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'As urgent and relevant today as it ever was': The radical manifesto hidden in Georges Seurat's 1884 masterpiece

Georges Seurat's once-mocked painting Bathers at Asnières is copo de cristal de baccaratboth an "exquisite distillation of the very essence of summer" and "a modern wonder in the art of seeing".

The greatest works of art see seeing differently. From Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, with its bulbous fish-eye looking glass bolted to the back of the bedroom, warping reality, to édouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882, and its riddling ricochet of stares, these paintings play with our perspective and offer flashes of the world in all its strangeness. Some paintings perform their magic more stealthily, of course, without a mirror in sight. Take Georges Seurat's seemingly straightforward exaltation of summer, Bathers at Asnières, 1884 – a painting that, on closer inspection, peels away at our perception of perception with a passion and intensity that makes it as urgent and relevant today as it ever was.

At first glance, Seurat's colossal 2m x 3m (79in x 118in) canvas – much larger than gallery-goers were accustomed to encountering – is an outsized celebration of the lazy luminosity of the season, enshrining the relaxed mood of workers on a break from nearby factories as they bathe in etherealising sunshine along the banks of the Seine, northwest of central Paris. The light that polishes the pallid skin of figures who have spent too long stewing in the sooty fug of sunless foundries (those "dark Satanic mills" of which William Blake once wrote) seems initially to bestow on them a monumentality rarely seen in contemporary art and a grandeur typically reserved for the depiction of myth and history. Look closer, however, and their smooth and deceptively solid physiques suddenly begin to unstitch themselves, unweaving into a loosening mesh of pulsing photons – waves of pure hue and pigment distinct from form. The workers are animated in their motionlessness: hefty and weightless in equal measure.

In Seurat's hands, the very property of light, that most fundamental element that makes perception possible, is no longer a straightforward source of illumination. It is a substance that can, and must, be pulled apart and put back together again. Far from a simple celebration of summer indolence or the unwinding of mind and muscle against a tapestry of afternoon heat and haze, Bathers at Asnières is a deft dissection of the mirage of superficial appearances – an elaborate exercise in the undoing of the social and psychological veils that shroud our seeing and shape our world. It is a painting that sees into the life of things.

To unlock the latent layers of meaning in the work one needs a key and an expert guide. Fortunately, Seurat has provided us with both, hiding in plain sight, signalling our attention from near the very centre of the painting. There, just above the slumped shoulders of the central-most shirtless figure, fitted with a helmet of flattened auburn hat hair, is a slender chimney chugging smoke – one of several smokestacks that puncture the humid sky – that simultaneously interrupts Seurat's vision and is arguably responsible for every aspect of it.

The chimney rises from one of the many factories in the nearby neighbourhood of Clichy, the centre of French candle manufacturing at the time – an extraordinarily lucrative industry made possible by the scientific ingenuity of Michel Eugène Chevreul, a pioneering French chemist whose intellectual insights helped shape the 19th Century. In addition to isolating stearic acid – a crucial component of animal fat from which an odourless and clean-burning candle could be crafted – Chevreul is credited with formulating a highly influential theory of colour on which every inch of Seurat's painting is painstakingly based. To understand the essence of Seurat's singular vision, one must get to grips with the essence of the mind of the man who, in a real sense, lit the wick of both the work's material subject and revolutionary manner of seeing.

When Seurat began work on Bathers at Asnières in 1884, he was a 24-year-old Parisian artist trained at the prestigious école des Beaux-Arts, which had produced many of the finest painters of the age, from Delacroix to Degas. While attending art school, Seurat first encountered Chevreul's ideas on colour, which had formed the basis of the chemist's treatise De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (or On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colours), published four-and-a-half decades earlier in 1839. Chevreul had turned his attention from candle-making to colour theory in the 1830s after having been approached by a guild of weavers to explain why their dyes appeared so dull. He concluded that the colours themselves were not the problem. Their arrangement was. He demonstrated that two complementary colours, when placed side-by-side, enrich each other in the eyes of those who perceive them. Each contrasting colour appears more vibrant and distinct than it otherwise would – an elegantly simple revelation that would reverberate across the worlds of science and art.

