Seurat knew many things, the sacred laws of common sense, which we neglect no doubt because they are too simple.

That it is not instinct that composes, but intellect; that instinct—genius—proposes and the lucid mind disposes, composes, translates the impulse, the imperfectly formed, sketchy need that we call inspiration….

A painter may intellectualize, and Seurat was not averse to doing so. But, ultimately, we know that certain works are possessed of that radiance, that sublimity, those resonances that no formula can measure, explain or dissect, but that we feel, that excite us, transport us, make us forget everything else. There are cer tain canvases by Seurat that have this magic.
—Amédée Ozenfant, in Cahiers d’Art, 1926

It was once commonplace for people—and very knowledgeable people, too—to speak of Seurat’s painting as “scientific.” All those dots of color were likened to atoms or mol ecules, and we were invited to see in the painter’s method a harbinger of later scien tific discoveries. Nowadays the smart thing —in the academy and in the art journals, anyway—is to speak of the paintings as polit ical. In this reading, the figures and the mise en scènein Seurat’s pictures are read as lessons in the kind of anomie and alienation in evitably to be expected in a society besotted with capitalist enterprise. The one view con centrated on the artist’s technique. The other gives priority to his subject matter—or rather, to a certain extra-artistic interpreta tion of selective