Word: seurat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Herbert points out, Seurat's dots are not really dots either. Far from laboring away at a mechanical surface programmed in advance by theories of complementary color, Seurat displayed the most intuitive and mobile sense of the relations between sight and mark. One of the miracles of his art is his ability to analyze light, not through the simple juxtaposition of dabs of color but by a layering of tiny brush marks built up from the underpainted ground, so that the eventual surface becomes a fine-grained pelt, seamless and yet infinitely nuanced, from which captured light slowly radiates...
...give them. The port, under its light-suffused spell, its unpeopled high-summer sleep, becomes a subject of reverie but not a fantasy, anchored in the real by such declarative touches as the iron bollard placed dead center in the foreground, yet located in the ideal as well by Seurat's profound attentiveness...
...Seurat was a brilliant and highly self-conscious metteur en scene. His landscapes often possess the sense of anticipation one associates with an empty stage. (Hence they were a powerful influence on De Chirico, and on Surrealism generally.) Nowhere is this more piercing than in the large study for the landscape of La Grande Jatte, without its 50 or so people, its monkey and two dogs. The curtain has risen on this green paradise, and the cast will filter on, one at a time, throughout the subsequent studies -- the St.-Cyr cadet, the lady with the monkey but without...
...time Seurat is thinking, editing, adjusting. Throughout his career, his efforts are directed to refracting what he sees through what he knows. He quotes Poussin, Ingres, classical marbles, Han figurines; the boy hollering in the water in Une Baignade, Asnieres was once a classical Triton blowing a conch. But the sources are perfectly absorbed in his pictorial intents. For this reason alone, Seurat was an artist of a kind unimaginable in our own fin de siecle, now that art education has been lobotomized by the excision of formal drawing and the study of prototypes...
...record of Seurat's thought lies as much in his drawings as in his final paintings. He drew on Ingres paper with Conte crayon, a waxy black stick that, stroked over the rough surface, produced a slightly blurred line and deep granular tones -- the equivalent of his intricately speckled surfaces in painting. And he was a great draftsman -- one of the greatest since the Renaissance, worthy, at the top of his form, of being compared to Rembrandt or Goya...