Word: seurat
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...century ago, when he began painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat froze a score of weekend strollers into pointillist immortality. Now they are posed on a Broadway stage, thawing into something like life. The matron on the right, with the bustle and the chained monkey? She is the artist's mistress, Dot (Bernadette Peters), pretty as a picture but not quite so still; she would rather be at the Follies. See the white bundle a man at the rear is holding? That is the infant daughter of Dot and the artist...
...where is Seurat (Mandy Patinkin)? Everywhere. Finishing a hat, making trees and boats appear with a wave of inspiration, forsaking his mistress and their child to remain faithful to the only dots that matter: those in his painting. "I am not hiding behind my canvas," he declares. "I am living in it." Only he could live there, where the emotional chaos of life can be made as ordered and harmonious as a green thought in a green shade...
...Seurat was the wayward child of impressionism. Renoir and Sisley might seek to catch life on the fly; he would aspire to stasis. Their voluptuous brushstrokes were too imprecise, too sensational for this artist-scientist. Seurat worked dot by meticulous dot, woodpeckering the canvas with pricks of color that would fuse into meaning in the spectator's eye. So it is with the sculptor in Act II of Sunday in the Park with George. This George composes bit by bit, or byte by byte. He has created a computerized sculpture, Chromolume #7 (chromo-luminarism is an other critical term...
...Gris' work has its avant-garde credentials, it can now be seen as he probably wanted it to be: as the extension, into a modern idiom (for cubism was, to him, a kind of ultimate language) of the tradition of calm, cerebrative painting that flowed from Chardin through Seurat, and whose essential subject was still life...
...sphere, cube and cylinder, those intimidating Platonic solids of programmatic modernism. His pigment, however, has an extraordinary range of effect. His work sports in the transparency, density and sweet pastiness that only oil paint can give. Surfeited by color, twinkling with fields of dots (like enlarged details of a Seurat, betokening light), its casual surface can look clumsy; but that is only Hodgkin playing with the idea of clumsiness, extracting an educated pleasure from the babyish joys of daubing. In fact, his taste rarely fails, and his talent as a colorist remains unmatched among living painters. Both place his paintings...