Abstract:

This dissertation analyzes the work of the French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat as a sustained exploration of the conditions, limitations, and processes of visual perception and cognition. Seurat's interest in the perception of color has long been noted, first by contemporary critics and then by later art historians, as the foundation of his pointillist technique of paint application. But my dissertation is the first book-length study to elaborate the multiple aspects of perception that interested Seurat, beyond color perception, and the myriad ways in which Seurat's interest in perception permeates his body of work, beyond pointillism. More specifically, I argue that Seurat was devoted to elaborating a complex model of perception and cognition in his images that emphasized the relationship between the eye, body, and mind of the viewer. Seurat's work constitutes a sustained inquiry into the possibilities and limits both of vision for comprehending and navigating the external world, and of painting and drawing as a means of representing the world around us.

Each chapter in the dissertation focuses on a different part of Seurat's oeuvre. Chapter One analyzes Seurat's little studied series of seascape paintings, which I discuss, in part, as an acknowledgement of and an attempt to supersede the perceptual limits of any single viewing position and the representational limits of the single easel painting. Chapter Two analyzes the development of Seurat's figural paintings, which manifest his increasing skepticism regarding the ability of painting to adequately represent the external world. Chapter Three explores Seurat's body of drawings, which I discuss as a complementary underside to the perceptual and representational terms articulated in Seurat's paintings, focusing in particular on the relationship between the sight and touch of the artist, the viewer, and the depicted subjects of the drawings. Throughout the dissertation, I situate Seurat's exploration of various aspects of perception and cognition as a meditation on different modes of being in the world, ranging from productive sensory, corporeal, and cognitive engagement to a more passive, spectatorial relationship to the world around us.