From painting to performance: 'Sunday in the Park with George' inspired by impressionist art

In his masterpiece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” the French post-Impressionist Georges Seurat demanded that the world look at art in a shocking new way.

He never sold a painting.

But this pioneer of pointillism inspired Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine to pen the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Sunday in the Park with George.”

The Santa Fe Playhouse is mounting the musical beginning on June 27 .

More than 100 years ago, ‘’La Grande Jatte’’was a manifesto by an artist in revolt against Impressionism. Atomizing color into thousands of dots, Seurat applied scientific visual principles to art. Seen from a distance, his pointillist compositions reveal people and landscapes in natural harmony.

“It’s a very beautiful piece inspired by the famous painting by Seurat,” director Anna Hogan said. The show’s creators “decided to create historical fiction around the image. The characters are based on the people in the painting. It all speaks to the plight of the artist.”

Set in the 1800s but premiered in 1983, the musical explores how priorities shift when an artist is creating something unconventional.

In the first half, the character of Seurat is struggling to find a way to interact with people without compromising his art. His art has alienated those closest to him.

During the second half, we see Seurat’s great-grandson, also named George, a cynical and conflicted contemporary artist, struggling with similar problems in 1980 .

The conflicts see-saw between money and art, dealing with acclaim and struggling for companionship.

“It speaks to a lot of different disciplines,” Hogan said. “What is it asking you to compromise on?”

Sondheim speculates about who the characters in the painting were based on. The most prominent among them is identified as the painter’s mistress named Dot. The others include such diverse types as boorish American tourists, a surly boatman and a class-conscious German servant.

To Seurat, the silent and expressionless people are only models for his composition.

The song “Children and Art” was based on Sondheim’s dilemma. He believed the only things worthy of leaving behind were art or children.

At the end of Act I, a harmonic work of art forms, with the actors mimicking the poses in the painting.