TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092391/0923400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.5 KB | 181 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 74

Against the Cult of the Moment


A superb show presents Georges Seurat as an inspired lyricist who
achieved grand images of mysterious permanence

By ROBERT HUGHES


    In the past decade the American public, mainly in New
York City and Washington, has been treated to one of the
historic events in the life of the modern museum: the
collaboration between U.S. institutions and the Reunion des
Musees Nationaux on a series of retrospectives of the great
French artists of the 19th century. Edouard Manet in 1983;
Vincent van Gogh in 1984 and 1986; Paul Gauguin, Gustave Courbet
and Edgar Degas in 1988; Claude Monet in 1990 -- all these, done
at the highest pitch of curatorial skill, have redefined the
School of Paris for us.

    Nor is the sense of exaltation these shows leave behind
untinged with regret: one knows that this golden moment of the
museum retrospective, flourishing amid the corrosive vulgarity
that overtook the American art world in the 1980s, will not
return. Its coda, and in some ways its climax, is the show of
paintings and drawings by Georges Seurat that, having spent the
summer at the Grand Palais in Paris, opens at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York next week.

    Seurat, like Masaccio or Mozart, was a true prodigy. Born
in 1859, he succumbed to an attack of galloping diphtheria in
1891, at 31. This all too early death has had the effect of
concentrating his life around a single stylistic effort, the
invention of pointillism. The one thing everyone knows about
Seurat is that he painted rather stiff pictures composed of
dots, in the belief that this system of breaking down color into
its constituent parts was scientific and not, like Monet's
Impressionism, intuitive.

    Had he lived as long as Monet, Seurat would have been a
hale duffer of 70 when his many heirs, like Mondrian, were
coming into their maturity as artists. What would he have left
behind him by then? Possibly -- if one can guess from his last
big paintings like Chahut, 1889-90, and Cirque, 1890-91 --
something quite different from the calm, composed "Egyptian"
classicism of his best-known work, the sublime Un Dimanche a la
Grande Jatte of 1884-86. For the last paintings are more
frenetic, more consciously urban and, above all, more influenced
by mass culture (the posters of Jules Cheret, for instance) and
working-class entertainment (fairgrounds, circuses, cafes
concerts) than anything he had made before.

    We would then remember Seurat not only as a great
synthesizer of classical order and modernist perception but also
as the artist who fused both with the exacerbated delights of
the mass culture that was emerging at the turn of the century:
the true "painter of modern life,'' as anticipated by
Baudelaire. The history of modern art, in terms of its
engagement with "low" culture, might then have been quite
different. Because he died so young, we have the first artist
but only hints of the second.

    When this show was first mooted, there were doubts. The
rarity and fragility of some of Seurat's major paintings meant
they could not travel. No Grande Jatte, therefore; no Baignade,
Asnieres, 1883-84; no Chahut. Was this like staging Hamlet
without the prince? As it turns out, no. Apart from the fact
that some works of art should never travel, and deserve the
tribute of a pilgrimage, their absence forces one to concentrate
on the abundance of others that the curatorial team, headed by
Francoise Cachin of the Musee d'Orsay, has assembled.

    Here we have the most complete group of Seurat's drawings
-- and drawing, for him, was absolutely fundamental -- ever
assembled, together with the oil sketches and finished studies
for the big works (more than 30 for La Grande Jatte alone); the
landscapes of the Ile de France; the exquisite seascapes of
Gravelines and Honfleur; and the theater scenes, like the
brooding and mysterious frieze of musicians and chattering
spectators at the Cirque Corvi known as the Parade de Cirque,
1887-88. In the studies, particularly, one sees Seurat's major
ambition working itself out: his conservative but in fact deeply
radical desire to reconstruct an art opposed to the
Impressionist cult of the moment, his hope of making grand,
complex, time-resistant images whose mysterious permanence could
take its place beside Greek and Assyrian bas-reliefs or the
works of Ingres in the Louvre.

    From this body of material, a rather different Seurat
emerges from the one we are used to. The "scientific" painter
with his abstruse color theories recedes somewhat, and an
inspired lyricist comes to the fore -- a 19th century Giorgione.
As the art historian Robert L. Herbert puts it in his catalog
essay, Seurat "wanted to be perceived as a technician of art,
and so he borrowed from science some of the signs of its
authority, including regularity and clarity of pattern."

    But, as Herbert points out, Seurat's dots are not really
dots either. Far from laboring away at a mechanical surface
programmed in advance by theories of complementary color, Seurat
displayed the most intuitive and mobile sense of the relations
between sight and mark. One of the miracles of his art is his
ability to analyze light, not through the simple juxtaposition
of dabs of color but by a layering of tiny brush marks built up
from the underpainted ground, so that the eventual surface
becomes a fine-grained pelt, seamless and yet infinitely
nuanced, from which captured light slowly radiates.

    The tawny blond and blue surfaces of the seascapes, like
Le Chenal de Gravelines: Petit-Fort-Philippe, 1890, mediate
between solidity (the molecular structure of the skin of paint)
and transparency in a way that is unique in 19th century
painting, and as a result they can absorb and reward all the
contemplation the eye can give them. The port, under its
light-suffused spell, its unpeopled high-summer sleep, becomes
a subject of reverie but not a fantasy, anchored in the real by
such declarative touches as the iron bollard placed dead center
in the foreground, yet located in the ideal as well by Seurat's
profound attentiveness.

    Seurat was a brilliant and highly self-conscious metteur
en scene. His landscapes often possess the sense of
anticipation one associates with an empty stage. (Hence they
were a powerful influence on De Chirico, and on Surrealism
generally.) Nowhere is this more piercing than in the large
study for the landscape of La Grande Jatte, without its 50 or
so people, its monkey and two dogs. The curtain has risen on
this green paradise, and the cast will filter on, one at a time,
throughout the subsequent studies -- the St.-Cyr cadet, the lady
with the monkey but without her attendant gentleman.

    All the time Seurat is thinking, editing, adjusting.
Throughout his career, his efforts are directed to refracting
what he sees through what he knows. He quotes Poussin, Ingres,
classical marbles, Han figurines; the boy hollering in the water
in Une Baignade, Asnieres was once a classical Triton blowing
a conch. But the sources are perfectly absorbed in his pictorial
intents. For this reason alone, Seurat was an artist of a kind
unimaginable in our own fin de siecle, now that art education
has been lobotomized by the excision of formal drawing and the
study of prototypes.

    The record of Seurat's thought lies as much in his
drawings as in his final paintings. He drew on Ingres paper with
Conte crayon, a waxy black stick that, stroked over the rough
surface, produced a slightly blurred line and deep granular
tones -- the equivalent of his intricately speckled surfaces in
painting. And he was a great draftsman -- one of the greatest
since the Renaissance, worthy, at the top of his form, of being
compared to Rembrandt or Goya.

    The economy of his means is stunning. Form floats to your
eye out of velvety blackness, and each drawing is a record of
becoming. Seurat's personages -- friends like the painter
Aman-Jean, strangers glimpsed in the street, women with the
mannered gravity of Greek kouroi -- have an immense dignity and
distance. Watch how a mere lightening of tone on a woman's face
in profile, in the studies for La Grande Jatte, records the
head's twist toward the light; or how wittily the curve of a
little girl's highlighted slouch hat reflects that of her back.
Such style, one realizes, is in essence moral. Seurat, one of
the wittiest and most logical artists who ever lived, was simply
incapable of triviality.