Friday Lates: Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists

As our exhibition ‘Radical Harmony’ draws to a close, The Courtauld’s new exhibition ‘Seurat and the Sea’ is around the corner. This will be the first exhibition devoted to Georges Seurat in the UK in almost 30 years.

Working in port towns in France along the English Channel on summer visits, including Honfleur, Port-en-Bessin and Gravelines, Seurat captured their seascapes, regattas and port activity in his distinctive Neo-Impressionist technique, as seen in paintings currently at the National Gallery.

The Courtauld curator Karen Serres joins Chiara Di Stefano, Associate Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery and Julien Domercq, co-curator of ‘Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists’, to discuss this pioneering artist and his contemporaries.

Dr Chiara di Stefano is Associate Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery. She studied Art History in Italy (University of Turin) and France (Sorbonne University). She has published extensively on modern art and the history of collecting and worked in a curatorial capacity at Centre Pompidou, Paris. At the National Gallery she has worked on several exhibitions focusing on artists including Edgar Degas, Eva Gonzalès, Edouard Manet and Winslow Homer.

Julien Domercq is a Curator at the Royal Academy and guest curator of 'Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller's Neo-Impressionists'. Previously he was Associate Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, working on exhibitions including ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’ and 'After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art'. Julien also spent time at the Dallas Museum of Art, where he was appointed assistant curator for European art covering the period from the Renaissance to the late 18th century.

Dr Karen Serres is Senior Curator of Paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, responsible for the care and display of the collection of paintings up to 1900. She received her training in art history and museum studies at the Ecole du Louvre (1997) and the Sorbonne (1998) in Paris. She completed her MA (1999) and PhD (2004) at The Courtauld, where her research focused on French and Italian Baroque painting. In 2009, she was named the Nina and Lee Griggs Associate Curator of European Art at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. She returned to The Courtauld as Schroder Foundation Curator of Paintings in 2012.