Getting to the Point of Seurat’s Drawings at the MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of Georges Seurat’s drawings displays a body of understated, shadowy sketches, revealing the stylistic innovations the artist made over the course of his short career. The exhibit focuses on a chronological examination of Seurat’s diverse subject matter and his manipulation of representation and abstraction. Famous for his Sunday on the Grande Jatte and celebrated as the father of pointillism, Seurat emerges as a protean artist whose artistic development ended prematurely.

The exhibit begins with drawings from Seurat’s early studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and ends with the preliminary sketch work for his renowned oil paintings. These fragmentary glimpses of Seurat’s technical approach to painting leave the viewer in awe of his prodigious accomplishments and wondering what he would have achieved had he lived into the twentieth century.

The drawings from Seurat’s initial stint at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts vastly differ from his later work. They adhere to classical Greek and Roman models for figure drawing and are attentive to details of human anatomy. Nonetheless, even in these early studies, Seurat’s eye focuses on shadow and the play of light. He renders musculature and volume through zones of dense shadows, and highlights the curvature of his model’s brow with areas completely absent of pencil work.

In the drawings that date from after Seurat’s time at the Ecole, his attention to shadow and light intensifies. Seurat’s drawings evolve in a style that expresses the atmosphere of the Parisian cityscape he studies. The media Seurat uses lend themselves to the suggestive atmosphere that he captures in many of his drawings and sketches. The exhibit goes to great efforts to correlate Seurat’s draftsmanship and Pointillism. Many of the drawings on display are paired with curatorial notes and explanations that describe Seurat’s particular method of drawing. Although the amount of information on the technical aspects of Seurat’s drawing is at times overwhelming, the importance the exhibit places on his tools and medium explain the evolution of Seurat’s singular style.

The density of the black, charcoal Conté crayon allows Seurat to model his figures through light and shadow. In his drawing My Mother Knitting, Seurat takes advantage of the thick solidity of the Conté crayon’s lines. With the crayon, Seurat gives his figures a sense of volume. The contrast of the velvety darkness of his mother’s hair against the milky purity of her cheekbone gives her a soft and subtly tangible presence. Again he shades from dark to light to illustrate his mother’s nimble fingers—her knuckles catch light and contrast with the shadowy recesses between her index finger and thumb. With minimal pencil strokes, Seurat simultaneously grasps his figure’s shape and form and dramatizes the interplay of light and shadow. Forgoing linearity for tonality, Seurat simplifies his figures.

Seurat uses his materials to their full effect in his landscape drawings of Paris and its environs. In many of his drawings, Seurat focuses on the Zone, a wasteland caught between the cosmopolitan city and the more rural suburbs beyond. He captures the desolation and griminess of the Zone with richness of the Conté crayon and the rippling effect it has on corrugated paper. In Railway Tracks, Seurat renders the sky bleak and suggests smog with hazy strokes of his crayon. Eerily reminiscent of both factory smoke stacks and barren tree trunks, electric poles punctuate the empty colorless sky.

The ridges of the machillet paper catch the strokes of Seurat’s crayon. At once this scene is an image of loneliness and of the excess of modern culture. The dark railroad tracks trail off into the dissipated emptiness of the dark background and question the deterioration of nature at the hands of industrialization.

The ambiguous atmosphere Seurat creates in Railway Tracks and other drawings of urban expansion and industrialization carries over to his later studies. Seurat draws figures without clear lines of delineation or circumscription, yet they have a definite presence. In Night Stroll, Seurat immerses the central female figure in an atmosphere of shadows. Her dark, serpentine silhouette dominates the lower register of the drawing, enticing the viewer. Contrasting light and dark, Seurat dapples her contours with moonlight and envelops her figure with an irradiation of white light. Behind her emanating glow, murky spectral figures dissolve into the background, as if they are communing with the night. Seurat illustrates the fine mist of night descending upon these figures with powdery strokes of his charcoal. In Night Stroll, Seurat uses the moon to create a surreal atmosphere, both luminous and absent of light at once.

The exhibition ends with Seurat’s sketches for his large scale oil paintings. At first, it is difficult to translate Seurat’s style as a drawer, limited to the black of his charcoal and the white negative space of his paper, to his style as a painter. Sunday on the Grande Jatte showcases pointillism and prompts an examination of Seurat’s use of color.

Seurat layers flecks of basic colors, like greens and blues, to create a wide range of tones. This technique provides Seurat not only with richer shades of greens, but also gives his shades the shimmering quality of color in light.

After viewing this exhibit, however, what is most notable in Seurat’s paintings is not how he blends colors, but how he creates a palpable sense of atmosphere with his colors. Seurat focuses on zones of light and dark to set the tone of his scenes. In his paintings, Seurat manipulates the intensity of colors to bathe his figures in light and shadow and draw attention to them. In paintings like Sunday on the Grand Jatte, Seurat illuminates a sun-swathed atmosphere that seems to emanate from the figures occupying the scene.