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Georges Seurat: Precocious Genius
| Article
# : |
19594 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
1,583 Words |
| Author
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Michael Gibson
Michael Gibson, author of a number of books on art, is the
Paris art critic for the International Herald Tribune and a
frequent contributor to publications in Europe and the United
States. |
The deeply secretive Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was always at pains to point out that the technical aspect of his work was the only thing that really interested him: "People see poetry in what I do. Not so! I am merely applying my method." A precocious genius, he completed his masterpiece, La Grande Jatte, at the age of twenty-five, and died of diphtheria six years later, at thirty-one.
But every artist has his peculiar procedures and strategies both unconscious and intentional, and Seurat, as the exhibition of some 230 items now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (September 9, 1991, to January 12, 1992) clearly reveals, is obviously no exception to the rule.
The visitor can safely ignore the artist's dull, competent early academic drawings, which might have been more appropriately displayed in a room apart, but one can only be dazzled and stirred by the whole sequence of dark conte crayon drawings that constituted Seurat's entire production over a period of three years, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four.
The solemn and solitary mood they convey may remind one of the dreamworld of a number of otherwise very different artists, such as Odilon Redon or Alfred Kubin. Seurat's peculiar approach, however, while ostensibly striving to render only the visible, without any of the supernatural and literary intentions inherent in the work of the two Symbolist artists, somehow manages to make even the most commonplace figures, actions, and situations appear strange and indeed ominous.
At first glance one may be impressed by the brilliant formal simplification of familiar shapes achieved by an unusual application of the opaque shadow of the conte crayon: a house, a horse and cart, a locomotive, a man eating (the artist's father), an old woman sewing (the artist's mother), a young woman wearing a veil, and all those other moody and enigmatic figures. But after we have observed them for a while, the mood begins to shift. The brooding darkness of the medium, the vagueness of the outline, the monumentality of the forms begins to solicit one in an insinuating manner. The artist is not merely urging one to recognize some shape he happened to observe in the real world, but to encounter something he quite unmelodramatically designates as darkly portentous, even as it stands before one in the guise of a banal everyday figure or occurrence. Everything in Seurat's understated drawings seems to stand as an enigmatic clue to the decisions of fate and the speechless secrets of life
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