by John Updike
The exhibit of Seurat’s drawings at the Museum of Modern Art gets some welcome color from a few oil studies for paintings and from small photographic reproductions of paintings for which some drawings were preliminary sketches. But the profound and grainy black of Conté crayon is the dominant shade, and four big rooms of it—130 drawings in all—test the gallerygoer’s eyes. The first room’s handsome, precocious student drawings of antique casts and nude models (the superb, soulful Male Nude, Profile of 1877–78; the gnarly, nearly headless Aged Hindu of 1878–79) establish that Seurat began as a disciple of Ingres, with his fine outlines and neoclassic cool. Indeed, Seurat’s drawings persistently aspire to the smooth, grave, impersonal essence of Greek sculpture. He said, “The Panathenians of Phidias formed a procession. I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes.”
By 1880, having completed his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts under Henri Lehmann (a pupil of Ingres) and his year of military service in Brest, Seurat began to draw in a new, theory-driven manner. His linear sketches of fellow-soldiers give way, in Seated Woman (1880–81), to a figure entirely blocked in with diagonal pencil shading, and in Woman with Basket (1881–82) to a figure sketched from behind in Conté crayon, fundamentally dark against the light paper but with some searching linear swirls reminiscent of Daumier’s lithographs. Nude and Nurse and Child (both 1881–82) banish any hint of an outline; figures are defined as they emerge from a dark ground of Conté crayon—swirls of it like a greasy mist. Tree by a Road (1881–82) does away with definition almost entirely—the tree is a blur, the road a double arc of relative pallor—and Landscape with Houses (1881–82) poses its geometric forms beyond a foreground, a good half of the image, almost solidly black. Forms feel carved out of an underlying darkness. The elegant profile Aman-Jean (1882–83)—Seurat’s first publicly displayed drawing, hung at the Salon of 1883—is accomplished in a somewhat conventional range of grays, with a conventional precision, but the contemporaneous heads of his mother, Embroidery and The Artist’s Mother, show how brilliantly for the artist, as the Conté crayon warms in his hand, is willing to go in the direction of minimal linear indication and maximum saturation in black.
From the early 1880s on, Seurat drew almost exclusively on quarter-sheets (roughly nine by twelve inches) of a handmade laid (as opposed to machine-made wove) French paper called Michallet. Consisting of pulp dried on a rectangular frame of fine metal rods, Michallet paper retained, as alternately raised and depressed parallels, the impression of the fine rods, and, at right angles, that of the less close “chain” lines impressed by the wires that kept the rods aligned. Conté crayon, a soft mixture of clay and pulverized graphite or carbon or both, brought up the texture of the paper even when very lightly used, and when applied heavily created a dense black. By these means Seurat achieved a sort of black-and-white Pointillism, a style of rendering that employed minute marks as they accumulated in the viewer’s eye. A phrase of Seurat’s recorded by the Symbolist writer Gustave Kahn can be applied to the drawings as well as the paintings: Seurat spoke to Kahn of “l’art de creuser une surface”—translated, rather fancifully by Richard Shiff in the catalogue, as “the art of fathoming a surface.” Creuser has the basic sense of digging, of excavating. “Hollowing out” a surface is what the drawings do, especially those, like Woman Reading (c. 1882) and Woman with Two Little Girls (1882–84), where a prevalent darkness yields a few pale areas that read as forms in murky space. In Night Stroll (1887–88), which exists in a pen-and-ink version as well as in a stronger Conté-crayon one, a light ground accepts dark blurs that uncannily convey the impression of bodies in a partially occluding and, in the second instance, moonlit atmosphere.
