Seurat as a modern artist connected and a gateway into the 20th century.

There is a Seurat drawing show at the MOMA.  He is far enough back and unquestionable enough so that there should be no trouble writing about him. Wrong!! Modern critics find it very difficult to go back before modernism in 1910, unless there is a body of related suppositional writing for them to use as a guide.  Because Seurat was active before there was anything we could call abstract painting and therefore we cannot be helped in understanding him by pointing to abstract painting unless we point to him as its forerunner. In the fourth sentence of the review by Roberta Smith on the front page of Friday's art section (October 26, 2007] comes this phrase "...they instantly clarify the show's intent,  which is to clarify the way the silent, classical remove of Seurat's impeccable, stylized paintings was distilled from an active socially aware engagement  with the world that registered most fully in his drawings."

I will merely underline one usage. The word classical, short for Neoclassical means working towards fulfillment as an artist by filling in the model of a previous neoclassical master. For Seurat, say Ingres, or better David.

It is true that Seurat spent countless hours finding the models for his paintings. There usually was a single figure, occasionally two whom he noticed and sketched from life. When a drawing was complete, and sufficiently worked out to be used in a painting what we see is nothing classical, but a newly made metaphor taken from that scene.

In la Grande Jatte in the near middle distance, above  and between the man  with top hat and cane and a lady who may be knitting, is an image of a red object which starts out as a round open shape enclosing a white volumetric circle. It proceeds to the ground as a form with some apparent weight and strength. Behind it as a gray stone, something like the glacial boulders we find in the Northeast.
In the drawing for this object, there are enough pentimenti to tell us that he was working from an old lady sitting on the ground, wearing a hat with a streamer tied around it and then reaching the ground behind her. She has been changed into a strange combination, which takes it place in space, leaving the rock [her torso] in a different spatial location than the ex hat.

In the distance, underneath the rear of the tugboat, two soldiers walk arm in arm. One wears a white hat the other a black hat. Now, this is a figure composition, so we expect figures. The figures' actions are normative enough that we do not question some of the more remote groups. But this group had been first turned into toy soldiers cut out of wood rounded on the lathe before it was placed in its naturalistic atmosphere. So, we have a solution of another metaphoric type, developed in drawing. The two girls who sit at the far edge of the large shadow which controls the front and bottom edge of the painting have also been worked up in drawing with great persistence and intensity. To identify further, one of them has a parasol and the other is enjoying the sight and smell of some flowers she holds in her hands. Look at them very carefully. They are seated on a very gentle rise of ground, neither of them is sitting in a shallow well which can hold about half of their thighs and buttocks.  There is also no marking, rendering or volumetric progression which gives us the idea that either of them could change their poses and suddenly feet would appear and they could run or walk away. Seurat's drawings for this pair have turned them into "nagas" or Indian snake goddesses, with the torsos, head and arms of a person but the lower parts of a snake. This is extremely radical metaphoric reconstruction through drawing.  Throughout the painting, ladies with bustles have a new form which cannot be changed. We look in vain for the extra set of legs which should appear under  their bustle, but the expectation is that it should be there. The man playing the trumpet has permanently fused in his back arched position. The little girl on one leg is permanently so.

I call Seurat's constant impetus in this work "local metaphor."  Many different kinds of things occur such as the lady whose hat has engaged a sailing boat, and even has a round cloud as a part of her hat. In many cases the reaction I have when I realize one of Seurat's many visual puns is to laugh.  I don't think I am laughing at Seurat but with him. He saw the jokes, and he put them there.  Each of his major paintings is composed differently, using different elements. This is, of all of them the one the most about metaphoric construction and humor. I don't deny that he also has both a spatial arabesque and a linear one, but I think that those too are sufficiently antithetical to cause witty paradoxes which are a joy to behold.

I do believe that with his work he did contribute to the generations of artists who followed him. The influence is obvious on De Chirico, and on the first Balthus Street Painting. But another influence is on the work of Paul Klee.  Klee never claimed that he sprang full grown from the head of Zeus. He was influenced by Seurat, Redon, and the Rape of the Lock" series of prints by Klinger[as was Di Chirico].

The painting by Seurat which is the closest to something one might call classical is at the National Gallery in London. It is called Bathers at Asnieres. Immediately, there are problems with this. It is not composed like a tradition classical, romantic or baroque figure painting. In fact, it is not like any earlier figure painting. It is composed like a Claude or Poussin landscape. The layers in the space established by large forms with their cast shadows, and with repoussoirs, usually the head or head and torso, keeping the rest of the space back and behind each such figure. There is a side to side rhythm which works use slowly into the space of the painting. We don't have any strong art nouveau linear movement to bother our traveling. The most developed figures are two boys. One is a redhead with his shirt, hat and other articles of clothing on the grass behind him. The other is a boy fully dressed, wearing his straw hat and sitting somewhat further into the space. The drawings which develop these two figures are the sort of which some critics could say they are extremely classical and build the form up in an unambiguous and vital way. I, too, believe that to be true. But they are both radical restatements of the figure. The figures have been newly reconstructed leaving out numerous insertions and other anatomical checkpoints into volumetric wholes which do not resemble any early artist's work. They do not much resemble the figure either. They are new figures created through the simplification of forms seen in light against a surrounding series of, first of all, values, which encroach on the figure, and later tones, including the hues and their intensities.
They can not be picked up and taken out of their world and understood, nor can the drawings be taken off the page and still understood.  This is not true of some work of David, and of a good deal of work by renaissance masters. This is thoroughly late nineteenth and twentieth century  drawing. Do remember that the new Goupil drawing course for which Van Gogh's brother with working had changed the emphasis in understanding figures into the simplest possible silhouttes made up of sharp edges, which would express the form.  And was it Van Gogh[?]  and some of the others who did the exercises and found them useful. Seurat comes out of that world. The forms of the figure are not built up little by little by anatomical shreds, but in a fell swoop from an understanding of the large silhouettes and their light and shade faces, seen in the context of their composition.

First of all, among the critics with an exception or two whom we must all know, none of them look for metaphor.  They do not understand the metaphoric nature of formal struggle, but think of it as a struggle to make abstraction.  This is of course nonsense when we start with a period where there has been no prior abstraction accomplished. The way to abstraction away from figuration must be through poetry, because only the metaphor gives us a different goal to appreciate and  try to accomplish other than the look of the motif. Seurat is a metaphor driven artist. But unlike, Cezanne, for example, he presents his achievements as a series of discrete solutions different from one another.

So a Seurat drawing show is important and not to be missed because we are in at the beginning of modernism. Seurat invents a variety of compositions taking different sorts of advantage of his studies and his experiences. He was, of course, busy mentally with all sorts of other goals, including his neoimpressionist build up of form and coloristic understanding of forms in space and not. It is always important to return to him because he was one of the great forerunners of radical twentieth century abstract and metaphoric painting, and even of some of the better surrealists.

Love,
Gabriel

P.S. I have not been well enough to go and see the MOMA show.  I was in the hospital all day today, and tomorrow go to clinic.  I am very impressed by the importance of Seurat, and the misunderstanding of his work, and of the work of symbolists, generally. I think he is someone to study and learn from. Not learning how to draw(classically or not] but learning how to think. So very little any of us do nowadays can fairly be called "poetry".  We need an exposure and to think about it on our own. We won't be getting help from any non-painters.