Word: seurat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Signac and Georges Seurat were the leaders of a group awkwardly styled the neo-Impressionists. Seurat has always been seen as the inventor, Signac as the follower. This unfairly simple view should, with luck, be dispelled by the retrospective of some 120 oils, watercolors and drawings by Signac on view through Dec. 30 at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, its only venue...
...sensitive to color and gifted in the organization of forms. Sometimes his pictures are a little pedantic: he goes at his shapes with the stolid determination of a silkworm chewing its way across a mulberry leaf. But the best of them are filled with a joy in life that Seurat, a curiously melancholy artist some of the time, couldn't top. Signac makes you feel--really feel, not just think--what it can be like to be in a world ruled by the pleasure of color and by the calm reflection that is, so to speak, its postcoital afterglow...
Signac never achieved a masterpiece of the order of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, but how many painters have? In the late 1880s and early 1890s, though, he brought off a sequence of ravishingly beautiful landscapes that stand with the best of late 19th century art, along with some remarkable figure paintings...
Both Signac and Seurat strove to give a noble, architectural permanence to fleeting effects by analyzing shape and light in terms of dots of color. They wanted rigor and system, not Impressionist spontaneity. Each man influenced the other; Seurat was the greater artist, but it was a real partnership. Thus it was Signac who persuaded Seurat, and not the other way round, to purify his color by banishing earth pigments from his palette. Later Signac would give up on the dot, using larger spots in a sort of mosaic. Under the influence of Turner, whose luminous watercolors and oils...
Sunday focuses its first act on George Seurat, the impressionist artist who created “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte.” The opening act, set in the 1880s, follows the progress of George’s work, presenting snapshots of the various individuals that provide inspiration for the painting—a baker, a nurse, a boatman, et al. Their appearances are brief, their depth non-existent; they exist to the audience only as they exist to George. Yet George, who skillfully observes his subjects—effortlessly taking them apart...