norman lebrecht
December 20, 2025
This month marks the birthday of Georges Seurat, born on 2nd December 1859. He died on March 29th, 1891, aged only 31.
In 1886, the young French artist Georges Seurat caused a major scandal when he unveiled a radical new style of painting. Known as Pointillism, this technique involved painting in ‘dots’ of pure complementary colours. Artists working across Europe, including Paul Signac, Jan Toorop, Henri-Edmond Cross and Anna Boch, experimented with the style in different ways. They became known as the Neo-Impressionists.
Georges Seurat invented an entirely new way to see. It was scientific, complicated and yet once you understand it, simple. Pointilism was the application of colours in small dots, close together until they appear to blend, the brain conceiving new colours constructed from the old. The other artists who attempted to follow his system met with greater or lesser success but it was Seurat’s obsessive pursuit of the perception of colour that remains with us, nearly 200 years later.
Here are two documentaries that tell us all about Georges Seurat – the facts, the history, the background: four passionate National Gallery curators shine a light on this band of artists – whose political ideas were as radical as their painting – and explore how they paved the way for art as we know it today in the best art film the National Gallery has yet made.
The world’s most significant collection of Neo-Impressionist art is displayed in the National Gallery’s current exhibition, ‘Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists’.
And the second documentary – Georges Seurat: Great Art Explained
But, more significant, at least to a writer obsessed with musical theatre, is the masterpiece that is Sunday in the Park With George, the 1985 Broadway show by Stephen Sondheim that got to the heart of what art is.
There are so many moments in this show that resonate with anyone who wants to understand the incomprehensible feat of making a work of art. I think “Finishing The Hat” is the best song ever written about the process and compulsion to make art and, as sung by ManyPatinkin, the best performed.
Do watch the documentaries but, above all, don’t miss the full-length original production of Sunday in the Park with George, starring Mandy Pantinkin as George and Bernadette Peters in her career-defining performance as Dot, from 1986. It was a revelation at first viewing on Broadway and the many times I have seen it since and, having just watched it again, it still is.