Seurat, Aman-Jean, 1882–83. Conté crayon. (Photo Credit Ill.22)
Seurat’s secretive, crepuscular temperament was drawn to the tawdry area of Paris just outside the walls, called “the Zone,” and to the industrial suburbs—Saint-Denis, Asnières, Courbevoie—“the country of the stinking industries,” as Louis Barron wrote, or, in a phrase of Victor Hugo’s, “the limbos of Paris.” Seurat’s first two major canvases, showing suburbanites enjoying sunny leisure, derive from these limbos, but his drawings, often done during walks in the dusk, show a joyless landscape of railway right-of-ways, factories, and lonely laborers. In Drawbridge (1882–83), the bridge lifts its iron beams like beseeching arms, right off the Michallet paper’s deckled upper edge; in Steamboat (1882–83), the dark vessel looks like a squashed bug on the floor of the pale river. In Wine Tumbril (1882–83), the great wheels of the vehicle can hardly be disentangled from the writhing scribbles of the surrounding gloom. A ragpicker and a tramp (his hat at a jaunty angle as he slumps under a bridge) loom in stark silhouette; such near-total blackouts as Cart with Grazing Horse (c. 1883), Two Wagons (c. 1883), and Rain (1882–83) lead the dutiful viewer to ask himself, somewhere in his long circumnavigation of the second and third rooms, Who was Seurat doing these for? The drawings were not, except for the showpiece Aman-Jean and a few later, picturesque specimens, put on display, or sold. They were done, one must conclude, in a spirit of scientific research—an ongoing experiment in drawing with nothing but masses of shading, thus creuser the paper surface. It is paradoxical that this follower of Ingres, concerned with the laws of optics and of orderly artistic procedure, in practice produced drawings so expressionist in their violent scribbles and nocturnal atmospherics. Some figures, such as those in The Veil (1882–84) and The Lamp (1882–83), approach in their surrealism the charcoals and lithographs of the older French artist Odilon Redon; the landscapes The Edge of the Forest (c. 1883), In a Park (c. 1883), and Tree Trunks Reflected in Water (1883–84) come close to total abstraction. It is a rare scene that, like Place de la Concorde, Winter (1882–83), gives us, in its range of white to black and its illusion of recession, the sense of a space in which we might move and breathe.
Things brighten in the fourth and final room of the exhibition, dominated by drawings preparatory to Seurat’s precious few paintings. His figures were never more statuesque and classically solid than in his studies of naked boys for A Bathing Place, Asnières. Two luminous seascapes—Grandcamp, Evening (1885) and Lighthouse and Mariners’ Home, Honfleur (1886)—illustrate the lessons in tonal contrast that Seurat’s drawing exercises had taught him. A piquant model, one of the three depicted in the painting Poseuses (1886–88), poses in three media—an oil sketch in rough Pointillism, a relatively tender Conté crayon, and an ink-and-pencil outline, lightly stippled. After his chef d’oeuvre, La Grande Jatte, Seurat turned for subject matter to street fairs, music halls, and the circus—a strange turn, since his formalized mature style could hardly have been less suited to animated action. But the democratic instincts that drew him to the Zone and the industrial suburbs relished popular entertainments, and his art included a certain caricatural wit. One wall of the final room holds a series of theatre drawings—At the Concert Européen, High C, Music Hall Scene, At the Gaîté Rochechouart, Café Singer, Eden Concert (all from 1886–88)—that show Seurat willing to vary his medium with chalk and gouache and Gillot paper and to subdue his technique to subject matter. We become interested in what the drawings show as well as how they show it. In these gaslit interiors the performers onstage are seen in a pale haze of illumination while the audience—drolly ovoid heads topped with bowler hats and upswept hairdos—and the agitated orchestra populate a dark foreground. The two clowns described as a study for Parade (1887–88) are faceless and absent from the painting, but the vivid trombonist in its center is even more of a presence in the Conté-crayon drawing.
