Making sense of Seurat

‘It’s too familiar, too obvious,’ says Cathy FitzGerald at the beginning of her new interactive series for Radio 4, Moving Pictures. But then she took another look at Georges Seurat’s ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’, that huge, weird and unsettling pointilliste painting of a crowd of Parisians enjoying a sunny afternoon on the banks of the Seine some time in the 1880s. Instead of the 30-second glance we might give it in the art gallery, or five minutes at the very most, FitzGerald encourages us to linger, to look a little more slowly, take in the detail and fully appreciate what’s there on the canvas. After all, Seurat took two years to finish it.

If you’ve not come across FitzGerald’s programmes before on works of art that we might think we know but not really, she’s teamed up with Google Art so that as you listen to her discussing her chosen picture with a group of art historians and curators, you can also zoom into a high-resolution on-screen image, getting far closer to the canvas, the brushstrokes, the artist’s intention than you would ever be able to in the gallery (the Seurat in any case is in Chicago).