TW5: Joey's Culture Corner

I had promised some time ago to post this, and am just now getting around to it – unfortunately, some of the content has been lost in the interim. Below is the only version my review “A Person, a Painting, and a Play” from the TrekWest5 segment “Joey’s Culture Corner.”

Taking it from the end, the play is Steven Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, the Painting is A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and the Person is the painter, the French Post-Impressionist and the father of Pointillism, Georges Seurat.

On its surface, “Sunday in the Park with George” is a play about the birth of Pointillism – specifically, about the painting of the “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” – but I think that this is Sondheim’s most deeply personal piece. It’s all about the cost of dedication to an ideal, and about the trade-offs we make every day. “Work is what you do for others – art is what you do for yourself!” decries one of the characters early in the play, and Seraut himself – who is clearly a stand-in for Sondheim – tells one of his critics “I do not paint for your approval”. Last year, Sondheim published the first of two volumes where he talks in depth about his musicals and their lyrics…I think it’s telling that the title he selected for this book is Finishing the Hat. While “Sunday in the Park” was not much of a critical success – and was a financial failure – it is one of only eight musicals to ever win the “Pulitzer Prize for Drama”. I give this musical the strongest possible positive recommendation. Probably my favorite thing about the musical is how Sondheim incorporated the musical technique of “Pointillism” – see the musical number Color and Light for an excellent example.

The painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” is probably my favorite painting NOT by Monet, and is probably the most famous example of Pointillism. The painting is 6’10” x 10’1” – a MASSIVE work, it took more than two years to finish. An absolutely fascinating principal of Pointillism is that it uniquely engages the brain in a behaviour known as “Neuroplasticity”, which refers to the ability of the human brain to change as a result of one’s experience. In his 2003 book The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, Jeffrey Schwartz wrote:

If your mind has been primed with the theory of pointillism…then you will see a Seurat painting in a very different way than if you are ignorant of his technique. Yet the photons of light reflecting off the Seurat…are identical to the photons striking the retina of a less knowledgeable viewer.

Seurat himself, and his impact on the world at large, is nothing less than astounding. There are very few places in this world today we can turn without seeing the influences of the theory behind divisionism and pointillism – film and photos, televisions and computer monitors, airbrushes and spray paint, digital cameras and cell phone screens – these all operate on the same basic principles of pointillism. The theories of color and vision that were explored in the work of Seurat and his contemporaries have had a profound effect on every part of our modern world.

So – Georges Seurat, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”, and Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” – I heartily endorse them all.