sacred Grove,” Parody of a Painting by Puvis de Chavannes Exhibited at the Salon of 1884.

At the age of thirty-five, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec died in his mother’s arms.  It was September, 1901.  The advanced stages of disease(s) current to Parisian nightlife, of which he was consciously enthralled, were influenced to little effect by what treatment he had sought for a glaring case of alcoholism.  With his death, Toulouse-Lautrec became an emblem of the decadent era that stapled the fin-de-siècle. As an artist instructed towards naturalism from an early age, he later lived and worked in the flaunting dive of Montmartre, a neighborhood known by Paris’ famous Moulin Rouge.  Toulouse-Lautrec drew from Oriental aesthetics of art, and from the neo-impressionists.  Toulouse-Lautrec substantiated flat color and bold lines when depicting the subjects of poster-art, and he had been better known as an illustrator during his life than as a painter, for the unique graphic style of these posters that plastered the streets.  He fashioned styles, techniques, and many influences into the vocal proponents of his caricatural design.  His multitude of drawings and canvases define a personal stance and sense of proportion and perspective.

In 1962, French doctors requested permission to unearth the grave of Toulouse-Lautrec. They were the first to name an inherited disorder of the spinal structure, pycnodysostosis (PICK-no-dis-os-TO-sis), but were unable to analyze the stunted skeletal remains of the artist.  In 1995, pycnodysostosis was positively accredited to the mutation of a gene on the first of twenty-three human chromosomes. The source of the congenital disorder was then linked to instances of inbreeding, again charging a series of posthumous diagnostics to look in the direction of the family tree.  Studies of family lineage, including Toulouse-Lautrec’s, have proffered different explanations for similar cases of “dwarfism” resultant of inbreeding.  The family lines of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec suggest that the retention of family wealth was a highly probable as av contributing concern.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, later in life. Oriental garb [figure missing]

As the grandchild whose grandmothers were sisters, Toulouse-Lautrec was the son of two first cousins. With the hereditary claims and not the unearthed bones of the artist himself, it can only be inferred that Toulouse-Lautrec suffered from pycnodysostosis.  Pycnodysostosis therefore cannot be directly linked to the incident that caused him to stop growing while he was still very young, but nonetheless, these studies find the fact that he managed to successively break both legs over the course of several months, very convincing.

A central vein can be depicted of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Georges Seurat from the midsts of comparative contexts and technical methods involved in the referents of their art to the acclaimed canvas of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and Muses.
An American man, Frederic Clay Bartlett, was the trustee responsible for the purchase and acquisition of Seurat’s most famous painting by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Five years later, in 1891, Bartlett was again in Paris, seeking lessons of the arts at the École de Beaux-Arts from Symbolist painter Fraçois Aman-Jean. In 1884, Aman-Jean and Seurat assisted Puvis de Chavannes as he was completing a reduced version of The Sacred Grove, which won the Salon of 1884 and was part of the Potter Palmer gift to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1922. It is rumored that Puvis worked out this version of his painting in a stairwell, a space where the larger mural version could not possibly have

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, reduced version of The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and Muses, 1884-1889, oil on canvas, 93 x 231 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Potter Palmer Collection. [figure missing]

fit. The mural of The Sacred Grove measures 460 x 1040 centimeters, and presenting a cropped scene of the reduced version it remains today at the Museé des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. [figure missing]

Puvis is recognized to have adorned Seurat with the intent, precision, and basic principles of the French classical tradition. For this school, Puvis was very much a demigod. It is observed that the stability and integrity of Seurat’s paintings surfaced through the technical deliberation of his color and form. In 1886, the product of many studies and renderings produced his iconic, A Sunday on La Grade Jatte, which suggested a premonition of artistic revolution predominately through the powerful debut of his style and discipline that was like an early calling of the Formalist school.

Georges Pierre Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1886-1889, oil on canvas, 207.5 x 308.1 cm (81 3/4 x 121 1/4″) – Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection [figure missing]

Seurat borrowed compositional elements from The Sacred Grove, and this is the most prime among other increasingly nebulous associations. Where Seurat rendered to typify a rigidity of pose, he actualized portions of his ‘scientific’ counterpoint within an aesthetic similarity of setting, and subjected a sampling of fifty bodies from the social strata in place of Puvis’ angels and muses. Overall, one most telling juxtaposition is that of their subjects’ activity – leisure.  Seurat entails a representation of this – commingles Sunday’s best with working class repose and recreation, evolves his subject from the Idealist imagery of Puvis and creates an acute sense of social awareness. At this stage of recognition the understanding of the signified and signifier become blurred, as if at once a layer of surface appearance combusts, sending a multitude of probes reminiscent of some initial stability to seek in the mire for greater depths of associated recognition.

