Exhibitions 1
Seurat and The Bathers (National Gallery, till 28 September)
Dots with dash
Martin Gayford
Factory chimneys smoke in the distance beside the suburban river. A train puffs over a railway bridge. A couple of youths are bathing; more figures lie or sit on the bank in the mild sunlight, each separate and alone, gazing at the water. It might easily be, say, Battersea or Barnes in the days of steam. In fact, it is set in the west- ern Seine-side sprawl of Paris, downstream from the Bois de Boulogne. We are, of course, looking at `Une Baignade, Asnieres' by Georges Seurat, one of the most famil- iar paintings in the National Gallery which is currently the centrepiece of the exhibition Seurat and The Bathers.
Indeed, this is such a familiar picture that we are in danger of not seeing it at all. It is to the great merit of the current show that it makes us look again, and realise not only what a beautiful work it is, but also how truly strange. After all, why paint these Parisian clerks and shop assistants, trousers rolled up, boots removed, on the heroic scale — two metres by three — of salon mythology, and in the poses of classi- cal gods and Tritons? Why focus so insistent- ly on this nondescript stretch of urban river- scape? What on earth was Seurat up to?
It isn't all that easy to say. He was a young man both taciturn and secretive. At meetings of the Societe des Artistes Inde- pendants at the Café Marengo in the 1880s, he 'used to sit smoking, silent and attentive'. Surviving letters suggest that Seurat was intensely ambitious — very insistent especially on his role as the inven- tor of pointillism — and at the same time pedantically precise and tight-lipped (he tended to write in clipped note-form). Even with his friends, he played things very close to his chest. Nobody realised that he had a mistress and baby son until his sud- den illness and early death, perhaps from meningitis, at the age of 31.
Similarly, it is not that easy for us to work out what Seurat was attempting in `Une Baignade, Asnieres', his first major work. His own account of the early period when it was painted was that it was a time dedicated to his search for an 'optical for- mula'. He finally found that formula, of course, in his discovery of the famous dot of divided colour, an achievement of which he was jealously proud. Indeed, this state- ment comes from a letter to the critic Felix Feneon in which Seurat is firmly pointing out that it was he, not his follower Signac, who had originated this technique. Towards the end of his short life it was on that objective, ostensibly scientific disci- pline that he put all the emphasis. Writers and critics, he remarked on another occa- sion, 'see poetry in what I do. No, I apply my method and that's all.'
But he couldn't really have been as dry as that. As one walks around the first rooms of Study for Vne Baignade, Asnieres' by Seurat this exhibition, one sees that Seurat was an artist of enormously precocious, intuitive gifts. His whole being, his fellow student and friend in those early days Aman-Jean remarked, was dominated by 'instinct and talent'. The proof of that is in the enormous originality and poetic power of the drawing that Seurat produced well before he had invented pointillism, indeed before he had done much as a painter at all.
Since his name is so linked with colour — skies filled with green and violet dots it comes as a slight shock to discover that Seurat started out as a great master of black and white. He was born in 1859, and in 1882, when he was 22, had developed an extraordinarily powerful graphic style. Indeed, those early drawings remain among the most powerful and beautiful things Seurat ever produced.
They have an intense feeling of stillness and mystery, the figures looming up as if out of darkness or fog. Hardly a line is dis- tinctly stated — none at all in a drawing such as 'Woman Reading' of 1883. Almost everything is done with differing intensities of conte on highly textured paper, creating exactly that granular effect he later recapit- ulated in paint. A good deal is made in the catalogue of the fact that some other artists of the day experimented with similar tech- niques, but that takes nothing away from the unique quality of Seurat's drawings. They generate light, a soft twilight glow — which was in Matisse's view the criterion of a good drawing — they have presence and volume, quietness and strangeness. Those qualities, as he moved from drawing to painting, remained at the heart of his art.
Obviously, his instinct was to search for some way of working in paint which was impersonal and systematic — the reverse of the cheery handwriting of a painter like Monet (Seurat had, in fact, little to do with the Impressionists except in subject mat- ter). You can see him experimenting in some of his early landscapes, for example using a regular criss-cross stroke which also turns up in parts of 'tine Baignade, Asnieres'. He was still searching when he painted that painting in 1883-84. The final answer, of course, was the dot.
The particular oddness of the 'Bathers' perhaps results from the twin sources from which he produced it — working from sketches and studies in the time-honoured academic fashion. There were numerous little oil sketches, done mainly on the spot, with which he established the landscape and the disposition of the figures. Then there were the conte studies, done in the studio, of the figures. The latter are very beautiful, in fact more beautiful that their equivalents in the painting — which was obviously a struggle. Some parts are very heavily worked, and various different tech- niques are used in different areas — the sunlit skin smoothly painted, for example, but dabs and slashes of bright divided colour elsewhere in the grass and shadows especially. This treatment gives chromatic zip to his large, calm forms. The result is exactly poised between out- door everyday observation, and the dream- like repose of the studio drawings. It is as if a group of young Parisians had been frozen on that bank, as if time had stopped. The mundane bridge, factories and chimneys have the crystalline purity of a villa by Le Corbusier. It was a balancing act Seurat never quite repeated.
It was a balancing act in another way, too. Seurat's idea for this, his first impor- tant picture, was to paint a picture of mod- ern life — the leisure time beside the Seine was a cliché of Impressionism. But to do so with the absolute lucidity and ordered geo- metric architecture of a painting such as Poussin's 'Finding of Moses' — on show which may have been at the back of his mind. `Une Baignade' is a painting in that classical tradition that was at the same time contemporary in subject, and 'scientif- ic' in technique (an extremely Gallic com- bination that). The great merit of the exhibition is that it makes all this clear; its only fault is that in the manner of art historically arranged shows, the exhibits are chosen — like lec- ture slides — to make points, not to look good. As a result there are one or two nasty salon pictures on display. Also some beautiful paintings by Monet, Van Gogh et al, whose main effect is to show how little Seurat had to do with them, how wonder- fully odd he was.
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