Seen most often one at a time and here and there, a retrospective of the drawings of Georges Seurat would seem to be a welcome opportunity. And certainly I made the effort to travel many miles to see this exhibition. But I am sorry to say that seen in great number, one hundred thirty five drawings, the work is greatly disappointing.
The beginning works were student work done in the Ecole des Beaux Arts academic manner. Pale gray pencil, or charcoal, is used to delineate the contours, through line, as well as to shade and suggest form. In a series of drawings from the classic examples, statuary, the craftsmanship is flawless: every area of the form is extremely well studied, the proportions are absolutely perfect, and the overall effect is of a drawing breathed onto the paper. As artworks, however, they have that rigid art school look and feel about them: one wonders, having made such a perfect drawing as each of these is, why a person would make yet another? As student work one can understand the concept of mastering a technique through repetition, yet as works in an exhibition they illustrate why the Ecole fell from favor at that time: they are without vital import, they are merely technique. As these drawings make very evident: a person can be trained to do this. And indeed they have been: we can see this same mastery in the works of Palko, Zick, and Tuscher, as well as in thousands of other classically trained artists.
One senses that Seurat somewhat shared that awareness of that school’s diminished reputation: once on his own he almost immediately began to draw in a different style. Perhaps aware of the impressionists concern with light and air, he began to focus on light as one of the necessary components for delineating form. Of the three plastic elements we can see that he was most interested in form, as, in his paintings, he would be most interested in color. In both the drawings and the paintings his concerns can be seen to be primarily intellectual. Intellectual content is perfectly fine in artworks but with Seurat it looks rather like the means for illustrating a polemic.
The museum’s interpretation tells us that the artist was very particular about the effect he wanted to achieve, using a specific paper because of the way it would react with his conte crayon. Most artists would understand this great pleasure that one feels using a specific medium. And certainly it is a beautiful effect, dragging the black crayon over the rough paper so that the sparkle of white glitters in the darkest areas. But I am always suspicious when an artist relies on the same materials over and over: I begin to suspect a devotion to effects.
The interpretation also tells us that he went out of the central city to an area known as “The Zone”, a sort of no man’s land between city and suburb. I think this indicates the problem with these works: neither the area nor these drawings have character, both lack vital import; the drawings are masterfully executed but they lack meaning. If an artwork is viewed as a shared experience, the artist must have and digest the experience before he can share it with us. These drawings from “The Zone” are merely exercises in a technique the artist was attempting to develop. By using “The Zone” he was presenting works for consideration that had no precedents: the observers would have to address the reality presented on these pieces of paper. There would be no familiar areas to serve as the basis for a critical comparison. In and of itself, that is fine. But, again, this lacks character, this lacks a shared experience. This is not a world in which the character of the people have given it personality: it is a drab, characterless no man’s land.
By contrast, in the drawings of Kathe Kollwitz, in which light also models the forms rising out of darkness, even though the environment might be equally nondescript, the focus is on the vital import, the feelings expressed by the artist.
In another series of drawings, the nightlife of Paris, we see the usual scene as depicted by Manet, Degas, and Latrec but in the Seurat technique.
In regard to that technique, the drawn line has now vanished and we see merely modeled form, and, for the most part, form isolated in blackness and coming into roundness where the light touches it. There is the quality of the luminous as if these had been inspired by early photography. But where the light touches the form it is so limited as to suggest that the artist is exploring technique rather than a visual experience, as if he were exploring how much or how little he needed to state to manifest his concept. As a drawing within a series of drawings during an artist’s development, this would be interesting. But there are so many of these drawings that we only see that his development was extremely slow and that he perhaps too much loved his materials, they were not a means to an end but an end pleasure. Rembrandt’s pen and ink landscape drawings are wonderful because he used the medium to record an impression, a vision, and his delight. They are beautiful drawings because of that, not because of the way the pen scraped across the coarse paper; the medium was the vehicle not the raisone d’être.
Seen as a whole, there is a development in the works. The first drawings are pale, light gray on white paper with the modeling only on the form. In the middle period the forms rise out of blackness. And in the last period, the forms are modeled using the whole of the gray scale and in a midtone gray environment. Very likely this latter change was motivated by his preparation for moving on to the paintings. Except for a few, and most notably in the portrait of Andre -, there is little sense that these drawings were intended to be finished art works.
In that Seurat was a contemporary of the impressionists who used the devices of composition found in Japanese woodcuts to create new designs and arrangements within picture space, it is odd that rather than follow that development, or seek another, he adhered rigidly to the academic practice of a centered, classical balance.
There is an absence of a sense of time. In his writings on the Italian Renaissance painters, Berenson tells us that it was not linear perspective that made those work different from the Gothic artists, it was the introduction of the presence of time. There is in painting a double concept of time: time present and time passing. In Seurat there is form and light and materials, but there is no sense of time. These drawings, as a result, are little more than technical exercises.
There is also very little indication of spontaneity; each of these drawings began with a concept and each of them has the sense of being a contrivance to illustrate that concept. As many of these were executed in the studio from sketches done in situ, it would have been very interesting to have seen some of those sketches from the field.
I sense this same studio contrivance in Seurat’s paintings. Those have interest as an intellectual development within a larger art movement but as paintings considered on their own, they too are in the end only the exercise of a technique. Despite their flash of color, they lack the spark of life. They come off as brilliantly executed exercises that can be seen to have been time consuming and tedious to make. Pissarro, always curious about new ideas and new developments, tried only a few paintings in this style, and then he moved on. There is a tendency to wonder, had Seurat lived longer, how soon and in what other direction he might have moved. But considering that his is at heart a “rigid” personality I doubt that it would have been too far one way or the other.
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