la berceuse by vincent van gogh, 1889: vincent van gogh and georges seurat r often seen as polar opposites: van gogh a passionate dutchman most at home in the countryside and seurat the quintessential frenchman – urban, cerebral, dispassionate. however, their work has much in common. both believed in traditional portraiture, both practiced the principles of chromoluminarism, both were interested in achieving a certain level of musical consonance or harmony in their work and both aimed to democratize art by breaking down the barriers b/w popular and elite art. in “la berceuse” van gogh tried to “sing a lullaby in color”. he distorts light, perspective and anatomy to instill vigor into his paintings. his portraits r detailed anthropological studies. he uses both abstraction and objectivity to fulfill his vision: “the painting of humanity … by means of portraiture”.
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young woman powdering herself by georges seurat, 1889-90. compare to van gogh’s “la berceuse.” seurat’s atomic particle of the new (modern) vision, the desubjectified dot, is in fact today’s unit of measurement for pictorial resolution. we talk about dots per inch or pixels – the single point in computer graphics, representing a rectangular grid of points of color. who would have thought.