Seurat: Between the Dots

POST-IMPRESSIONISTS AT THE DEYOUNG MUSEUM IN SAN FRANCISCO   PART I

The deYoung Museum in San Francisco is now showing Part II of its ambitious exhibition of paintings loaned from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. This exhibition focuses on the Post-Impressionists and features paintings by Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, Cezanne and Gauguin. It also offers a broad look at Pointillism, Gauguin’s numerous followers, the Symbolist movement and the Nabis. It’s a substantial amount to take in no matter how familiar some of the works may be.

Great art allows you to (actually) stop thinking about yourself for a substantial length of time. Ah, what bliss. Not just to escape, but to think and feel without your Self as the center of reference . The tyrannical guard dog we carry around inside that looks after us, but also continually gnaws away at the bone of ourselves, gets time off in the company of these deeply visual, searching works.

Like the preceeding deYoung show, “The Birth of Impressionism,” this exhibition has a story to tell. The achievement of Impressionism, the depiction in paint of the fleeting affects of natural light, set up questions that the Post-Impressionist painters felt compelled to address. Once the solid appearance of objects began to waver under changing light, and once visual perception itself took center stage, how could you reintroduce structure back into painting? how could you use a highly personal viewpoint to explore the inner as well as the outer world?

The Post-Impressionist Cezanne voiced the ambition of his peers to make of Impressionism “something solid and durable like the art of museums.” He retained the Impressionist feeling of transparent, light color, but created a sense of permanence in his paintings, like his hero Poussin. He built his works one stroke at a time, each stroke a small plane of color, inspired by his subject but altered by the demands of the painting’s composition.

The Impressionists themselves felt the pressure of the questions posed by their own artistic successes. While Cezanne’s prismatic approach could capture even flickering reflections in enduring crystalline compositions

Monet (who lived until 1925) was drawn increasingly to the looser but no less unifying structure of liquid. After painting all manner of water subjects throughout the years, he focussed his attention towards the end of life on his water gardens Giverney. Looking for a less transient expression, Pisarro became a Pointellist. Renoir in his later Rubenesque nudes, his paint still in love with women, focussed more on their form than the variable light falling on them.

What about the shift from visual sensation to inner expression? Impressionists explored this also. Degas who brightened his palette by tuning his eye to the real world rather than the Old Masters, heightened his use of color further in his later paintings. His “Dancers” bathed in blue light and his “Bather” immersed in Venetian brick red, while exploring psychologically charged gestures, mine associations of a particular hue, like musical compositions in a specific key.

Monet’s “Train Station at St Lazare” and “Tuleries Gardens” seen in the last deYoung show offered the emotional experience of colors and color combinations in themselves, connected to a specific subject or not.  

But to return to the main story of this exhibition: with the tools of the “New Painting” at hand, the urge to look beyond the historical, literary and religious subjects favored by the Academy, and the use of a new language of color, the Post-Impressionists utilized flattened form, patterned compositions, chunky paint application, spiritual and religious subjects. They reflected on their own reactions and responses in their art .

The Post-Impressionists in this show were highly trained inheritors of a long tradition, and yet free from that tradition, and from Impressionism itself. The variety and quality of works in this exhibition illustrate that freedom grounded in tradition is an explosive recipe for creativity. We are still rocked by the shock waves of the “Big Bang” of the Renaissance, where intellectual liberation was rooted in the spiritual traditions of the Middle Ages. Freedom born of freedom is something quite different, where creativity can be haunted by anxiety (think Picasso).

In the exhibition layout at the DeYoung, the tipping point between the classic examples of Impressionism at the beginning of the show and the rooms of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin and others later on, turns on a wall of small oil studies made by Seurat.

 

These little panels were made in 1883-4 as Seurat was working out ideas for his famous “La Grande Jatte,” and the large painting “The Models” in the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia. In this row of works that progresses from a softly painted portrait of a boy to a fully Pointellist depiction of a seated nude from the back, you can see the shift that was taking place in painting in Paris. You can see it in a single panel:

..It’s as if you are watching the metamorphosis of a fleeting but tangible scene into a permanent and indefinable one. It is a depiction of the light of a particular time of day, of the charm of the imperfectly seen distant horizon, the contrast of flesh and water. And at the same time it is as if the human forms are retreating before our eyes to a more permanent sphere, where silence reigns and where movements are dictated by a strict purpose. Seurat was drawn to Egyptian art, its rhythm and stasis. The main figure in this panel, a closely observed adolescent in mid-stride, seems to have paused on his way towards becoming a silhouette in a ritual, not totally unlike an Egyptian figure on a wall relief.