Seurat probably spent less than the smallest fraction of time talking publicly about any formulaic behind his works of art than he did standing in front of then with a brush.  Other Neo-Impressionists were much more active in the social sphere, striving to identify their movement beyond the malady of Salon culture, as if waiting to see the proponents of a commercial machine turned back into chemical compounds and torrents of organic materials.  In his book, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground, John Hutton says of Camille Pissaro, Paul Signac, and “their confederates”:

“In search of a synthesis that could explain how the high art associated with a wealthy art-buying public was to aid in the gestation of a new, more just social order, the Neo-impressionists turned not only to theories that sprang from the dominant motives of art but also to theories of an art social which had evolved in the 1880s in artistic and literary circles influenced by the anarchist and socialist movements.”

After the death of Seurat, a letter of Signac, perhaps his closest friend and five years his junior, written to Camille Pissaro reads:

“I have scarified myself to the general interest, because I was the most bellicose member of the group. And I believe that I have not been without usefulness, and that if out ideas have to some extent imposed themselves I have had something to do with it….”

Seurat drew and painted his studies on a small and thin, jetty-like island on the Seine river near the working class burrow of Asnières, downstream from many of the expansive industrial sectors of Paris (appendix, C). Seurat’s solidity of light negotiates his micro-sized points and flecks of color as they stack atop equally nuanced intonations of subsurface. His solidity of ‘truthful’ light – the resplendent amenity, harmonizing the contours of form with the music of color as it sublimates, transfuses. The images below, taken through a microscope, are cross sections of Seurat’s canvas showing his composite use of color.

These examples well illustrate why Neo-Impressionist artists objected to how critics regarded only the surface of their work with descriptions of pointillism. Divisionism, a term more precise than Neo-Impressionism, is expounded in Signac’s treatise work, Color in Neo-Impressionism, where he says:

“[t]o divide is to ensure all the benefits of luminosity, color, and harmony by the optical intermingling of exclusively pure colors (all the hues of the prism together with all their tones); by the separation of the various elements and their proportion (according to the laws of the contrast of gradation and irradiation); by the choice of a brushstroke proportional to the dimensions of the picture.”

Seurat himself was generally never vocal enough to assert that someone should refer to him by any specific term, though he did suggest the dictum for the movement, chromo-luminarist. Was it the prowess of his technique, or a universal effect wrought by the intimacy of his art that saved the subjects of La Jatte from the more cautionary stage of caricature onto which they surely could have slipped?

La Grande Jatte was shown at the Salon of Independent Artists in 1886 and became an irreversible landmark against a current of laissez-faire bourgeois art, swelled for decades by its sponsor, the Third Republic of France. It emerged as the manifesto of Neo-Impressionism in its countless approach, and took the revolutionary effect of stitching apart the threads of Romantic Impressionism. The artists of this antiquated genre that erratically bridged the old generation of Camille Pissaro with the young, of educated intern-like artists. As if the air of the National Salon had been deadened overnight, La Jatte pointed finger at the manner of subject, and thus at the subject of the artist.

The Neo-Impressionists deprived Impressionism of what had been specifically neglected like an unborn child – modernity. They mixed it in with the substance of their voice.

Contemporary art critic and influential author Joris-Karl Huysmans had similarly insurrected the imaginative space of the fin-de-siècle with his novel Á Rebours, published 1884 – two years before A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Breaking with a long tradition of naturalism and feuding with other senior vice-heralds of French art, literature, and Parisian life, Huysmans wrote into the many ambling thoughts of the decadent character Des Esseintes. The character Des Esseintes, assumes an expansive knowledge of literature and art history through an extension of Huysmans’ own.

In 1887, Huysmans wrote of La Grande Jatte, perhaps over-zealously:

“[s]trange thing! This landscape painter whose seascapes can induce monotonous dreams becomes all unsuggestive façade when he places painted personages upon his stage; and it is here that his technique—that arpeggio of little strokes, that mesh of tiny stitches, those mosaics of colored points—trips him up.”

