You made it time. If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press “Continue.”
At what point, as you step back …
… do these dashes and dots resolve …
… into something else?
It can appear abstract up close, but your eye turns it into something real.
In the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” released 40 years ago, Cameron Frye stares directly into these eyes.
Cameron, played by Alan Ruck, is an anxious type with an unhappy family life. (Among other things, his dad loves his 1961 Ferrari more than him.)
The scene cuts back and forth from Cameron’s eyes, to the eyes of the little girl, zooming in until it’s just dots. It’s a window into Cameron’s insecurities: The closer you look at him, the less that’s there.
Mr. Ruck remembers the film’s director, John Hughes, telling him that the painting “gets right inside you.”
“It gets right inside Cameron,” Mr. Ruck told me in an interview last week.
They shot the scene over two hours at the Art Institute of Chicago. As he stood staring and staring, channeling Cameron’s anxiety, Mr. Ruck was overwhelmed.
“When you get as close as you’re allowed to get, and you sort of let your peripheral vision take over, you’re just overwhelmed by color,” he said. “It’s like … whoosh.”
Let’s take a tour of the other faces in the painting.
They’re constructed, like everything else, with paint straight from the tube. Seurat used only 14 pigments for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” dabbing and dashing to mingle complementary colors.
From the more fully rendered man smoking in the front …
… to the woman with the child, her face dissolving into the water behind her.
Keep going, further back into the trees …
from dot to dab to dash to dot to dab to dash …
… and let your eyes fill in the rest:
There’s more there than you’d expect, even in the shadows:
For years, Seurat labored obsessively over this massive canvas — nearly seven feet tall by 10 feet wide — as he refined a technique that became known as pointillism.
The image shows 48 figures on La Grande Jatte, an island on the banks of the Seine just outside Paris. It was created in the 1880s just a few years after the Impressionists revolutionized painting. The Impressionists were romantic. They painted outside and quickly, trying to capture the play of light over the landscape in streaky brush strokes. Their first exhibition in 1874 announced some giants: Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne among others.
Seurat came a dozen years later, and his style was slow, laborious, scientific, composed. (Seurat had the time; he was born to a well-off family and didn’t need to rely on commissions. His parents paid for his studio and paints.)
Seurat had been studying ideas about color since his teens. Color wheels, like this one from the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, gave artists detailed references for color complements. The guidance: Colors that sit across the wheel from each other appear more brilliant when placed next to each other on the canvas:
Diagrams like these from the French art critic Charles Blanc showed specific methods of using two colors — in large bands, skinny stripes, fields of stars or little dots — to achieve a third, a phenomenon he called “optical mixing”:
Seurat took these ideas and went to work.
He made near daily trips to the island for six months, and made dozens of sketches and studies in various sizes and styles:
He laid out the characters as if they were on a stage set frozen in place. (Do these people look like they’re enjoying their Sunday?)
He hoped to evoke the procession of carved figures (or frieze) that ringed the tops of temples like the Parthenon.
“I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color,” he wrote.
He achieved this with hundreds of thousands of dabs across the canvas.
With his method, the color wouldn’t mix on his palette; it would happen in your eyes.
This, he hoped, would create a more luminous painting. Something that truly shimmered.
“By putting these complementary colors side by side, he creates this vibration, which mimics the idea of light,” said Gloria Groom, a curator at the Art Institute, where this painting still lives. He pushed this to the extreme, “the idea that luminosity is not coming from a specific angle or direction; it’s coming from this canvas itself.”
The painting was shown at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. The reaction was … mixed.
“Not since the first showing of the Impressionists, twelve years earlier, had a painting received such abuse or ridicule,” read a passage from a 1958 catalog of Seurat’s work. “Public, critics, many of the advanced artists themselves, could see nothing to admire and much to dislike.”
But it changed everything, Ms. Groom said, opening the door to new kinds of art.
“It is the end of the idea of Impressionism as spontaneous, capturing nature, capturing things on the fly, the momentary,” she said. “It is all about very much permanence, calculation, scientific color theory, applied to a modern life subject.”
New “isms” were coined (Neo-Impressionism). Seurat had followers. People like Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin experimented briefly with the pointillist technique and complementary color application, Ms. Groom said. Seurat was only 26 years old.
Seurat died young, at 31, in 1891, probably of diphtheria. As years went by, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” started to lose some of its shine — many of the brown dabs here were once yellow:
Yet that fading hasn’t dimmed the magic: The crowds still gather daily at the Art Institute, looking, stepping back and looking again.
The “Be Like Ferris Bueller” tour is the museum’s most popular.
“I always thought this painting was sort of like making a movie,” Hughes said in his director’s commentary. “When you’re very, very close to it, you don’t have any idea what you’ve made until you step back from it.”
With a little distance and a little time, it all comes into focus.
* * *
This is an installment in our series of experiments on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait; a sudden rain over a bridge; a unicorn tapestry; some buckets from Home Depot; and a Whistler painting.
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