Optics and Color Theory: Parade de Cirque by Georges Seurat

The late 19th century saw the end of the Impressionist movement, which was marked by quick frantic brushstrokes in attempts to capture the fleeting. This was followed by a strong emphasis on science, the study of optics and color theory that would be known as Neo-Impressionism. More specifically in Georges Seurat's case, Pointillism—the precise application of dots of paint, arranged in complementary or contrasting hues. As the leader of this new movement Seurat, a Parisian painter and draughtsman, his mastery of color harmony made his artwork both technically spectacular and visually intriguing. One prime example of this is his Parade de Cirque, made in 1887 and shown at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1888. It is currently in the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Parade de Cirque was both Seurat's first nocturnal scene as well as one of his first images of popular Parisian entertainment. Smaller and with a denser figural composition than most of his other works, Parade de Cirque depicts a sideshow, which was a common form of entertainment in Paris in the late 1800s. The scene is divided almost in half, with the left side containing the main act, signified by the large central figure in the scene, standing on a small stage. In the background, separated by a ledge, are the accompanying musicians. The ringmaster, shown on the right, looks on as patrons queue up at the ticket booth along the foreground of the picture plane. The entire outdoor scene is bathed in the artificial light of the nine gaslights at the very top of the painting.
The subject of the scene, while important to Seurat as one of the first of his paintings that detail urban entertainment, is a subsidiary to the technique known as mélange optique or optical mixture. Drawing on Charles Henry's theories concerning the expressive ability of line and color, Seurat employs a system of horizontal and vertical lines coupled with complementary pairs of color to convey the various moods at play in the scene. First, lines help to set the both the melancholic and joyful moods. The horizontals found in the ledge that separates the musicians from the performer, and the balustrade that divides the space between the performer and the audience conveys the melancholy feeling that exists the world of the traveling circus. This is juxtaposed with vertical lines in the gaslights, conveying the sentiment of joy that emerges from the lively entertainment provided to the audience. The moods are also represented in the precise pairs of color, laid down in a system of dots. Orange-yellow pair is used for the warm light that bathes the performers and violet-blue to suggest their shadows. Parade de Cirque is also unique in the fact in although Seurat was driven by the perception of the natural observation of color to the eye, his application of the dots in this painting are less concerned with the eye's perception but rather achieving the otherworldly shimmer of light in this nocturnal scene.
Aside from the theories of Charles Henry, Seurat also adhered to the Symbolist theories of Teodor de Wyzewa, an art and music critic prolific in the Parisian avant-garde world. De Wyzewa's theory stated that line and color should be implemented in combination with one another to create a higher level of expression, he writes:
Today these colors and lines, which belong to the technique of painting, can be applied to two very different modes, one sensory and descriptive that re-creates the exact appearance of objects, the other emotional and musical, which neglects the object these colors and these lines represent…marrying them to one another with the sole purpose of producing within us, through their free play, am impression like that of a symphony.
In using streams of color arranged in outlines, mainly as the contours around the figures and other objects in the scene, it gives both the dots of color and the lines a sense of rhythm and musicality, acquainting each element to its musical counterpart of melody and harmony. For instance, the line of patrons at the bottom of the picture plane, with their varying heights and poses, is reminiscent of musical notes on a scale. Melody and harmony are at play in the arrangement of the dots of paint in their complementary pairs. Although they exist as individual entities of their own, when paired in this way, they work in tandem to express an overall emotion rather than a realistic documentation of the scene. The focus now shifts to the method in which the scene is rendered, and not how accurate the scene is portrayed.
Parade de Cirque would also serve as a precursor to the last set of figural compositions of Seurat's short career. He first made preliminary live sketches in the spring of 1887 when Fernand Corvi's circus set up near the Place de la Nation, a public square bordering the 11th and 12th arrondissements in Paris. The final composition was refined after many preparatory studies, giving Seurat a working model for later scenes of popular entertainment such as La Chahut in 1889-90 and Circus in 1890-91.
The provenance of Parade de Cirque is an interesting one, exchanging hands only six times before arriving in New York in 1932. It remained in Seurat's possession until his death in 1891. Listed with the painting were sketches of various parts of the composition like the tree, the ringmaster, the clown and one of the entire scene. It then passed to his mother, who only kept it for about a year. Seurat's brother Émile and his brother-in-law Léon Appert took hold of the painting but sold it, with the help of Félix Fénéon, the art critic who first coined the term Neo-Impressionism to describe Seurat and his peers, to Berheim-Jeune, a prestigious gallery dating back to the 18th century, that exhibited some of the greatest artists of the Impressionist movement. It left Paris in 1929 when it was bought by the fledgling gallery of Reid and Lefevre in London. It stayed for a very short time in the inventory of Reid and Lefevre, selling in January of the same year to M. Knoedler and Company. Stephen C. Clark, founder of the Baseball Hall of Fame and grandson of Edward Clark, founder of the Singer sewing machine company, bought it from Knoedler and took it to New York City in 1932. It then passed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1960, when it was bequeathed to the collection after Mr. Clark's death.
While in the possession of Josse and Gaston Berheim-Jeune, Parade de Cirque was exhibited four times in two solo shows of Seurat in 1909 and 1920, respectively and two expositions of modern paintings in 1917 and 1925. In London, at Reid and Lefevre, titled La Parade, it was part of two exhibitions celebrating 19th century French painters in 1929. In 1929, under the ownership of M. Knoedler, it was sent to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to be part of the very first loan exhibition of artwork by Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin in the United States. It also traveled to the Rhode Island School of Art and Design and was shown in the New York gallery of M. Knoedler and Company. When acquired by Clark in 1932, he continued lending Parade de Cirque to the Cleveland Museum of Art's Twentieth Anniversary exhibition in 1936, twice to Knoedler in 1949 for a solo show of Seurat's work and in 1954, where it was part of a show focused on his own private collection. Before entering the collection permanently in 1960, Clark lent the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art thrice for their Paintings from Private Collections: Summer Loan Exhibition, which ran every summer from 1958 to 1960. It returned to its native Paris in 1991, loaned by the Met, as part of an exhibition surveying Seurat's entire oeuvre at the Galeries Nationales de Grand Palais.
The truly magical aspect of Parade de Cirque is that it is the technique of applying small dots of paint to the canvas put emphasis on the surface of the canvas and not on the image. The tiny dots of contrasting and complementary colors take center stage and the eye of the viewer delight in following them as they scatter across the canvas. Up close, they are meaningless, but at a specific distance, they work in tandem to form the image of the nocturnal sideshow, glimmering in the light of the Parisian gaslights.
Seurat is considered by many art historians to be an important figure in modern art. His techniques grounded in color and symbolist theories penned by Henry and de Wyzewa, helped to shift the focus of painting from the image to the materials. Parade de Cirque is not driven by realism, but instead by the dots of paint that make up the image. Form and color were now liberated from the image. Seurat's use of color theory was a logical transition from Impressionism and led the way for other art movements such as Fauvism and Cubism.

Notes

1. Dorra, Henri. Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology. University of California Press, 1995.



Bibliography
Dorra, Henri. Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology. University of California Press, 1995.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Circus Sideshow, George Seurat." Accessed February 20, 2014. http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/437654.


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Henri Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, (University of California Press, 1995), 149.