His critique of Seurat from the article, Chronicle of Art: The Independents, is inextensible, misleading, and discombobulating.  He goes on to say:

“. …Monsieur Seurat succeeds—but no better than did his predecessors the Impressionists—in rendering the vision of the human figure in light; and as a result of concentrating all of this efforts on this goal, he neglects to penetrate further and deeper. Strip his figures of the colored fleas with which they are covered, and underneath there is nothing; no soul, no thought, nothing.”

For one example of an instance of Huysmans’ more explicit and crass critique of art, see his attitude pertaining to the bourgeois subject matter of James Tissot’s painting from1869 at the appendix of this essay (C).

Before this review of Seurat’s painting could leave the mouth of Huysmans’ pen in 1887, his ideas that coincided with the theories of Seurat’s circle of artists would have most likely appeared in his articles made public though the pages of journals like the L’Art Moderne. The following quote is important to the thesis of this essay, and it must briskly draw like informants to a photograph the possibility of concurrence between Huysmans and Seurat.

“In 1883 Huysmans published L’Art moderne, which advanced a highly influential, but also confused and politically neutral version of the ‘truth’ thesis. According to Signac’s recollections, Seurat, like many painters of his generation, knew this text, and was impressed by its analysis of the Impressionist technique. It would therefore seem to conform to the kind of veridical Impressionism Huysmans called for, while remaining politically uncontentious in doing so. Huysmans’ s text was not dissimilar to its predecessors in its analysis of the Impressionist technique, and in its eulogy of Impressionist virtues and its condemnation of the vices of Salon art. It was distinguished, however, by its powerful language and its relentless reductio ad absurdum of the techniques of Salon painting, which he characterised as antiquated and therefore inappropriate to modern-life subjects, or the sensations of modern life.”

In practice, Huysmans should be able to agree with his words from 1869, and should align himself with artists who:

“go further to the individuals they paint[.]…[A]nd while they express their eternal appearance marvelously, they also know how to give them the flavor of their home ground. The prostitute smacks of prostitute and the society lady of society lady.”

An author occupies his conception of reality, and there is always need for the many small units of the basic formulae contained in this prompt when, given further description, they are broken apart into.

When Des Esseintes is typified as an anti-hero by any a lesser lofty sense of taste or decency, the novel’s predicate becomes masked by its overtly blaring character, who might wish to inspire in such a reader the fright of being spit upon. The idea of this essay hearkens to dissuade the fear of an actual threat, despite the yet-to-be-discussed topic of the Faustian ledged involving the pact with the devil of a German protagonist. As if the author of this essay should at this point say, “the views and opinions of these authors and artists do not necessarily reflect that of this essay” – I will continue with an overview of Des Esseintes’ yearning for the perfect object of art instead of introducing and contextualizing the substantially associated imagery of the Faustian legend in Huysmans’ novel.
From the fourteenth chapter of Á Rebours:

“he demanded a disquieting vagueness that would give him scope for dreaming until he decided to make it still vaguer or more definite, according to the way he felt at the time. He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive patiently and even vainly to analyse… he had withdrawn further and further from reality and above all from the society of his day, which he regarded with ever-growing horror; this hatred he felt had inevitably affected his literary and artistic tastes, so that he shunned as far as possible pictures and books whose subjects were confined to modern life” (pp. 165-166)

Important paintings that Huysmans placed at the Dukes mansion at Fontenay include his centerpiece, Gusave Moureau’s, Tattooed Salomé. In Á Rebours, Huysmans’ effectively mingles this imagery with a feminine spirit of the Faustian legend.

“Although she lived in the late nineteenth century and was physically and effectively a modern , by virtue of ancestral influences La Faustin was a creature of the eighteenth century, sharing to the full its spiritual perversity, its cerebral lassitude, its sensual satiety” (pp. 167-168)

“beneath the printed line lurked another line visible only to the soul, indicated by an epithet that opened up vast vistas of passion, by a reticence that hinted at spiritual infinities no ordinary idiom could compass. The idiom used in this book was quite different from the language of Flaubert, inimitable in its magnificence; this style was penetrating and sickly, tense and subtle, careful to record the intangible impression that affects the senses and produces feeling, and skilled in modulating the complicated nuances of an epoch that was itself extraordinarily complex. It was, in fact, the sort of style that is indispensable to decrepit civilizations which, in order to express their needs, and to whatever age they may belong, require new acceptations, new uses, new forms both of word and phrase.” (pp. 166).

