Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Abstractness, hieratism, and naive cursiveness of edge

Georges Seurat
Study for La Grande Jatte
1884
drawing
British Museum

Georges Seurat
Woman fishing - study for La Grande Jatte
1884
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Georges Seurat
Madame Seurat, the artist's Mother
ca. 1882-83
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"And as for Seurat's drawings!  Seurat's abstractness, hieratism, and  naive cursiveness of edge . . ."

"Where in Seurat can one find two figures facing one another, let alone conversing?"

Georges Seurat
Woman Strolling (Une élégante)
ca. 1884
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Georges Seurat
Study for Poseuses
1886-87
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Georges Seurat
Study for Une baignade
1883
drawing
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

"All the aesthetic categories of the nineteenth century, including most of the modernist ones, disappeared down the black hole of Seurat's technique. A technique that pretended to be a technics – to engineer at last the "elocutory disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words  [Mallarmé]".

Geroges Seurat
Lighthouse at Honfleur
1886
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Georges Seurat
Poplars
1883-84
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Georges Seurat
Nurse with child's carriage
ca. 1882-84
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

"In Seurat, those moments collapsed into one another – they were equated, or duplicated, or ironized out of existence. Drawing (that is, separate identities) emerged from the wreckage as so much whispering of ghosts.  Ghosts of an endless, ignominious energy.  But not people – not objects of empathy or sympathy.  Not actors.  Not things with insides." 

Georges Seurat
The black bow
ca. 1882
drawing
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Georges Seurat
Landscape with houses
1881-82
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Georges Seurat
Peasants
ca. 1881-84
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Seurat was profoundly anarchism's painter: cruel and elusive and infinitely fond of the city's foibles and moments of freedom.  He operated at the point where an all-consuming aesthetic irony happens on a truly naive delight in other people.  Where negation is indistinguishable from utopia."

Georges Seurat
Courbevoie - Factories by moonlight
1882-83
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Georges Seurat
Portrait of Paul Signac
1890
drawing
private collection

 quoted passages are by T.J. Clark from his chapter on Camille Pissarro and anarchism in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999)