You made it time. If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press \u201cContinue.\u201d<\/p>\n
At what point, as you step back \u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026 do these dashes and dots resolve \u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026 into something else?<\/p>\n
It can appear abstract up close, but your eye turns it into something real.<\/p>\n
In the movie \u201cFerris Bueller\u2019s Day Off,\u201d released 40 years ago, Cameron Frye stares directly into these eyes.<\/p>\n
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.)<\/p>\n
The scene cuts back and forth from Cameron\u2019s eyes, to the eyes of the little girl, zooming in until it\u2019s just dots. It\u2019s a window into Cameron\u2019s insecurities: The closer you look at him, the less that\u2019s there.<\/p>\n
Mr. Ruck remembers the film\u2019s director, John Hughes, telling him that the painting \u201cgets right inside you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt gets right inside Cameron,\u201d Mr. Ruck told me in an interview last week.<\/p>\n
They shot the scene over two hours at the Art Institute of Chicago. As he stood staring and staring, channeling Cameron\u2019s anxiety, Mr. Ruck was overwhelmed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you get as close as you\u2019re allowed to get, and you sort of let your peripheral vision take over, you\u2019re just overwhelmed by color,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like \u2026 whoosh.\u201d<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s take a tour of the other faces in the painting.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re constructed, like everything else, with paint straight from the tube. Seurat used only 14 pigments for \u201cA Sunday on La Grande Jatte,\u201d dabbing and dashing to mingle complementary colors.<\/p>\n
From the more fully rendered man smoking in the front \u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026 to the woman with the child, her face dissolving into the water behind her.<\/p>\n
Keep going, further back into the trees \u2026<\/p>\n
from dot to dab to dash to dot to dab to dash \u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026 and let your eyes fill in the rest:<\/p>\n
There\u2019s more there than you\u2019d expect, even in the shadows:<\/p>\n
For years, Seurat labored obsessively over this massive canvas \u2014 nearly seven feet tall by 10 feet wide \u2014 as he refined a technique that became known as pointillism.<\/p>\n
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 C\u00e9zanne among others.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t need to rely on commissions. His parents paid for his studio and paints.)<\/p>\n
Seurat had been studying ideas about color since his teens. Color wheels, like this one from the French chemist Michel Eug\u00e8ne 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:<\/p>\n
Diagrams like these from the French art critic Charles Blanc showed specific methods of using two colors \u2014 in large bands, skinny stripes, fields of stars or little dots \u2014 to achieve a third, a phenomenon he called \u201coptical mixing\u201d:<\/p>\n
Seurat took these ideas and went to work.<\/p>\n
He made near daily trips to the island for six months, and made dozens of sketches and studies in various sizes and styles:<\/p>\n
He laid out the characters as if they were on a stage set frozen in place. (Do these people look like they\u2019re enjoying their Sunday?)<\/p>\n
He hoped to evoke the procession of carved figures (or frieze<\/a>) that ringed the tops of temples like the Parthenon<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n He achieved this with hundreds of thousands of dabs across the canvas.<\/p>\n With his method, the color wouldn\u2019t mix on his palette; it would happen in your eyes.<\/p>\n This, he hoped, would create a more luminous painting. Something that truly shimmered.<\/p>\n \u201cBy putting these complementary colors side by side, he creates this vibration, which mimics the idea of light,\u201d said Gloria Groom, a curator at the Art Institute, where this painting still lives. He pushed this to the extreme, \u201cthe idea that luminosity is not coming from a specific angle or direction; it\u2019s coming from this canvas itself.\u201d<\/p>\n The painting was shown at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. The reaction was \u2026 mixed.<\/p>\n \u201cNot since the first showing of the Impressionists, twelve years earlier, had a painting received such abuse or ridicule,\u201d read a passage from a 1958 catalog of Seurat\u2019s work. \u201cPublic, critics, many of the advanced artists themselves, could see nothing to admire and much to dislike.\u201d<\/p>\n But it changed everything, Ms. Groom said, opening the door to new kinds of art.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is the end of the idea of Impressionism as spontaneous, capturing nature, capturing things on the fly, the momentary,\u201d she said. \u201cIt is all about very much permanence, calculation, scientific color theory, applied to a modern life subject.\u201d<\/p>\n New \u201cisms\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Seurat died young, at 31, in 1891, probably of diphtheria. As years went by, \u201cA Sunday on La Grande Jatte\u201d started to lose some of its shine \u2014 many of the brown dabs here were once yellow<\/a>:<\/p>\n Yet that fading hasn\u2019t dimmed the magic: The crowds still gather daily at the Art Institute, looking, stepping back and looking again.<\/p>\n The \u201cBe Like Ferris Bueller<\/a>\u201d tour is the museum\u2019s most popular.<\/p>\n \u201cI always thought this painting was sort of like making a movie,\u201d Hughes said in his director\u2019s commentary. \u201cWhen you\u2019re very, very close to it, you don\u2019t have any idea what you\u2019ve made until you step back from it.\u201d<\/p>\n With a little distance and a little time, it all comes into focus.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n This is an installment in our series of experiments<\/a> on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait<\/a>; a sudden rain over a bridge<\/a>; a unicorn tapestry<\/a>; some buckets from Home Depot<\/a>; and a Whistler painting<\/a>.<\/p>\n