At MoMA, Exercises by Seurat
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“Georges Seurat: The Drawings,” which opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is MoMA doing what it does best. The breathtaking show of more than 135 works — primarily conté drawings, along with sketchbooks and a small selection of oil sketches and easel paintings, including studies for and from his large masterpieces — presents a Modern master in unadulterated form. Few artists have conveyed the magical, otherworldly quality of the circus, the sideshow, the concert hall, and the theater as well as Seurat. Few have given ordinary subjects, such as bathing and spending a Sunday afternoon along the banks of the Seine, such grand and mysterious power. And few artists have infused light with such spiritual weight.
Seurat was an artist of riveting contradictions. He atomized the world to lay bare not its elements but, rather, its mystifying foundations. He went inward and deep. He likened the act of drawing to that of personal excavation — “discover[ing] unknown stones beneath stratifications of land and soil.” In Seurat’s velvety, dark conté drawings, forms are densely solid yet strangely vaporous, as if seen through the veiled light of fog, rain, dusk, or dawn. Roughened and porous, like stone, Seurat’s black forms are fleeting, and they swallow light. They hover like apparitions and they rise and fall, and open and close, as if they are breathing. They are shadows that shift into volumes that quiver at their edges and twinkle like stardust at their centers. Seurat makes the ephemeral tangible, lasting, and classical; and that which is solid he makes diffused — transformed into something mysterious, if not religious.
In Seurat’s greatest drawings, light and form have nothing to do with the academic act of description. He pares down things and acts to essentials and essences; he even transforms them: a top hat, a monkey, a parasol, a gas lamp, a high kick, and a corseted-and-bustled hourglass woman all become living, game-piece signs or ideographs emblematic of both thing and era. His eye is focused on the familiar — people reading, knitting, and plowing; a nude model in the studio, a woman with a parasol, an acrobat, or a boy sunning himself — and the drawings are tinged with naturalism. But they depict Modern annunciations, visitations, and spiritual passages. For Seurat, whose mature drawings suggest that he had summoned light and form into being through incantation, the act of drawing is a form of prayer.
Like van Gogh, Seurat had a brief, meteoric career. Born in Paris in 1859 to a family of means, he studied under Henri Lehmann, a disciple of Ingres; but Seurat was also drawn to the classicism of Puvis and Poussin, Courbet’s monumental celebration of popular subject matter, as well as to the shock of Impressionism’s stippled color strokes and the pure and emotional shotcolor of Delacroix. Seurat worked as an artist for only about 11 years, dying abruptly of malignant diphtheria in 1891, at the age of 31. Seurat’s monumental body of paintings and drawings, one has to remember, represent an artist just getting started. But there is nothing in this show to suggest a lack of lifetime achievement.
Seurat is best known for his innovative color theory that produced the movement of Pointillism. Yet he was a classicist who also understood how, like Titian, to activate a beautiful curve with shimmering translucent vibrations — movements that make the eye caress back and forth and across a form as it follows the length of a contour. He is also, in the later vein of Nadelman, Arp, and Brancusi, an artist who, in his pursuit of refinement and distillation, arrived not only at what Nadelman would coin as “significant form,” but also at “significant light.” Seurat was inspired by the abstract, planar carvings in ancient Egyptian art (his carved contours at times suggest Byzantine or Egyptian flatness and wavering in the plane), and he has been a major influence on artists as diverse as van Gogh, Klee, and Balthus; but as a Pointillist, he has had no equals. Scientific theory, without spiritual conviction, remains theoretical.
The last major New York show of Seurat was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1992 retrospective of the artist. “The Drawings” reminds us how significant Seurat really is. The show, organized by Jodi Hauptman, associate curator in MoMA’s department of drawings, is serene and supple — sure to be a crowd pleaser. Seurat, who was described in his day as “a young man crazy about drawing,” treated drawing primarily as an end in itself, not as a medium for studies. And some of the most beautiful and luminous drawings in existence adorn this show’s walls: they include “Aman-Jean,” of the artist painting, and “Embroidery: The Artist’s Mother,” in which she has a spidery delicacy and an architectural monumentality (both c. 1882–83); “The Echo” (1883); a study for “Bathing Place, Asnières,” and “Sidewalk Show” (both c. 1883–84), a haunting picture that resembles a staged execution, and the drawing “Trombonist” (c. 1887–88), a study for the Met’s astounding “Circus Sideshow.” Standing before these works, I felt as if I were in the presence not of ordinary people but of bodhisattvas, saints, and gods.
Arranged chronologically, the exhibit begins with academic works, including “The Hand of Poussin, After Ingres” (c. 1875–77). Even in the earliest works, I could sense Seurat’s pursuit not just of volume but also of the shimmering and the ethereal. The show quickly hits a fever pitch that never lets up: astonishing drawings of the countryside, the seaside, lone animals, and figures create an atmosphere in which the majority of works are staggeringly complex in their density, in their darkness, and in their sense of reduction to essentials.
Luminous studies for the paintings “Bathing Place, Asnières,” “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” “Circus Sideshow,” and “Models,” in the Barnes Collection, pepper the walls along with masterful drawings of acrobats, clowns, dancers, café singers, Parisian nightclubs, and strollers along the Seine.
“The Drawings,” however, is not perfect. The exhibition is a slow burn that builds to an abrupt finish, making me hungry for the larger paintings for which, and from which, the drawings were made. Also, wall text and catalog essays focus too much on process, as if explaining how conté crayon moves across textured paper, or that X-rays show that Seurat combed through his painted ground, could really unravel the creation of the artist’s inimitable form and light. But this is nitpicking.
“Georges Seurat: The Drawings” is one of the greatest shows to be mounted in New York this season; and it towers above the throwaway exhibits of Kara Walker and Richard Prince. Ms. Hauptman, a Joseph Cornell scholar who also brought us last year’s stellar exhibition “Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon,” is one of the bright lights in Mo-MA’s dim present. Part of the pleasure of “The Drawings” is that walking through its galleries feels like old-home week at MoMA. As I was pulled by masterpiece after masterpiece, across gallery after gallery, I thought, “This show, and its curator — as well as the promise of more shows of this caliber — are what make the Museum of Modern Art so damn important and essential.”
October 28 through January 7 (53 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).