The grandfather of transformation in Western art is the Roman poet Ovid, whose stories of men and gods, aptly titled “Metamorphosis,” inspired European painters for centuries. A Renaissance painting by Tintoretto shows Ariadne transported aloft from her unhappy human sphere upon marrying the god Bacchus. Her crown has become a ring of stars that we still see in the night sky as the Corona Borealis. 

A sculpture by Bernini shows Daphne turning into a laurel tree, just in time to escape the erotic designs of Apollo.

While Tintoretto and Bernini’s works depict a transformation from the personal into the natural order through the dramatic actions of their humanistic figures. Seurat articulates an increasing abstraction and stillness.

In the two years previous to the color studies at the deYoung, Seurat restricted his explorations exclusively to black and white, mostly in works of conte crayon on paper. In three drawings from these years (not in the show) we can see his mind at work as he applied himself to the challenges posed by Impressionism.

“The Harvester” of 1983 captures a working gesture but already feels calm and monumental in its underlying arrangement of shapes and tonal values. A drawing from a year later, of a rural scene including sheets or blankets on a clothesline, shows his subsequent method. Seurat describes form almost without using any outlines, but through ‘clouds’ of marks instead (click on image to see a larger view), while utilizing the blank paper as both white objects and light. It take some effort to make out the objects in the palpable twilight that envelopes the scene. This is a remarkable drawing style for someone whose favorite artists were said to be Holbein and Ingres, both masters of line. In the later drawing of a young girl, we have arrived at a very mysterious place indeed.

Our subject has started to become or inhabit geometric shapes: curves, angles, rectangles and trapezoids, the building blocks of mathematics which Plato considered eternal. While on the one hand this drawing is an accurate rendition of a well-dressed girl in hazy sunlight, on the other, its subject seems to regard us from within a misty atmosphere both intimate and remote. Seurat is hand-in-hand here with the Symbolists shown later in the exhibition, in his preoccupation with the dreamlike and the ineffable. Part of the excitement of this drawing though is that as abstract as the girl is, she also is more real and particular  -we “know” what she is like-  than the more “realistic” “Harvester.” If you enjoy these drawings of Seurat’s but are not familiar with them, run don’t walk to see even one of them, or to a good book about them. Their combination of nuanced tone, abstract form and observation has led them to be described as “the most beautiful painter’s drawings in existence.”

The color studies we’re looking at began where the black and white drawings leave off.  A kind of Symbolist portrait of the boy whose painted areas lack clear definition, leads to Impressionist brush strokes, which become smaller uniform marks, which then become little dots.

Seurat, whom his friends called “the notary” for his orderly ways, liked to emphasize his rational system, his “method.” In his Pointellist works he almost always used 11 colors, each used in the same order, one at a time, over the entire canvas surface. He was fascinated by new color theory regarding colors mixing in the eye, afterimages of colors, and the interactions of complemenaries. His technical path in painting to a more permanent expression was to break apart all appearances into individual dots, and to reorganize the dots back into stable forms.  – Given his attraction to science, if Seurat’s Pointellism has some relation to atomic theory, it also nods to the later Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics! which notes that the location of tiny particles cannot be predicted.

In looking at a detail of a painting in the show by Signac, Seurat’s companion Pointellist, we see a figure described by spots of color.

The woman’s arm and hand, and the background environment are described with dots and dashes of paint which blend together visually at a distance. But in looking at the study of the nude back by Seurat, the dots seem to be unpredictably everywhere or anywhere, doing different things.

They are not necessarily “on” the object or its outlines, but might denote the air in front of the nude, the color of her skin, or the the light bouncing off it, the ambient atmosphere, color or mood of the room. Yet the object, the nude, is there, in its majestic calm and intimate dignity.

Here, a few years after his black and white studies, Seurat has moved beyond the mystery of a Symbolist mood, from twilight to day. The flat playing card geometry is now full of life, a witty version of a pear hanging on a branch. This is solid form with the vivacious excitement of Impressionist light. It is a sensitive observation of a real person, and a sculptural statement that exudes light and color. Despite his “method” and its aura of systematic order, Seurat is a poet in paint. All this, before his untimely death at 31.

 

Seurat’s short career had a substantial impact on his Post-Impressionist peers. Looking back from the present moment, with the advent of computer technology with its bits and bytes, and the relationship of much art to digital photography, Seurat almost seems to be casting a longer shadow than Cezanne. Cezanne explored the dismantling of conventional imagery. Seurat’s short career focussed on putting it back together once it was broken apart.