Art
Seurat
THE history of most sensitive artists during the second half of the nineteenth century is that of a stniggle between realistic
and non-realistic tendencies in their art. Van Gogh went from the grim realism of his early drawings and paintings of the Le Borinage period to the intense emotional expressionism of his Auvers canvases. Gauguin gave up the direct rendering • of nature which is the foundation of his Breton paintings, and in Tahiti aimed more and more at the decorative. Cezanne pursued the analysis of form, sometimes at the expense of naturalism, and Monet turned the realistic discoveries of Impressionism into means for producing colour patterns.
• Seurat followed a slightly different path, which can be traced at the exhibition of works by the Neo-Impressionists at Wildenstein's.
The most revealing exhibits in this collection are a group of early drawings. Some of these date from Seurat's school days, and show hint with an almost old-masterish love of exact realism and skilful drawing, apparently derived from Ingres. But when he came out into the world Seurat found that the only idiom of painting that was really alive and therefore usable by a sensitive artist was Impressionism. On the other hand Impressionism was not an idiom suited to his aims, and the early drawings show him trying to express his views about life in a medium which only allows of statements about the visual appearance of things. This is conspicuously the case in drawings like the Man Hoeing (65), and The Angelus (77). The latter challenges direct comparison with the painting of the same subject by Millet, and the comparison brings out the real character of Seurat's treatment of the theme. For though in a sense he is less realistic than Millet in that he expresses himself entirely in terms of silhouette, yet in his approach to his subject matter he is more realistic, in that he avoids all the false sentimentality which makes for the peculiar falseness of Millet's composition.
The early paintings, like Sous-bois (35), show the same obsession with -purely visual effects, but they are in general concerned with landscape subjects where this approach is more suitable. It is not till about 1883 that Seurat begins to treat the people that he saw around him as themes for paintings. The grandest work of this type is La Baignade, in the Tate Gallery, painted in 1884, for which several sketches are included in the .present exhibition. In. the years immediately after this the strain begins again to be felt, but this time in a different way. The only tendency which dilutes the realism of the Baignade was Seurat's interest in monumental composition. In the Baignade it hardly affects the realism and has not gone far beyond the degree necessary to prevent a painting from be- ing merely incoherent, but in the next great work, Dimanche .a la Grande Jaffe, this interest is already becoming almost an _obsession. The sketches for this painting are still fresh and
• realistic, but when. it comes to the finished work geometrical
• accuracy of patterning seems to have been the matter upper- -most in the artist's mind. This is still more so in the last paintings. It is worth noticing that the artist's themes at this time are not in general taken from the life with which he was most immediately concerned, but from such subjects as the theatre or the music-hall. In some of them this choice is accompanied by a slightly satirical attitude, which lessens .the directness of the artist's approach. Further, the tech- nique is no longer, as in La Thrignade, designed to achieve realistic effects, but is rather a stylised Impressionism, an Impressionism reduced to a pattern. In the present exhibi- tion the most important works of the last period are Le (Yrque and La Poudrense, though the extreme example of the style, La Parade, is represented by a drawing, Le Cirque shows all the confusion of the type : the attempt to combine effects of movement with monumental composition, and with Impres- sionist division of colours, and at the same time the use of Mannerist devices, such as the half-figure of the clown jutting into the foreground, only in order to make a particular kind of compositional effect. A painting such as this is a master- ' piece of intellectual calculation, but compared with the early works like La Baignade its methods are so indirect that they indicate how far the artist has been forced to give up his contact with nature and to take up some sort of. intellectual
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