A society is born, it has been said, that is defined as fast. Indeed, it is fast, if one considers how much acceleration has occurred in just a few years. Baudelaire’s *The Painter of Modern Life* dates from 1863. It is addressed to Constantin Guys, whose line and rapid execution the poet admired. The new city is seized in the instant, wrested away from previous painting; one moves from Ingres and Delacroix to Manet, and shortly thereafter the capture of the instant becomes increasingly central. We will have Renoir’s festive instants, those of the ballerinas—before, after, or during the performance—or Degas’s horses. Finally, there is the instant arrested within passing time in Monet. Soon an era of hyper-speed and of the machine will arrive, envisioned by our Italian Futurists and by Marinetti. One fine day there will be an era like our own—little epic, very social—an era of isolation and solitude, in which the instant itself is what it means to be alive. After the industrial moment, which identified its alienation in sensory disturbance, in solitude amid crowds, in the midst of clamor, we arrive at a falsely shared solitude: shared in absence, written noise produced by people who are now, at times, nothing more than avatars. Fictions and functions of the self that converse with one another while remaining alone. I will stop digressing and turn to pointillism, a technique that traps this speed slowly. Here, finally, is a meditated stance, one that requires time—much time—in order to obtain a new idea of frozen fleetingness. The eye steps back from the canvas and reconstructs the vision; the scene is composed of countless dots of color. Roy Lichtenstein would later carry out an interesting analysis of meaning, distancing himself from the representation of reality through the language of comics, and developing an idea of the pixel generated by enlargement, by the point that creates the image. Before that, however, much of art history would pass beneath the bridges of the color dot, including the Italian dreamlike visions of Previati and Segantini, and above all the early work of Balla. All of this, now, at the exact moment of *La Grande Jatte*, is nothing but vision—true vision, slow and deliberate. A great deal of time devoted to looking at the instant: this is the novelty. A fusion of time, a standstill of the moment imprisoned within an infinite, motionless cage. And that infinity is perceptible. Time is needed to look; one must step back, then move closer again. The time of viewing and the time of execution bear a resemblance to one another—proportionally, of course. It does not take months to look, but neither does it take mere seconds. This prolonged gaze captures an instant that has been imprisoned, as we have said, slowly. The viewer completes the work through vision. We discover that the instant reveals the leisure time of Parisians and reveals it as alienated—not fast and jittery, not sketched in fleetingness, but expanded, static, pompous. Even the subjects partake in this slowness and seem to freeze themselves in their moment for as long as possible. The Arcadian spirit of Puvis de Chavannes emerges. In their poses they seem aware of being eternalized—static and epic: solemn. In this painting no one looks at the observer, no one looks at the slow painter who captures the scene, no one sees the viewer; we are alone here in the museum, on this side of the canvas. Only a little girl seems to perceive us—though we are not certain. Otherwise, no one looks at anyone. All together we begin to alienate ourselves already, along with these Sunday-afternoon Parisians, all together showing ourselves without looking and thus, by reflection, without being seen. We display lavish clothing, stroll in leisure, monkeys on leashes, large buttocks, parasols. We will probably go to the museum café. The picturesque opposes the sublime through the sharpness of its detail. The splendid nature into which we intended to plunge ourselves is extinguished—even as it is shown as luxuriant to the eye that wanders across the canvas and disappears within it.
