Thirty-one. That’s the pitiably young age at which Georges Seurat died, in 1891 (most likely from diphtheria), an age when most of us are just beginning to wake up to the idea that life isn’t forever.
An avant-garde artist when such a thing was possible, Seurat achieved fame during his short, urgently lived artistic career, primarily as the inventor of Pointillism — dot paintings based on 19th-century positivist theories about optics and color. Seurat’s most famous pointillist painting, A Sunday on the Grande Jatte (1884-86), hangs solemnly (and forever — it’s not allowed to travel) at the Art Institute of Chicago. In modern iconic resonance, it ranks as high as Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Not so the drawings. Like many artists, I only found out about Seurat’s drawings years after I had seen his paintings. Because drawing always has to fight for attention with painting, its big and noisy sister, Seurat’s drawings, despite their beauty, are easily shoved to the side when people tell the story of modern art.
I first saw Seurat’s drawings 15 years ago at the huge Seurat exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Now comes an exhibition dedicated exclusively (except for a couple of small paintings) to Seurat’s drawings. Georges Seurat: Drawing is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through January 7, 2008.
Aman-Jean. c. 1882–83. Conté crayon on paper. 24 1/2 × 18 3/4” (62.2 × 47.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960 (61.101.16). © 1989 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The MOMA show consists of 135 of Seurat’s approximately 250 extant drawings. They are small, tenderly drawn, black and white drawings made of conté crayon on paper. Full of melancholy, they are nevertheless stunningly uplifting because of how perfectly they suggest timelessness. For anyone who draws, the miracle lies in Seurat’s ability to extract form without using any contour lines. If you don’t draw, this may seem like no big deal. But it is. How does an artist assert the strength of a given form without defining its edges?
To make his drawings, Seurat lightly rolled his crayon around and around, on its side or sometimes on its end, across the surface of his bumpy paper. With rich variations of dark tones infiltrated by tiny bits of white paper poking up from underneath, the drawings sparkle almost as much as oil paintings. Seurat’s content is ordinary (a woman sews, a carriage moves across the snow, a row of suburban houses sits quietly in the dusk), but his crayon is sexy. In a fully carnal way, it loves its paper.
We’re used to the excitement of modern art’s invention, originality, deformation, and assertion of art for art’s sake. But modern art that’s exquisite throws us back to the likes of the lovely Van Eyck.
There’s no dispute over Seurat’s modernity, however. Both his subject matter — the rapidly changing landscape in and around Paris and the modern human beings who inhabited it — as well as his way of seeing, which consciously acknowledges that we can never grasp the full truth of anything — are thoroughly modern.
Unlike his paintings, Seurat’s drawings come to us without any theory. They yield the highest ratio of profound meaning per square ounce of material used of any artist I know.
For the most part, people blog in order to get things off their mind. I’m posting my thoughts on Seurat’s drawings for another reason. I want to keep them in my mind, for as long as I live.
