Word: seurat
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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...
...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...