Seurat, Seated Woman with a Parasol (study for La Grande Jatte), 1884–85. Conté crayon with white chalk. (Photo Credit Ill.23)
It is the figure studies for La Grande Jatte, however, that belong, in their delicacy and radical simplicity, among the masterpieces of modern European drawing. Seated Monkey (1884), in a pose not used in the finished painting, projects a simian esse
nce, a shadow so faintly swiped onto the paper that its grid of distinct laid and chain lines appears the pattern of a costume, a pattern that, in the very slightly darker head, seems to hold an eye and a hint of a frown. Seated Woman with a Parasol (1884–85) is majestic against the paper’s white ground, her hat smaller than in the painting, where she seems rather squat, sprouting from the grass like a colored mushroom; in the drawing she has her full height, and a bosom whose softness is suggested by a blur haloing the crayon’s darkest, most nearly solid black. Young Woman (1884–85), who appears in the painting as a small figure just above the seated woman’s parasol, is even more Brancusi-esque in her streamlined shape, a silhouette so nearly featureless that we marvel at the artistic conscience that preserved this notation and fitted its tiny piece of humanity into the grand mosaic. And Child in White (1884) seems less a representation than an abstraction, with its white rectangle and two trapezoids; but there it is, very near the center of the panorama, those geometric shapes having become the bodice, skirt, and crown of a sun hat worn by a little girl caught up in the enchanted stillness of this Sunday moment—a moment that the young French artist, out to revolutionize the way we paint and draw what we see, froze in time at the threshold of modernism, when the ideals of tranquillity and order could still be thought to rule.
1The estimate of more than eight hundred letters is to be found in Van Gogh, by Rainer Metzger and Ingo F. Walther (Taschen, 2005). This review has drawn repeatedly upon its facts.
2The Australian-born Cooper’s translation was published in Letters to Émile Bernard (Museum of Modern Art, 1938); the complete letters were published in the original by Ambroise Vollard in 1911. The editors of the Morgan Library catalogue—Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker of the Van Gogh Letters Project, at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam—commissioned a new annotated translation by Imogen Forster. All but three of the letters were acquired by the collector Eugene V. Thaw in 2001 and have been promised as a gift to the Morgan.
SECESSIONISTS AND SURREALISTS
Can Genitals Be Beautiful?
EGON SCHIELE: The Leopold Collection, Vienna, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 12, 1997–January 4, 1998.
In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) Freud found the civilized love of beauty something of a puzzle: “All that seems certain is its derivation from the field of sexual feeling. The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim. ‘Beauty’ and ‘attraction’ [the German Reiz means “stimulus” as well as “attraction”] are originally attributes of the sexual object.” And yet, he goes on, “It is worth remarking that the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are nevertheless hardly ever judged to be beautiful; the quality of beauty seems, instead, to attach to certain secondary sexual characteristics.”
Breasts, hips, shoulders, and throat, for instance: in females, a rhythmic soft curvaceousness, and in males an angular hardness, signifying strength. The beautiful nudes of Western art aren’t close-ups. Only in primitive art, with its urgent need to evoke the sources of fertility, are the phallus and the vulva emphasized, as it were, innocently; by ancient Greek and Roman times there already existed the specialized category of the pornographic—graphic art or writing supposed, like a harlot (pornæ), to sexually stimulate. In a compartmentalized society like pre-modern Japan’s, shunga erotica, with its giant genitals and decorous faces, formed a distinct genre, and a district for prostitution could be set aside as a “floating world.” But in a questioning Western world, where the crucifix and the figures of Adam and Eve give the naked body a sacred sanction reinforced, in the Renaissance, by the artistic authority of classical statuary, the genitals awkwardly cling to an artistic humanism whose epitome and measure is the human form. If men and women have sexual parts and a sexual purpose, how can an art of representation suppress them?
Indeed, Leo Steinberg has persuasively proposed, in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983), that from before 1400 to the mid-sixteenth century, European religious art emphasized the genitals of the Infant Jesus and the dead Christ in an ostentatio genitalium that enforced the doctrine of the Divine Incarnation. God became, so to speak, all man. But something, perhaps a sexual puritanism present in both Protestantism and the Counter-Reformation, caused a cloud of fig leaves and gravity-defying loincloths to descend, even upon such splendid works as Michelangelo’s boldly frontal Last Judgment and his statue of the risen Christ in the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. Human male genitals are hard to overlook—harder than those of four-legged animals—whereas those of the female, happily, are tucked out of sight. No incarnational theology ever championed pubic hair, and with its conventional omission a Diana or a Venus as smooth and bland as soap could be displayed in parks and on façades and as decoration in bourgeois homes.
