Shedding Some Light

Few productions stirred the theatrical world this past year as much as Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George.” Ostensibly variations on the theme of art and society, the play is also about science. Sondheim deals with the role of science in the lives of particular artists, and by extension in the world of art throughout the last hundred years.

The first act of this remarkably plotless musical focuses on the innovative French painter George Seurat. The second act jumps a century to juxtapose the predicament of his putative great-grandson, also George, and also something of an artistic original.

Scientific and Artistic Musings The phenomenon of light that so fascinated the Impressionists also occupied the musings of their contemporary scientists. In 1850 the Frenchman, Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau, made the first nearly accurate measurements of the movement of light through space in time. And 28 years later the American, Albert A. Michelson, made the measurement exactly.

The painters tried to capture the effect of light on canvas, but none in so scientific a manner as Seurat, the inventor of a particular kind of Impressionism called Pointillism. Seurat placed his pigments as dots of primary colors on canvas. Close up the dots look like chaos, but at a distance they are blended by the eye into subtle shades and shapes. Seurat was a perfectionist whose vision was ignored by his contemporaries and unappreciated by the woman who loved him (she preferred everyday attentions to the honor of having her essence distilled into the image of a perfection outside of time). Without much support Seurat labored for two years to capture an idealized image of life in his monumental canvas, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte.”

In the second act we see that the idyllic 19th-Century park has succumbed to urban sprawl, that its moment has only been captured on canvas. We meet Seurat’s fictitious American descendant, an artist who is also misunderstood by the public but in a different way. The modern George is something of a celebrity, having presented a dramatic laser display at a museum “happening” as his interpretation of the uses of light and time in art.

Separated by a century, both Georges, the historic and the fictitious, use their day’s up-to-date knowledge of optics to transmit their artistic messages. When George Seurat set up his easel in Paris, the scientific world was excited about the new techniques of spectroscopy. Physicists had begun to identify elements by measuring the absorption and emission of their spectra. And astronomers were identifying the matter in heavenly bodies by measuring their spectra and matching them with spectra of elements on Earth.

An Era of Change Physiologists and psychologists had begun to understand vision as the ability of the human eye and brain to act like a painter’s palette in blending optical messages. Much of their work was influenced by early photographers, of whom Fizeau was one, who captured an instant of life by recording light and shadow on film. The difference between the photographers and their contemporary painters is that the artists got to organize their special moments. The Sunday afternoon that Seurat immortalized is no single afternoon but what he selected from countless visits to the park.

Living in what we can now look back on as the beginning of an era of rapidly accelerating change, Seurat may have tried to capture that moment as a way of holding a finger in the dike of change. Whether or not Sondheim meant to contrast the study of optics then and now, he did just that when he characterized the modern George as a contemporary artistic prestidigitator of laser beams as compared to the original George’s preoccupation with the spectrum.

While Seurat tried to capture light in space in an effort to annihilate the passage of time, the laser artist collaborates with the movement of light through time. Thus the ephemeral is valued in itself, leaving the human memory as the only permanent canvas. Seurat may have tried to capture forever a moment he knew to be fleeting. But the younger George does not even try. Art is, instead, reduced to a visual experience in time. As the laser beams fill the theater like a symphony of light, the audience participates in the experience, and then is compelled to let go. Unlike Seurat’s canvas, which hangs in grandeur in the Art Institute of Chicago, the laser production does not promise the artist immortality.

It is possible that Sondheim was not especially conscious of what he was saying about science in “Sunday in the Park.” But that does not mean the issue is not there. In the 20th Century, enormous scientific revolutions have altered the way most of us see the world. Artists employ the metaphors of their times and for the last century the most powerful new metaphors in the Western world have been the visions of science.