“Georges,” said Gauguin, “I want you to meet Vincent Van Gogh, Theo’s brother. He paints like a Dutchman, but aside from that he’s a damn fine fellow.”
Seurat’s attic was of tremendous size, running almost the full length of the house. There were huge, unfinished canvases on the walls, with scaffolding before them. A high square table had been placed under the gas lamp; lying flat on this table was a wet canvas.
“I’m happy to know you, Monsieur Van Gogh. You’ll pardon me for just a few moments, won’t you? I have another little square of colour to fill in before my paint dries.”
He climbed on top of a high stool and crouched over his canvas. The gas lamp burned with a steady, yellowish flare. About twenty tiny pots of colour formed a neat line across the table. Seurat touched the tip of the smallest painting brush Vincent had ever seen into one of the pots and began putting little points of colour on the canvas with mathematical precision. He worked quietly and without emotion. His manner was aloof and detached, like that of a mechanic. Dot dot dot dot. He held his brush straight up in his hand, barely touched it to the pot of paint, and then dot dot dot dot on the canvas, hundreds upon hundreds of minute dots.
Vincent watched him, agape. At length Seurat turned on his stool.
“There,” he said, “I’ve got that space hollowed out.”
“Would you mind showing it to Vincent, Georges?” asked Gauguin. “Where he comes from they paint cows and sheep. He didn’t know there was a modern art until a week ago.”
“If you’ll sit on this stool, Monsieur Van Gogh.”
Vincent climbed up on the stool and looked at the canvas spread out before him. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, either in art or life. The scene represented the Island of the Grande Jatte. Architectural human beings, made out of infinitely graduated points of colour, stood up like poles in a Gothic cathedral. The grass, the river, the boats, the trees, all were vague and abstract masses of dotted light. The canvas was done in all the brightest shades of the palette, lighter than those Manet or Degas or even Gauguin dared to use. The picture was a withdrawal into a region of almost abstract harmony. If it was alive, it was not with the life of nature. The air was filled with glittering luminosity, but there was not a breath to be found anywhere. It was a still life of vibrant life, from which movement had been forever banished.
Gauguin stood at Vincent’s side and laughed at the expression on his face.
“It’s all right, Vincent, Georges’s canvases strike everyone that way the first time they look at them. Out with it! What do you think?”
Vincent turned apologetically to Seurat.
“You will forgive me, Monsieur, but so many strange things have happened to me in the last few days that I cannot find my balance. I trained myself in the Dutch tradition. I had no idea what the Impressionists stood for. And now I suddenly find everything I believed in discarded.”
“I understand,” said Seurat quietly. “My method is revolutionizing the whole art of painting, so you could not be expected to take it all in with one glance. You see, Monsieur, up to the present, painting has been a matter of personal experience. It is my aim to make it an abstract science. We must learn to pigeonhole our sensations and arrive at a mathematical precision of mind. Every human sensation can be, and must be reduced to an abstract statement of colour, line, and tone. You see these little pots of colour on my table?”
“Yes, I’ve been noticing them.”
“Each of those pots, Monsieur Van Gogh, contains a specific human emotion. With my formula they can be made in the factories and sold in the chemists’ shops. No more haphazard mixing of colours on the palette; that method belongs to a past age. From now on the painter will go to the chemist’s shop and simply pry the lids off his little pots of colour. This is an age of science, and I am going to make a science out of painting. Personality must disappear, and painting must become precise, like architecture. Do you follow me, Monsieur?”
“No,” said Vincent, “I’m afraid I don’t.”
Gauguin nudged Vincent.
“See here, Georges, why do you insist upon calling this your method. Pissarro worked it out before you were born.”
“It’s a lie!”
A flush spread over Seurat’s face. He sprang off his stool, walked quickly to the window, rapped on the sill with the ends of his fingers, then stormed back.
“Who said Pissarro worked it out before me? I tell you it’s my method. I was the first to think of it. Pissarro learned his pointillism from me. I’ve been through the history of art since the Italian primitives, and I tell you, no one thought of it before me. How dare you . . .!”
He bit his lip savagely, walked to one of his scaffolds, and turned a hunched back on Vincent and Gauguin.
Vincent was utterly amazed at the transition. The man leaning over his canvas on the table had had architectural features, perfect and cold. He had had dispassionate eyes, the impersonal manner of a scientist in a laboratory. His voice had been cool, almost pedagogic. The same veil of abstraction had been over his eyes that he threw over his paintings. But the man at the end of the attic was biting the thick, red under lip that stuck out from the full beard, and was angrily rumpling the mass of curly brown hair that had been so neat before.
“Oh, come, Georges,” said Gauguin, winking at Vincent. “Everyone knows that it’s your method. Without you there would have been no pointillism.”
Mollified, Seurat came back to the table. The glow of anger died slowly out of his eyes.
“Monsieur Seurat,” said Vincent, “how can we make painting an impersonal science when it is essentially the expression of the individual that counts?”
“Look! I will show you.”
Seurat grabbed a box of crayons from the table and crouched down on the bare plank floor. The gaslight burned dimly above them. The night was completely still. Vincent knelt on one side of him, and Gauguin squatted on the other. Seurat was still excited, and spoke with animation.
“In my opinion,” he said, “all effects in painting can be reduced to formulae. Suppose I want to draw a circus scene. Here’s a bareback rider, here the trainer, here the gallery and spectators. I want to suggest gaiety. What are the three elements of painting? Line, tone and colour. Very well, to suggest gaiety, I bring all my lines above the horizontal, so. I make my luminous colours dominant, so, and my warm tone dominant, so. There! Doesn’t that suggest the abstraction of gaiety?’
“Well,” replied Vincent, “it may suggest the abstraction of gaiety, but it doesn’t catch gaiety itself.”
Seurat looked up from his crouching position. His face was in the shadow. Vincent observed what a beautiful man he was.
“I’m not after gaiety itself. I’m after the essence of gaiety. Are you acquainted with Plato, my friend?”
“Yes.”
“Very well, what painters must learn to portray is not a thing, but the essence of a thing. When the artist paints a horse, it should not be one particular horse that you can recognize in the street. The camera can take photographs; we must go beyond that. What we must capture when we paint a horse, Monsieur Van Gogh, is Plato’s horsiness, the external spirit of a horse. And when we paint a man, it should not be the concierge, with a wart on the end of his nose, but manness, the spirit and essence of all men. Do you follow me, my friend?”
“I follow,” said Vincent, “but I don’t agree.”
“We’ll come to the agreement later.”
Seurat got off his haunches, slipped out of his smock, and wiped the circus picture off the floor with it.
“Now we go on to calmness,” he continued. “I am doing a scene on the Island of the Grande Jatte. I make all my lines horizontal, so. For tone I use perfect equality between warm and cold, so; for colour, equality between dark and light, so. Do you see it?”