The reassimilation of the genitals into art that could be shown in public galleries and museums has been a relatively recent revolution. In 1917, the Paris police closed an exhibit of Modigliani’s paintings because he insisted on indicating—with a characteristic painterly tact—the pubic hair on his female nudes; in 1912, an Austrian court found Egon Schiele guilty of “distributing obscene drawings” and sentenced him to three days in jail, on top of twenty-one days of pretrial detention. Certain works are on display in Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna, which not many decades ago would have been unthinkable in a public exhibit.
Schiele remains a test case in the moot matter of erotica versus art, the pornographic versus the merely lifelike. He is not the best witness in his own defense: he persuaded adolescent girls, including his younger sister Gerti, to pose for him in positions that thrust their vaginas forward, and he utilized his first long-term lover, Valerie Neuzil (called Wally), and then his petit-bourgeois wife, Edith (née Harms), as models for drawings which were sold to prurient Viennese as hot stuff. His quite explicit Reclining Woman Exposing Herself of 1916 is an impressive instance of wifely submission; at this same time in his life Schiele was, according to rumor, having an affair with Edith’s sister Adele, and was certainly using her as a naked or half-naked model as well—she was “more audacious in her poses,” Magdalena Dabrowski tells us in the exhibition catalogue.
If the litmus test of pornography is that it excite the (typically male) viewer, then Schiele is no pornographer. His nudes, gaunt and splotchy on the whole, make us tense and sad, even though many deserve to be called beautiful. He shares with his fellow-Viennese Freud a dispassionate and rather melancholy sexual realism, with an eye to psychopathology. The genital facts are there, plainly enough, but as checkpoints on a map of anxiety; the figures are feverish not with erotic heat but with the fever of disease. The early nudes, especially, appear emaciated and contorted; there can be felt in Schiele’s work, as in Kafka’s, a progressive normalization, a good humor, relatively speaking, growing from a stark and dire ground. The impression of unhealth is so strong that we must remind ourselves that, though Schiele died young, at the age of twenty-eight, it was not of a wasting disease like that of Keats but, as with Shelley, of a sudden misfortune—in Schiele’s case the great Spanish-flu epidemic, which carried off his wife, who was six months pregnant, three days before his own death on October 31, 1918.
Earlier that year, his mentor and only local equal, Gustav Klimt, had died at age fifty-five, leaving Schiele acknowledged as the premier painter of Austria; his one-man exhibition at the Vienna Secession in March sold out, and, amid the privations of the Great War’s final year, mounting commissions and invitations to exhibit encouraged the painter to expand to a larger studio. In that era’s millions of casualties, his was one of the burgeoning talents poignantly cut down, though it is hard to imagine him sustaining the pace and surpassing the intensity of his youthful production, achieved in the scant ten years from 1909 to 1918.
The scathing morbidity of his early work owes something, of course, to the ferment of Austrian modernism and the emergence of so-called Secession sty
le, the glittering permutation of Art Nouveau and Symbolism epitomized by Klimt’s bejewelled, two-dimensional tableaux. In Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, a generation younger than Klimt, Secession style became Expressionism, distinguished by violent color and a wiry, bony linearity. But the scabrous violence of Schiele’s precocious drawings had personal sources as well; these are described in the fall issue of Museums New York:
The central, traumatizing fact of Egon Schiele’s life was his father’s syphilis, madness and death. The untreated illness pinballed hellishly throughout the family, infecting (and demoralizing) his mother and killing four of his siblings. Egon, already a brooding adolescent, was psychologically seared by the association of sex, insanity and death—and it shows in his brilliant, disturbing art.
