As you mount the stairs to enter the Art Institute of Chicago’s European Painting collection, you see before you—beyond the tall glass doors on the landing—Georges Seurat’s large canvas “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte.” The afternoon scene, cut alternately by sunlight and shadow, shimmers with a luminosity that surpasses even the Monets and Renoirs that hang nearby. As you near the canvas, captivated by its color, its image starts to collapse. Each recognizable figure, when seen from afar, dissolves into a multitude of small, point-like applications of paint.

In John Hughes’s “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Ferris, his girlfriend, and his friend Cameron skip school and spend a day in Chicago, eventually finding their way to the Art Institute. In one scene, Cameron stands before the Seurat, gazing at a small girl in the middle of the frame, as the camera alternately cuts between his eyes and the canvas. At each successive cut, the camera zooms in more and more, until we are left with a final cut between a close-up of Cameron’s eyes and one of the constituent dots on the pointillist canvas.

In his commentary on the scene, Hughes says that he sees pointillism as a metaphor for Cameron’s life. Hughes comments: “The closer he looks at the child, the less he sees ... The more he looks at it, there’s nothing there. He fears that the more you look at him the less you see. There isn’t anything there.”

Is there really “nothing there?” Does a pointillist canvas, examined from a close distance, devolve into a metaphysical morass?

Pointillism, primarily developed by Seurat in the mid-1880s in France, made a science out of Impressionism’s attention to light. In fact, the pointillist technique can be traced back to a scientific textbook from 1881, Ogden Rood’s “Students’ Text-book of Color; or, Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry.” Rood engages in a discussion of the difference in effects of mixing colors’ pigments and mixing their rays of light. He suggests a method for painters:

“We refer to the custom of placing a quantity of small dots of two colours very near each other, and allowing them to be blended by the eye placed at the proper distance ... The results obtained in this way are true mixtures of coloured light ... This method is almost the only practical one at the disposal of the artist whereby he can actually mix, not pigments, but masses of coloured light.”

The way this passage prefigures Seurat’s innovations is astounding: phrases such as “small dots,” “blended by the eye,” and “true mixtures of coloured light” precisely constitute the lexicon one brings to pointillism. We can read pointillism as an attempt to use Rood’s theory to paint solely by this mode of color combination. Felix Fénéon, an early champion of Seurat, is highly attentive to this. “These colors, isolated on the canvas, recombine on the retina: we have, therefore, not a mixture of material colors (pigments), but a mixture of differently colored rays of light,” he writes. The paint becomes the means of light, which is the sole medium of the composition. Rood’s reductive scientific model of “dots” is literalized onto Seurat’s canvas, as the artist endeavors to paint purely with light.

Looking at a Seurat puts us in an uncomfortable position. There is an unending competition in his canvases between the painting’s pictorial subject and the technique of the painting. The subject of “La Grande Jatte” clears into an intelligible image only when we are at a sufficient distance to allow the rays of light from the canvas to mix on our retinas. When we move up to the canvas, the intelligibility of the subject dissolves, but the technique—as we discern the disparate dots—becomes intelligible. Stepping back again, we undergo a complete change in our vocabulary for processing the visual data. “Dots” and “systems” are no longer relevant; we think in traditional terms of “lines,” “figure,” “composition.” Confronting a Seurat, we can choose between examining the technique or the painting’s pictorial subject, but never both.

In Seurat, we find a figure for the dichotomy we face in our modern lives. In a world composed of particles that strictly obey precise mathematical laws, the guiding forces in our lives and in our art—love, regret, melancholy—seem to dissolve. We can see our own lives either at an artistic distance, or with a scientific scrutiny. Art and science in Seurat are like two banks of the same river, forever facing one another, though separated by the river’s width. And we Parisians can only ever choose one bank on which to spend our leisurely Sunday afternoon.

I remember as a child going to the Art Institute with my parents, and standing captivated before the canvas. Pressing in closer, I watched the colors collapse into their separate points. A new world of meaning exploded in front of me. Hughes sees “nothing there.” I think I saw nothing too, but a different kind of nothingness, the kind in the end of Wallace Steven’s “The Snow Man”:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

—Columnist Adam L. Palay can be reached at apalay@fas.harvard.edu.