Word: seurat
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...come from? Reach back far enough, and you can see its beginnings in work not included in this show: Giorgione?s F?te Champ?tre, from 1510, and the 18th century f?tes galantes of Watteau. They provide the pictorial tradition - plush scenes of the aristocracy at leisure in green settings - that Seurat adapted to the world of middle-class entertainments...
...Like the Sphinx, La Grande Jatte does not travel. Since the painting entered the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926, it has been lent just once, to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City for a Seurat retrospective in 1958. After it arrived there, a fire broke out in MOMA's galleries. The painting was unharmed, but the trustees of the Art Institute decided it would never leave home again. Even the great Seurat touring retrospective in 1991 had to do without it. Thirteen years later, the Art Institute is making up for that...
...Seurat?s career was brief but consequential. In 1884, when he was just 24, he exhibited Bathing Place, Asni?res, a painting that announced a powerful ambition: to synthesize flickering Impressionist-derived technique with stable, classical form. Two years later, he unveiled La Grande Jatte, a canvas that we now realize brought whole new departments of feeling and form into view. Five years after that, he was dead from diphtheria. But within that short life he was able to formulate a style, both utterly modern and serenely classical, that opened the way to everything from post-Impressionism and Symbolism to 20th...
...time he began work on La Grande Jatte, Seurat was also looking closely at Millet, whose bulky peasants figure behind many of Seurat?s magnificent drawings, and at the velvety etchings of Goya and Rembrandt. Seurat worked in soft, fatty Cont? crayon, dragging it across paper that had a rough, microscopically tufted surface. Minute threads of the paper?s whiteness remain visible beneath the crayon?s black, creating smoky gray and black textures of incredible depth...
...Seurat was also looking closely at the Impressionist works of Renoir, Monet and Pissarro. By the 1880s Impressionism was coming under attack not just from the usual academic conservatives but from a new generation who wanted art to reclaim its larger purposes, to represent moral hierarchies, eternal values, history - anything that imposed an order of the mind on the hectic gatherings of the eye. The Impressionists had no use for any of that. Their working method was to record the fleeting effects of light at a particular moment, and that moment was always...