This is the corner shot from the previous post on decorating and, if you look to the upper left, you will see a drawing.
This is a quick copy I did of a Seurat sketch for a study assignment in college. It isn't the best photograph, shot through glass and edited to reduce glare, and it isn't the best copy (done in an hour starting at midnight in the tradition of art school homework). Still, I admire the heck out of Seurat's drawings. They are all moody, sensitive, emotive, and compositionally exquisite.
So why am I hating on his paintings? Well, I would like to point out that I am not the only one to hate on them. In fact, Renoir and Monet would not show with him and Pissarro, who initially supported the 'philosophy' that Seurat's work embodied, grew to dislike it. The reasoning for this dislike is, simply put, his painting are not paintings. At best, they are depictions with paint. Just a misuse of the medium. For a painter's painter, it is an insult to the craft (for what it is worth, I am not a painter's painter either). I think Seurat made his pieces as paintings because he 'had to' for them to be 'finished' pieces of art in its most elevated form. Honestly, if you get a bunch of 2D artists in a room, open up a few bottles of wine, fast-forward an hour or so, and it will be very clear that for them, painting (and only oil painting) is tiered above drawing, printmaking, and really just everything. So I don't think that Seurat would have felt comfortable on a professional, Academically trained level, to have a finished masterpiece as anything but an oil painting.
I think this is too bad. His work is all about the color relationships. He coined it Chromoluminarism, also called Divisionism. Pointillism is the technique he used to show the effects that these pure, little bits of color had when they were next to each other. For Seurat, art was all about the connotative result of certain colors combined with the literal perceived color for the viewer. His art was entirely wrapped up in the new ideas of human perception and budding color theory. These contrasting dots of color would add up at a distance. If you think about it, this should sound an awful lot like the applications of color in printmaking (of course, exactly like dot-matrix printing but that isn't of historical relevance). But seriously, wouldn't it have made a killer print?
So you would think that Seurat would at least take advantage of his choice in mediums and capitalize on the characteristics of paint. But no, the surface of his canvas is flat. I admit, I pulled a Cameron Frye when I was in front of La Grande Jatte. You know what? There was no body to the paint, no lovely surface. And that is what I personally don't like. While I am neutral to the subject matter and stylized figures, the lifeless paint just reduces everything to an image. It just seems like a missed opportunity. There is something frustrating when you are looking at art which is all ideology. I wonder if Seurat even had fun making them, or was it all just cerebral? I think the soul is lost from his beautiful drawings. It is crazy to think that these black and whites had less rules and structure thrust upon them than these paintings with their vivid colors.
But this is just my take. I am sure others will disagree. At the end of the day, Georges Seurat left a legacy and opened doors for new thinking. I just hope he got some joy out of his work as he went.
Image notes:
The top sketch is my copy of Seurat's sketch of a nude model, done in conte. The top painting is The Bathers at Asnieres, the next is a detail from Parade de Cirque, and the bottom painting is the famous Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. All images are public domain in the US (US-1923).
Didn't get your fill on the fabulous, technicolor pit of color theory and Seurat?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Seurat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisionism
There, now your mind should be reduced to putty... colorful, colorful putty.
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