Georges-Pierre Seurat - Circus Sideshow (1887-88)
"Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science."
"We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infinite variabilities, the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They are infinite speeds that blend into the immobility of the colourless and silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought. This is the instant of which we do not know whether it is too long or too short for time. We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas. This is why we want to hang on to fixed opinions so much. We ask only that our ideas are linked together according to a minimum of constant rules. All that the association of ideas has ever meant is providing us with these protective rules - resemblance, continuity, causality - which enable us to put some order into ideas, preventing our "fantasy" (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire. But there would not be a little order in ideas if there was not also a little order in things or states of affairs, like an objective antichaos: "If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy. . . my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red colour to bring to mind heavy cinnabar." [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason] And finally, at the meeting point of things and thought, the sensation must recur - that of heaviness whenever we hold cinnabar in our hands, that of red whenever we look at it - as proof or evidence of their agreement with our bodily organs that do not perceive the present without imposing on it a conformity with the past. This is all that we ask for in order to make an opinion for ourselves, like a sort of "umbrella", which protects us from chaos.
Our opinions are made up from all this. But art, science, and philosophy require more: they cast planes over the chaos. . . . Philosophy, science, and art want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into the chaos. We defeat it only at this price. . . . The philosopher, the scientist, and the artist seem to return from the land of the dead. . . . The artist brings back from the chaos varieties that no longer constitute a reproduction of the sensory in the organ but set up a being of the sensory, a being of sensation, on an anorganic plane of composition that is able to restore the infinite. . . . Painters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap leads them from chaos to composition. . . . It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy, because another struggle develops and takes on more importance - the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself."
From What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri
"A parade, the free entertainment offered at the entrance of a travelling theatre, is intended to attract a crowd and encourage the sale of tickets. Seurat painted this extraordinary work during six months in 1887–88 and showed it at the fourth exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in 1888. It was his first attempt to render the effects of artificial light at night using the Pointillist technique and seems to have been inspired by a lecture on artificial light by James McNeill Whistler that was translated into French and published by the poet Stephen Mallarmé. Seurat achieved an unprecedented effect in the rendering of the illumination from the row of gas jets. Circus Sideshow is also Seurat's first systematic application of the scientific theories of Charles Henry (1859–1926) regarding the relationship between aesthetics and the physiology and psychology of the senses. By 1890 Seurat had formulated an aesthetic based on these theories that explains his intentions in Circus Sideshow: 'Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of contrary and similar elements of tone, of colour, and of line, considered according to their dominants and under the influence of light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations . . . . Gaiety of tone is given by the luminous dominant; of colour, by the warm dominant; of line, by lines above the horizontal.'"
"Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science."
Georges-Pierre Seurat
"We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infinite variabilities, the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They are infinite speeds that blend into the immobility of the colourless and silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought. This is the instant of which we do not know whether it is too long or too short for time. We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas. This is why we want to hang on to fixed opinions so much. We ask only that our ideas are linked together according to a minimum of constant rules. All that the association of ideas has ever meant is providing us with these protective rules - resemblance, continuity, causality - which enable us to put some order into ideas, preventing our "fantasy" (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire. But there would not be a little order in ideas if there was not also a little order in things or states of affairs, like an objective antichaos: "If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy. . . my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red colour to bring to mind heavy cinnabar." [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason] And finally, at the meeting point of things and thought, the sensation must recur - that of heaviness whenever we hold cinnabar in our hands, that of red whenever we look at it - as proof or evidence of their agreement with our bodily organs that do not perceive the present without imposing on it a conformity with the past. This is all that we ask for in order to make an opinion for ourselves, like a sort of "umbrella", which protects us from chaos.
Our opinions are made up from all this. But art, science, and philosophy require more: they cast planes over the chaos. . . . Philosophy, science, and art want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into the chaos. We defeat it only at this price. . . . The philosopher, the scientist, and the artist seem to return from the land of the dead. . . . The artist brings back from the chaos varieties that no longer constitute a reproduction of the sensory in the organ but set up a being of the sensory, a being of sensation, on an anorganic plane of composition that is able to restore the infinite. . . . Painters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap leads them from chaos to composition. . . . It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy, because another struggle develops and takes on more importance - the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself."
From What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri
"A parade, the free entertainment offered at the entrance of a travelling theatre, is intended to attract a crowd and encourage the sale of tickets. Seurat painted this extraordinary work during six months in 1887–88 and showed it at the fourth exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in 1888. It was his first attempt to render the effects of artificial light at night using the Pointillist technique and seems to have been inspired by a lecture on artificial light by James McNeill Whistler that was translated into French and published by the poet Stephen Mallarmé. Seurat achieved an unprecedented effect in the rendering of the illumination from the row of gas jets. Circus Sideshow is also Seurat's first systematic application of the scientific theories of Charles Henry (1859–1926) regarding the relationship between aesthetics and the physiology and psychology of the senses. By 1890 Seurat had formulated an aesthetic based on these theories that explains his intentions in Circus Sideshow: 'Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of contrary and similar elements of tone, of colour, and of line, considered according to their dominants and under the influence of light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations . . . . Gaiety of tone is given by the luminous dominant; of colour, by the warm dominant; of line, by lines above the horizontal.'"
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art website.
