Volume 55, Number 1 · January 17, 2008
Nocturnes
By John Updike
Georges Seurat: The Drawings
Catalog of the exhibition by Jodi Hauptman, with essays by Karl Buchberg, Hubert Damisch, Bridget Riley, Richard Shiff, and Richard Thomson
an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,October 28, 2007–January 7, 2008.
Museum of Modern Art, 269 pp., $49.95
Impressionism, our impression is, proceeded by instinct, its stabs of high color pursuing what the eyes of Monet and Renoir and Pissarro and Sisley found in the open air, as sunlight's spectrum flitted across the sight of haystacks, poppy-dotted fields, and rippled water. Analysis was left to Postimpressionism, whose varied masters, with a greater or lesser degree of programmatic determination, put forward terms for their own art and the art of the future. Neither Cézanne nor Van Gogh was more resolutely theoretical than Georges Seurat. Born in 1859 and dead at the age of thirty-one, in 1891, Seurat was temperamentally taciturn—Pissarro called him 'mute'—and confided a statement of his theories to paper only once, in an unsent three-page letter of August 28, 1890, in response to queries from the critic Maurice Beaubourg.
Review, 2070 words
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