Word: seurat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lived as long as Monet, Seurat would have been a hale duffer of 70 when his many heirs, like Mondrian, were coming into their maturity as artists. What would he have left behind him by then? Possibly -- if one can guess from his last big paintings like Chahut, 1889-90, and Cirque, 1890-91 -- something quite different from the calm, composed "Egyptian" classicism of his best-known work, the sublime Un Dimanche a la Grande Jatte of 1884-86. For the last paintings are more frenetic, more consciously urban and, above all, more influenced by mass culture (the posters...
...would then remember Seurat not only as a great synthesizer of classical order and modernist perception but also as the artist who fused both with the exacerbated delights of the mass culture that was emerging at the turn of the century: the true "painter of modern life," as anticipated by Baudelaire. The history of modern art, in terms of its engagement with "low" culture, might then have been quite different. Because he died so young, we have the first artist but only hints of the second...
When this show was first mooted, there were doubts. The rarity and fragility of some of Seurat's major paintings meant they could not travel. No Grande Jatte, therefore; no Baignade, Asnieres, 1883-84; no Chahut. Was this like staging Hamlet without the prince? As it turns out, no. Apart from the fact that some works of art should never travel, and deserve the tribute of a pilgrimage, their absence forces one to concentrate on the abundance of others that the curatorial team, headed by Francoise Cachin of the Musee d'Orsay, has assembled...
Here we have the most complete group of Seurat's drawings -- and drawing, for him, was absolutely fundamental -- ever assembled, together with the oil sketches and finished studies for the big works (more than 30 for La Grande Jatte alone); the landscapes of the Ile de France; the exquisite seascapes of Gravelines and Honfleur; and the theater scenes, like the brooding and mysterious frieze of musicians and chattering spectators at the Cirque Corvi known as the Parade de Cirque, 1887-88. In the studies, particularly, one sees Seurat's major ambition working itself out: his conservative but in fact deeply...
From this body of material, a rather different Seurat emerges from the one we are used to. The "scientific" painter with his abstruse color theories recedes somewhat, and an inspired lyricist comes to the fore -- a 19th century Giorgione. As the art historian Robert L. Herbert puts it in his catalog essay, Seurat "wanted to be perceived as a technician of art, and so he borrowed from science some of the signs of its authority, including regularity and clarity of pattern...