“Georges Seurat: The Drawings”

Pierrot and Colombine

Photo: Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Talk about harshing one’s mellow! There I was at the press preview for MoMA’s terrific “Georges Seurat: The Drawings”—scribbling happily in my notebook—when I was roused from my reverie by the skeptical voice of Walter Robinson, editor of Artnet. “You’re not actually covering this, are you?” he asked. Sure, I replied, why not? Pausing as if to sum up the enormity of what he was about to tell me, he said, “It’s boring.” Robinson is something of a kidder, so it took me a moment to realize he wasn’t joking. Struggling for a suitable riposte to his observation, I swung for the fences and missed: “Boring? Is the Parthenon boring?” At which point, he rolled his eyes and darted away. My primitive mind, it would seem, could not grasp his complex argument.

Maybe it can. Let’s stipulate that as far as choices go, Seurat is a safe one, especially for an institution that proclaimed its fulsome expansion would showcase contemporary art. Let’s also allow that ever since MoMA reopened, everything in it seems obscured by the imperial scale of the place and the air of corporate triumphalism it conveys. And finally, let’s admit that, yeah, with the exception of a couple of small paintings, there are a lot of drawings in this show, all of them roughly the same intimate scale and dark, sooty tone. So what? The Modern will never be a museum of contemporary art, no matter how much the people who run it huff and puff to the contrary. And the exhibit’s installation, which mounts the drawings on gray panels centered on the walls, keeps the huge gallery from swallowing up Seurat’s evanescent renderings.

As for the possibility that Sondheim fans may be disappointed by the near absence of the artist’s dazzling dots, too bad. This is the first comprehensive gathering of Seurat’s works on paper in something like 20 years, and given the fact that drawings have the unfortunate tendency to fade when exposed to light—even the dim levels here—it will likely be one of the last. Nobody will confuse this show for Matthew Barney clambering up the Guggenheim in a kilt, which is just as well. In an age of museum spectacle and excess, this survey is a rare example of art scholarship for its own sake.

Which isn’t to say that the exhibit is some kind of dry exercise. On the contrary, the work astonishes the eye with the artist’s preternatural gift for conjuring luminosity out of the dark matter of his chosen medium, conte crayon. Relying only occasionally on outline, Seurat preferred to let his pieces—portraits of family members and glimpses of people on the street; wistful, almost longing looks at the seashore and the rapidly industrializing suburbs surrounding Paris—emerge practically on their own in a dense accretion of marks. This technique would sometimes take flight in eccentric patterns of spirals and curlicues, as if Seurat were waving a conductor’s baton instead of merely drawing. He was acutely sensitive to the paper he used, called Michelet, employing the microscopic ridges and troughs that grooved its surface to achieve his effects—barely grazing the former to achieve his lightest of lights, while pushing his crayon deep into the latter to create his inkiest blacks. Wall labels explain that this texture was a result of the paper’s manufacture, but you don’t really need to know any of this to sense the magic in this oeuvre.

Seurat (1859–1891) had an extraordinarily short career—barely ten years—to produce some of art’s most iconic paintings, including Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. While his drawings periodically served as studies for these masterpieces, the majority of them were done in their own right, constituting a distinct and separate body of work in which Seurat nearly pushed through to pure abstraction. Images like Child in White (1883–84) are barely recognizable as representational forms, and yet, more than the paintings, such renderings arguably distill an era trembling on the brink of revolutionary change. Dusk (The Angelus) from 1883 pictures a farm at sunset, portraying the dying light as if it were witness to the end of an agrarian world. Commanding a material that resembled factory smoke, Seurat took moments out of the chaos of modern life and made them stand as still as an ancient column. In our millennium of ever-shortening attention spans, Seurat’s balm of timelessness is not only not boring, it is necessary.