Public Radio East serves Eastern North Carolina by providing news, fine arts, and informational programming that challenges, stimulates, educates, and entertains an intellectually curious audience.

© 2026 Public Radio East

Public Radio East
800 College Court
New Bern, NC 28562

EIN 56-1802728
Public Radio For Eastern North Carolina 89.3 WTEB New Bern 88.5 WZNB New Bern 91.5 WBJD Atlantic Beach 90.3 WKNS Kinston 89.9 W210CF Greenville
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

The Making of Seurat's 'La Grande Jatte'

A new exhibit in Chicago focuses on a single painting -- Georges Seurat's groundbreaking, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. The show features the trial-and-error preparations that led up to Seurat's masterpiece. NPR's Susan Stamberg reports on the exhibition, which opens Saturday at the Art Institute of Chicago and runs through Sept. 19.

Curator Douglas Druick says Seurat was aiming for art that was both contemporary and timeless.

In his 1984 musical Sunday in the Park With George, composer Stephen Sondheim imagined Seurat making the painting. Druick says Sondheim did with his music what Seurat did with Impressionism: "He took something that was wonderful and paid homage to it, and he made it into something else."

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Susan Stamberg was one of NPR's "founding mothers" (she also coined the phrase). She joined the network at the time of its inception in 1971, and her career at NPR spanned more than five decades.