In À Rebours, Huysmans enumerated an extent of pessimism through the centrality of one protagonist that scarred the isolated, soundproof salvations of Des Esseintes, that reached into the moments of his artificial synesthetics. Posited in Parisian culture, the novel, an extreme case of the dandy paradigm, contains passages that foreshadowed an attitude of craftsmanship and constructive transparency. Entrenching with the vision of social proxies in concurrent years and those to follow – Divisionists, and the art of Neo-Impressionism.

In conclusion, these anachronistic additions made by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s and his unknown assistants mocks Puvis de Chavannes, though has since been re-titled by art historians.

FIGURES

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, “The Sacred Grove,” Parody of a Painting by Puvis de Chavannes Exhibited at the Salon of 1884, 1884.

Oil on canvas, 172 x 380 cm. The Henry and Rose Perlman Foundation, Inc.

Clock – right of center, tops the classical monument.
Flying angel grips a tube of paint.

Easel – accompanies the leftmost figure.

Procession of Bourgeois – dwarfish figure of Toulouse-Lautrec urinates at front.

Boy eating something different than the fig leaves he had held – second from right. Puvis de Chavannes painted a third version of the sacred grove, 1884-89, named Sacred Wood Dear to the Arts and Muses (appendix, D). The perverse and faulty rendering of this section makes a great ambivalence clear.

WORKS CITED // APPENDIX
(A) Madeleine Knobloch, the secret wife of Seurat, by Seurat.

Georges Seurat. Young Woman Powdering Herself.
c. 1888-1890. Oil on canvas. Courtauld Institute Galleries, London, UK.

(B) Location of study: Seurat’s La Grande Jatte

(C) Huysmans regards James Tissot’s painting, Jeunes Femmes Regardant des Objets Japonais. The Salon of 1869:

“[N]ow look how foolish the painters of modernity are. I was in one of their studios a week ago. Enter a young girl of twenty, cheap-looking, with a snotty brat begotten in the dregs of the Reine-Blanche, but as pretty as you like and for a shilling’s-worth of lampblack under the eyes. The painter made her clean herself up, tossed the child in a corner, threw a velvet gown over this streetwalker, and placed a knick-knack in her paws. And this tart, so attractive to paint as a tart, becomes a lady studying a Chinese ornament! Modernity, modernity!! You have to go to a real lady, if you want to paint one!…no, you don’t make contemporary art by hiring a model who serves to personify the highest of ladies and the lowest of whores equally well. But as far as I am concerned it is above all from this point of view that the talented Impressionists are vastly superior to the painters who show at the official exhibitions. They go further to the individuals they paint, and while they express their eternal appearance marvelously, they also know how to give them the flavor of their home ground. The prostitute smacks of prostitute and the society lady of society lady.”

(D) Sacred Wood Dear to the Arts and Muses, Pierre de Chavannes.

Corynebacterium diphtheriae, diphtheria, is also known as angina suffocant, malignant angina, and gangrenous angina. This bacteria spread epidemically throughout Europe during the 19th century.
Vora SK. Death of Seurat. From the journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases. 2005 Jan [cited May, 4th, 2008]. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol11no01/04-0269.htm

Madeleine Knobloch, subject of Seurat’s canvas Young Woman Powdering Herself, 1890. Appendix, A.

Thomson R. Seurat. Salem (NH): Salem House; 1985.

Maroteaux P., Lamy M. The Malady of Toulouse-Lautrec. Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14245511

Hutton, John. Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground. Louisiana State Press, 1994. 93.

Letter excerpt from the book Paul Signac. Cachin, Françoise. Connecticut, 1971. 52-55.

Excerpt of Signac’s book taken from Paul Signac. Cachin, Françoise. Connecticut, 1971. 23-24.

Broude, Norma. Seurat in Perspective. Prentice-Hall Inc, New Jersey, 1978, 43.

Smith, Paul. Seurat and the Avant-Garde. New Haven, London, 1997. 69.

From Smith, Paul. Seurat and the Avant-Garde. New Haven, London, 1997. 69.

All quotes taken from Robert Baldick’s translation of Against Nature. Penguin, 2003.

From Smith, Paul. Seurat and the Avant-Garde. New Haven, London, 1997. 69.