Word: seurat
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...economy of his means is stunning. Form floats to your eye out of velvety blackness, and each drawing is a record of becoming. Seurat's personages -- friends like the painter Aman-Jean, strangers glimpsed in the street, women with the mannered gravity of Greek kouroi -- have an immense dignity and distance. Watch how a mere lightening of tone on a woman's face in profile, in the studies for La Grande Jatte, records the head's twist toward the light; or how wittily the curve of a little girl's highlighted slouch hat reflects that of her back. Such style...
...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...
...Majestically, Seurat refracted what he saw through what he knew...