MUSEUMS AND EXHIBITIONS REVIEWS
The Must See Exhibitions
From
Delacroix to Matisse: Drawings from the Algiers Museum of Art
After
a year of military service at Brest, Seurat exhibited his drawing Aman-Jean
at the official Salon in 1883. Panels from his painting Bathing at Asnieres
were refused by the Salon the next year, so Seurat and several other artists
founded the Societe des Artistes Independants. His famous canvas Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte
was
the centerpiece of an exhibition in 1886. By then Seurat was spending his
winters in Paris, drawing and producing one large painting each year, and
his summers on France's northern coast. In his short life Seurat produced
seven monumental paintings, 60 smaller ones, drawings, and sketchbooks. He
kept his private life very secret, and not until his sudden death in Paris
on March 29, 1891, did his friends learn of his mistress, who was the model
for his painting Young Woman Holding a Poweder Puff.
UNE
BAIGNADE
Photo, above: Painting of The Lighthouse at Honfleur, 1886 by Georges Seurat. (210 Kb); Oil on canvas, 66.7 x 81.9 cm (26 1/4 x 32 1/4 inches).
Painted in the same year as Pissarro's The Pork Butcher, Seurat's first large picture shows in contrast the monumental sense of form which complemented the method (still in process of development) of dividing color. This was a move away from Impressionism though there is an Impressionist atmosphere in the landscape background with the river distance, the Courbevoie bridge and the smoking factory chimneys of the industrial Paris suburb of Asnières. In Impressionist fashion also he made a number of small oil sketches from which the final composition was derived. The sketches have the character that belongs to work carried out on the spot. Asnières was to Seurat and his friend Signac what Argenteuil had been to Monet and Renoir. The Seine and its boats offered a like attraction; the bridge at Courbevoie and the island of the Grande Jatte, seen across the river from the bathing-place on the right, were also to furnish material for magnificent pictures. Une Baignade is a whole collection of Seurat's motifs---and a truly remarkable work for a young man of twenty-four. The kinship with Piero della Francesca that has often been remarked is distinct in the ordered rhythm of design and the firmly simplified contours. The feeling of repose is heightened by the lateral directions of figures, stylized shadows and river bank. The picture was exhibited at the first Salon des Indépendants in 1884 and in 1886 was one of the `Works in Oil and Pastel by the Impressionists of Paris' exhibited by Durand-Ruel at the National Academy of Design in New York. Too original to find immediate favor either in Paris or New York, it received harsh criticism. The critic in an American paper who described this painting as the product of `a vulgar, coarse and commonplace mind' seems with every epithet to present the exact opposite opinion to that with which the work is regarded now.
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