The pink-skirted woman was changed from a single woman to a mother; the bustle on the strolling woman's costume was exaggerated, and the monkey was a last-minute addition.

These are just a few of the surprises visitors take away from the Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition, "Seurat and the Making of 'La Grande Jatte.' "

The title, of course, refers to one of the museum's most beloved paintings: the enormous, heavily populated tableau of Sunday loungers on a Paris isle that has captivated viewers from Stephen Sondheim to Ferris Bueller.

But if nearly all the museum's 1.5 million annual visitors make a stop in front of the Neoimpressionist masterpiece at some point, this exhibition forces visitors to slow down and take another look - both from a distance, examining the Impressionist works that influenced Georges Seurat before he broke away, and up close, literally, with scientific research that breaks down the painting's colors and sheds light on the picture's creation.

"Sometimes familiarity is a bit numbing. You think you know the picture, but there's a plot to discover," says Douglas Druick, cocurator of the exhibit. "We tried to construct a process whereby visitors would come to the realization and appreciation of a picture we're told is great, and we know is great, but in a way that turns the head back into heart."

The result is a stunningly complete examination and celebration of one work that, in the end, has a lot to say about artists' influence on one another, the years of work that build up to a masterpiece, and the legacy of Impressionism, in addition to the information specifically about "La Grande Jatte."

Seurat, for many art historians, is the anti-Impressionist. When "La Grande Jatte" was first exhibited at the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886, everything about the painting - its size, the extensive preparation that went into it, the almost frozen effect of the scene - was viewed as a repudiation of Impressionist ideals such as spontaneity and movement.

But Seurat once told an interviewer, "I found myself while studying others," and the Art Institute's exhibit elegantly demonstrates that claim. Works by precursors like Francisco José de Goya, Honoré Daumier, and Jean-François Millet, contemporaries such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir - along with Seurat's own black-and-white drawings and early paintings - show the gradual evolution of Seurat's style, emulating the Impressionists before he ultimately broke from them when he began "La Grande Jatte" at the age of 24.

"It's not just an explanation of this particular painting, but how Seurat gets here, how he has the chutzpah to embark on something this much a slap in the face to his predecessors," says Gloria Groom, a cocurator of the exhibit.

One of the striking evolutions in Seurat's own style is his use of color. He dropped out of art school after just a year and a half - long before he'd studied color at all - and his early works are nearly all crayon sketches. Even in those drawings, Seurat was less interested in details than forms, and he strove to achieve a heightened contrast by placing light and dark areas next to each other.

It was a strategy that he soon carried over into his color experiments, learning how complementary colors - blue and orange, or red and green - can intensify each other, how dabs of primary colors can mix in the eye of the beholder, and how the light and dark contrasts he'd worked with in black and white could translate.

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