Week Twenty-Two | Seurat & the Purpose of Drawing
“People say they see poetry in my paintings. I see only science”
-Georges Seurat
My parents came to visit recently and with some impatience they unceremoniously deposited several rather mouldy looking boxes in my hallway and announced that this was, at last, the final boxes of my old stuff still in their house. I internally groaned thinking the last thing I want as the renovation starts is more difficult stuff to sift through and probably throw away. Amidst lots of ancient Bon Jovi tapes, letters to friends I’ve long since lost touch with, one of the boxes contained a fascinating journey into my Fine Art and History of Art undergraduate degree, which I do not at all recall was substantially about drawing. I pulled out an old essay titled ‘The Purpose of Drawing - Georges Seurat’. Well to use one of my Dad’s phrases, you could have knocked me down with a feather. I have only recently been looking at the drawings of Seurat in the context of the Research paper and saw several of his works in the Courthauld Institute in London over Easter. I’m amazed at how I seem to be stuck on the same things I was 30 years ago and even more incredulous am I that I don’t even remember learning about all of this before.
The purpose of drawing, indeed. I have been asked recently what the difference between drawing and painting is and I feel increasingly that drawing has its primary foundation in understanding. Any distinction around pencils and paper or wet paint seem just too fraught with exceptions and the purpose seems truly to be more nuanced, more instinctive. I believe we draw in order to understand, but I don’t think that’s necessarily central to painting. Seurat’s drawings are refined, polished, very finished. They are entire observations, which although I don’t think is necessary in a drawing, they do show a complete and exhaustive investigation of the subject. Seurat was famous for the invention of the pointilist technique of painting but I believe the mastery of his vision may be found in his drawings.
Seurat understood evocation as well as observation and his mysterious, moody drawings in conté crayon are atmospheric and melancholic. There is also a stillness. The light is often luminous and Godly, the marks seem to vibrate with potential energy. Layers of scribbly lines and hazy smudges create a portal into another world that feels human, urban and yet also deeply rooted in the natural landscape. Seurat seemed to truly understand a physicality of place with his blackest of blacks and illuminated spaces amidst his drawn landscapes.
A few points raised by my former self:
‘The Purpose of Drawing - a Comparison of ‘The Peasant: Patience Escalier by Vincent van Gogh and ‘L’Appel’ by Georges Seurat’
Drawings were not exhibited at the time and so afforded a more intimate opportunity to investigate the sensibilities of the artist. Today drawings are more likely exhibited but may offer intimacy still
Seurat saw drawings as whole works with a direct line of communication into his paintings, unlike van Gogh’s where drawing had a more elevated status than was common at the time but drawing seemed to have an investigative impetus unto itself
Drawing-painting dialectic: in the case of van Gogh - drawings that are independent of paintings; drawings with shared motifs and similar subject but remaining somewhat distinct; drawings that were made for and in preparation for paintings; drawings that were made after the painting. In the case of Seurat - drawings supported paintings but remained whole, independent works.
Seurat ‘drew from the middle outwards’
Social criticism by both artists but a somewhat neutral, ‘withdrawn proximity’ of Seurat entirely different to van Gogh’s tacit but actively emotional connection with his ‘peasant’ subjects
Seurat’s light-dark continuum: dissolved spaces ‘the tonality and formlessness allowed Seurat to realise his strong feeling for the “degradation of our era of transition” and evoke the lost condition of the urban poor in an inhuman, industrial wasteland’
Comment on the sense of pathos in the physical location and human anonymity of Seurat’s suburban subculture where “the beauty of a landscape is made of melancholy”
Seurat’s ‘withdrawn proximity’ in his drawings reflects a physical closeness with a social and emotional distance
Convention of drawing had previously been that the basic act of drawings is to make lines: Seurat rejected the idea of a delineation of object and context. Seurat’s drawings became ‘unbroken transitions’ that dissolved objects and spaces.