While many of Seurat's Impressionist forebears were aware of Chevreul's conclusions, they regarded his prescriptions for colour placement – blues beside orange, yellows beside purple, etc – more as loose poetic suggestions than strict scientific dictates. Not Seurat. Determined to break new artistic ground, he saw Bathers as an opportunity to introduce an entirely new visual technique capable of illustrating Chevreul's ideas with greater systematic rigour than anyone had attempted before.

Seurat set about plotting Bathers like a mathematical proof of Chevreul's "law of simultaneous contrast". His fastidiousness is evident in how he positions orange-blushed flesh against blue-green water; how the grass is flecked with yellow-lilac flickers; and how he outlines with cool blue the warm and rosy tones of the boys' skin, intensifying the figures and making them visually throb. In these moments, Seurat succeeds in scrubbing away the artificial social markers of class and status. What remains is the soul of colour, shaken through the sieve of Chevreul's theory.

This calculated deployment of pigment would serve as a decisive step to Seurat's famous painterly innovation of pointillism, or deftly dabbed dots that mix in the mind of the beholder rather than on the palette of the painter – thus amplifying their effect. The pointillist technique, which provided a more precise way of evincing Chevreul's ideas, soon after made its grand debut in Seurat's famous sequel of relaxing Parisians, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884). Although Bathers was not initially painted with dots, but with a clever matrix of criss-crossing strokes that diminish in size as they approach the horizon, the artist would return to the canvas in 1886 and '87 to inflect its surface, here and there, with the tiny dibs and dabs that would define his mature style. All but subliminal specks of cobalt blue, added later to the back of the orange hat on the wading boy who hoots through his hands, unsettles his stability. They make him vibrate.

From its inception, Seurat was determined that Bathers at Asnières would not be just another painting. It was an audacious manifesto on how we see the world when the artificial trappings of class and status, form and function, are filtered away to reveal the vital vibration of colour, pure colour – a meticulously plotted statement of purpose and artistic intent. In preparation for the work, Seurat dramatically departed from Impressionist spontaneity and its habit of working hastily outdoors, undertaking in his studio more than a dozen oil sketches and nearly as many crayon drawings, convinced this would be the masterwork that established his place in the art world. Bathers, he believed, would be the painting that people noticed – the one he could confidently submit to the famously implacable jury of the influential Salon, the institution whose stingy regard, if secured, could determine the career prospects of any aspiring artist. So he submitted it. And they rejected it.

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While widely admired today as a masterpiece of evocative atmospherics, Bathers at Asnières' road to critical acclaim was a bumpy one at best. Bruised but unbeaten by the Salon's rejection, Seurat remained determined that his canvas would still be seen. He soon joined forces with a plucky band of equally aggrieved rejects from the persnickety Salon that included Paul Signac and Odilon Redon. Calling themselves the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants, the crew hastily staged a rival exhibition in a makeshift wooden pavilion, near the Place de la Concorde. Unfortunately for Seurat, the incommodious size of his canvas and the organisers' decision to cram the rough-and-ready walls with more than 400 works, resulted in his work being elbowed into an unglamorous spot in the show where it was met with befuddlement by the few who took any notice of it at all. Though one early reviewer of the painting showed restraint, insisting that he didn't "quite dare poke fun at it", another felt no compunction in calling it "monstrous", "vulgar", and "bad from every point of view".

It would be another half-a-century, and long after Seurat himself would die prematurely in March 1891 at the age of just 31, that his masterpiece would begin to be seen as a significant moment in the story of art. After languishing in private hands for 60 years, Bathers was acquired in 1924 by the Tate Gallery in London, elevating its profile. Positioned properly on a museum wall, with ample space for visitors' eyes to absorb its power, Bathers at Asnières began to gain critical traction both for its exquisite distillation of the very essence of summer and as a modern wonder in the art of seeing.

Georges Seurat's Bathers at Asnières is on display at The National Gallery in London.

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