Word: seurat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...extraordinarily dignified, almost hieratic sense of presence. Under the unifying skin of black paint (ordinary house paint sprayed on the raw wood), the rich accumulations of shape, the curious offcuts and repeated units, are as effectively transmuted into pure shadow as the objects depicted in a painting by Seurat become pure light...
...right that this show should be held in London, since the word post-impressionism was invented there, and applied to the painting of the 1880s by Roger Fry, the English art critic, when he organized a sensationally vilified show of Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Cézanne and others at the Grafton Galleries in 1910. By then the painters that Fry's exhibition encircled were all dead, and his name for them was a last resort: he toyed with calling them "expressionists," luckily decided not to, and at last exclaimed, "Oh, let's just call them postimpressionists; at any rate...
Nothing, one would think, could be addressed more purely to the eye than Seurat's divisionism, his way of analytically representing color and light by means of dots of pure pigment, stippled closely together. In front of a painting like The Gravelines Channel, Grand Fort-Philippe, 1890, one.is conscious of nothing but the field of infinite nuances, the chalky light of the marine estuary, the artist's utter absorption in vision itself: this is one of the most exquisite paeans to the discriminatory power of the human eye ever to be set on canvas, far away, one would suppose, from...