Sunday in the Park —-

“This is a world both real and unreal – a sacred world. We are often harried by life’s pressures and its speed, and many of us think at times: Stop the world, I want to get off! In this painting, Seurat has “stopped the world,” and it reveals itself as beautiful, sunlit, and silent – it is Seurat’s world, from which we would never want to get off.”

—   Sister Wendy Beckett

La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat

Not our Sunday, bien-sûr, but a brighter, better Sunday: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte (1884), the vision of Georges Seurat, French pointillist, about whom art historian and commentator Sister Wendy Beckett continued:

“Seurat’s Grande Jatte is one of those rare works of art that stand alone; its transcendence is instinctively recognized by everyone. What makes this transcendence so mysterious is that the theme of the work is not some profound emotion or momentous event, but the most banal of workaday scenes: Parisians enjoying an afternoon in a local park. Yet we never seem to fathom its elusive power. Stranger still, when he painted it, Seurat was a mere 25 (with only seven more years to live), a young man with a scientific theory to prove; this is hardly the recipe for success. His theory was optical: the conviction that painting in dots, known as pointillism or divisionism, would produce a brighter color than painting in strokes.”

It is an enormous painting, nearly lifesize, and when come upon unawares in the Chicago Art Institute, can bowl you over. It bowled over Stephen Sondheim, who transformed the painting into a hit Broadway musical, “Sunday Afternoon in the Park with George(s).” Once seen, never forgotten: as testified by this photo in El Parque del Retiro, Madrid’s largest city park, snapped in homage to the Seurat, but facing to the right:

Photo by Frank Bruder