Seurat drawings at MOMA

Seurat in black and white:
What no other artist has ever achieved

ROBERT ZALLER

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) and Georges Seurat (1859-1891) were nearly exact contemporaries. Yet no two painters could be more unalike. Van Gogh applied his paint in thick, impasto strokes. Seurat used the thinnest and most refined of brushwork, and the Pointillist style he pioneered in the mid-1880s— paintings constructed from a myriad of individual dots of color, each discrete and distinct— resulted logically from his experiments in spectral analysis. If Van Gogh offered us a new way of seeing, Seurat concentrated his formidable talent on the act of seeing itself, and the artifice involved in all perception. The result was a limited but very grand body of work— John Russell not inaptly characterizes it as “as grand as any in the history of art”— climaxing in what is for me the culminating work of the 19th Century, Les Poseuses (accurately but not quite adequately translated as The Models), which hangs as it has since 1926 in the ground floor salon of the Barnes Foundation, and where I hope it will long remain.

As great a painter as Seurat is, he is arguably an even greater draftsman, and the current exhibit of his drawings at the Museum of Modern Art is an event not to be missed. The drawings are in the greatest possible contrast to the paintings for which they served as preparatory sketches. After his student apprenticeship, which showed a sensitivity to line that suggested a future Ingres, Seurat worked almost solely with Conte crayon on a thick-woven paper, Michallat, that absorbed and dispersed the crayon’s rich textures, creating a crepuscular world whose contrasts of black and white, unrivaled since Rembrandt, are like none other.

Seurat’s compositional genius is fully evident even in the smallest of his drawings, but it’s reduced to the most basic volumetric forms: the curve of a back, the column of a smokestack or a tree, the circle of a wagon wheel. There is intense observation in each of these sheets— no less intense than Van Gogh’s. But unlike Redon, the contemporary to whose graphic style Seurat’s is often compared, this work is no fantasy. Seurat’s world is fully recognizable: the world of street and field, and particularly of the suburban zone where street and field were beginning to blur and merge in the late 19th Century.

The impenetrable mystery of observation

This is not to say it is in any sense straightforward. Seurat’s dense, saturated textures lend even the most casual scene a sense of mystery, creating a fusion of Romantic sensibility and classic form that both evokes and frames real-life experience in a way no other artist has ever achieved. What he suggests to us is that both impenetrable mystery and lucid form is present in anything that presents itself to observation, or rather can be constructed by informed vision.

The eye and hand of the artist and the object of his perception are inseparable here, but the sovereignty of the former and the ineluctability of the latter, far from contesting each other, are united in a synthesis that reinforces the autonomy of both. The more we are aware of the artist’s skill, the more inducted we are into the world.

An apolitical social observer

Unlike Van Gogh, Seurat wears neither his heart nor his politics on his sleeve; there are no heroic sowers of grain here, no toilers chained to their labor, no prisoners tramping their round. Yet there is no keener observer of the class separation of 19th-Century society, and it was not by accident that Seurat’s genius was first hailed by Félix Fénéon, a critic of anarchist sympathies. Fénéon described Seurat’s pointillism as a kind of “divisionism” which, by the very nature of its technique, embodied social division itself; and Seurat, in incorporating his great depiction of the bourgeois world at leisure, La Grande Jatte, into his depiction of working-class models in Les Poseuses, made his own response to Fénéon’s insight.

The very different technique of the drawings is no less socially observant: a homeless man under a bridge in one and a woman in her furs in another. Both are socially isolated, estranged from each other; both possess a humanity that Seurat evokes in full and on its own terms. There is not the least hint of sentiment in the one, or of caricature in the other.

Personally, I find as much pathos in the feathered, corseted, full-figured prosperity of Seurat’s bourgeois grandes dames, with their half-ironic allusion to the nudes of classical antiquity, as in the exposed, phthistic nakedness of the three models in Les Poseuses (also a classical grouping). That, friends, is great art, and great humanity.

A George Grosz would, in a later generation, make the dehumanization of Weimar Germany the subject of his merciless pen, reducing both victimizers and victims to caricature. I wouldn’t do without either man, either vision. But Seurat gave himself the harder task, and consequently has the more lasting achievement.



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