Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists: Georges Seurat [Paperback]

I think that Mike Venezia has finally found a painter whose style he cannot imitate, but can still joke about. Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French painter and the founder of Neoimpressionism, best known for "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (thanks to Ferris Bueller more than Stephen Sondheim, I am sure). If there is one word associated with Seurat's work it would be "pointillism," which has to do with the style he developed of using small dots of pure color juxtaposed together to create a fusion of colors in the mind's eye. So I was thinking that in his Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists series that Venezia might working is some pointillism in some of his cartoons. But in case you were wondering, pointillism is hard work. So on the front cover of this book while Seurat is working on his famous painting some guy comes along and says "Hey, Seurat, dot's a pretty ice painting" (a joke that I am sure loses something in French). On the back cover cartoon Venezia works himself into Seurat's famous painting with all of the figures turning to look (and glare) at him for intruding on their pleasant afternoon with his lawn chair, loud music, chips, and drinks.

This book provides the key biographical details of Seurat's life, but it is the development of his peculiar painting style that Venezia emphasize more. So the art history lesson here is what young readers will take away from reading this book. There are sixteen drawings and paintings representing the entire course of Seurat's career, along with three studies for "Une Baigndae, Asnieres" to go along with two studies and one detail from "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." Their is also a drawn portrait of Seurat by Ernest J. Laurent to go along with works by great artist from the past that Seurat studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris by Raphael, Eugene Delacroix, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingeres, and those by the Impressionist artists Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Pierre Auguste Renoir that inspired Seurat to do better. There are also five of Venezia's cartoons that talk about his artwork and the device Seurat's father made for the arm he lost in a hunting accident to attach knives and forks to the end of his arm.

Venezia is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which is where "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" is on display. The Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists series is both educational and entertaining, and Venezia always makes good on his promise to use fun to introduce children to art and artists. The pointillism drawings and paintings are surely beyond the skill (and patience) of most of us, but young readers should appreciate the drawings Seurat made to explore the importance of shapes and form done with a smeary graphite-and-clay crayon on bumpy paper, and I think they can understand the basic principle of having tiny dots of different colors next to each other to create a different color when they are blended by the human eye. This is a fascinating series and I am always happy to discover there are volumes about artists that I have missed. Venezia has tackled not only Seurat but also Paul Dezanne, Edward Hopper, Monet, Picasso, Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh and Grant Wood--and those are just the artists whose works at on display at the Art Institute of Chicago (which I am going to see again this week because that is what I do when I have occasion to drive through Chicago).

The fascinating facts of the artist's life are enhanced with comic book style illustrations as well as copies of the artists work. This author takes what could be a very dry subject and makes it entertaining and informative. This book, and the remainder of books in this series, are an obvious resource for an art teacher's library but would make a terrific "outside the box" addition to any classroom teacher's library.

I bought all of the books in this series for our homeschool art curriculum. They are easy to read and a fun supplement that can lead to a nice trip to the Smithsonian Gallery of Art.

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