Word: seurat
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...leave behind untinged with regret: one knows that this golden moment of the museum retrospective, flourishing amid the corrosive vulgarity that overtook the American art world in the 1980s, will not return. Its coda, and in some ways its climax, is the show of paintings and drawings by Georges Seurat that, having spent the summer at the Grand Palais in Paris, opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York next week...
...Seurat, like Masaccio or Mozart, was a true prodigy. Born in 1859, he succumbed to an attack of galloping diphtheria in 1891, at 31. This all too early death has had the effect of concentrating his life around a single stylistic effort, the invention of pointillism. The one thing everyone knows about Seurat is that he painted rather stiff pictures composed of dots, in the belief that this system of breaking down color into its constituent parts was scientific and not, like Monet's Impressionism, intuitive...
...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...
...reproduction conveys the effect of a picture like Black Circle, Time, 1979-80. Painted every inch of the way with a Seurat-like determination to leave nothing accidental on the surface, it is Pousette-Dart's version of the circle that has been used, as a mandatory trope, by every Zen roshi for the past 300 years. It is the circle of black ink on white rice paper that says "emptiness" but also says "fullness," the abstract figure in which one can reflect on the presence of complete being...