Seurat’s influence gets its first-ever salute in France

When Georges Seurat first unveiled “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” the Paris art world was scandalized.

Some critics decried it as chaos on canvas, but others hailed it as genius. Few predicted it would help change the course of 20th century painting.

Seurat’s Pointillist masterpiece is now one of the most famous canvases in the world -- both for the innovative technique that stirred such controversy at the Impressionist salon of 1886 and for the influence it had on modern art.

“Neo-Impressionism: From Seurat to Paul Klee” opened last week at the Musee d’Orsay. It is the first time, curators said, that the movement and its far-reaching influences have ever been exhibited in France. The only other such retrospective was in 1968 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The Paris show, which runs through July 10 and will not travel, gathers a dozen Seurats among its 120 works, including many that rarely leave their home museums or have been tucked away in private collections.

“La Grande Jatte” in its final, monumental form is not among them but is represented by one of the artist’s last painted sketches, on loan from the Chicago Art Institute. The landmark work, named for an island in the Seine River, measures nearly 7 feet by 11 feet and hangs at the Art Institute. However, like other great Seurats scattered across Europe and the United States, it is too large and fragile to travel.

In its absence, “La Grande Jatte” is nonetheless honored as the pivotal centerpiece between two movements and the work that sparked a revolution with the change of a brushstroke.

Seurat’s Pointillist technique applied color in mosaic-like dots of pure color that from a distance created a more luminous and vivid effect than the blended palates of the Impressionists. Urban themes and modern subjects became his focus, rather than the indulgent pastimes pictured by Renoir and Monet.

The exhibit begins with Seurat’s inner circle -- Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro -- and shows how quickly the style resonated with such peers as Henry Van de Velde in Belgium, Jan Toorop in Holland, the German Expressionists and others. It also includes works by Edouard Vuillard and Pablo Picasso.