Hand of Poussin

Hand of Poussin
1875-77

Drawings and oil studies by Georges Seurat (1859-1891). Created in Paris, these artifacts made numerous separate migrations during the course of the all-too-unstable 20th century. Their common present fate unites them in the city of New York – some at the Metropolitan Museum, others at the Morgan Library.

Approach to a Bridge
1886

Peasants
1881-84

Landscape with Houses
1881-82

Fishing
1884

Monkey
1884

Circus Sideshow at Night
1887-88

Gray Weather, La Grande Jatte
1886-88

Forest at Pontaubert
1881

Four Sketches

Four little things made in the open air of the 19th century by Georges Seurat, who died of a fever in Paris at age 31.

Reconstructing Seurat

After making dozens of drawings and sketches to prepare himself, Georges Seurat painted Une Baignade, Asnières in 1884. This large summer landscape with figures was rejected by the Paris Salon as incomprehensibly Impressionistic. The artist was 24. Today the picture is a universal object of worship in London at the National Gallery.

In 2004 Michael Craig-Martin made Reconstructing Seurat (Orange) and Reconstructing Seurat (Purple). For this project, Craig-Martin  imported the splendid and jarring color-vocabulary of poster-maker Peter Max, a young artist (like Seurat, but eighty years later) who gained fame and fortune instantaneously (instead of scorn) but who is now only remembered as a footnote to the Sixties.

The postmodern rag bag often involves a trick like this, selecting recognizable elements from two distinct art-historic moments and then tossing them together to produce a more-or-less fresh-looking quilt.

Sunlight

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917)

Interior at Menil-Hubert, 1892

The sunlight falling into this room as rendered by Degas more than a century ago seems to possess exactly the same clear golden quality as the October sunlight falling on San Francisco today. The Degas painting was part of large show earlier this year at the Albertina in Vienna. A few of the other light-filled pictures from that exhibition appear below.

Alfred Sisley (British, 1839-1899)

Bridge at Hampton Court, 1874

Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883)

Bunch of Asparagus, 1880

Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848–1894)

Laundry Drying on the Bank of the Seine, ca. 1892

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917)

After the Bath, ca. 1893

Albert Besnard (French, 1849-1934)

A Meadow in the Park in Calais, 1890

Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891)

Figure in a Landscape at Barbizon, ca. 1882

Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883)

Portrait of Jeanne Duval, 1862

Paul Signac (French, 1863-1935)

Capo di Noli, 1898

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

View of Vétheuil, 1881

Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906)

Portrait of a Farmer, 1905-06

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919)

Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, 1875-76

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)

Street Scene in Montmarte - Le Moulin de Poivre, 1887

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917)

Two Dancers, ca. 1905

Image source is here.

Seurat Sketches

Image source is here.

Swope

I came across this Martha Swope photograph from 1963. George Balanchine is working with one of his relatively early muses, Diana Adams, while Jacques d'Amboise gravely observes the mirror-image of what he will be expected to do.

This, by the way, was the standard ballerina figure up through the 1960s. But from the Seventies onwards (and in no small part through Balanchine's influence) the standard ballerina became at least 20 pounds thinner. I have noticed in the recent wave of fresh adulation over Balanchine that nobody has mentioned his once-famous words to all his women dancers: "Don't eat."


Balanchine in Venice at age 22 when he was dancing with the Ballet Russes under Diaghilev, who also commissioned Balanchine's first choreography.

According to Vera Zorina (married to Balanchine from 1938 to 1946): "He admired physical beauty in an abstract form the way one might admire a painting by Seurat in terms of pointillism. He would discuss the particular tilt of the neck, those slender, fragile-looking stems actually having the strength of steel, as the "Maryinsky look" – after the famous school of ballet in St. Petersburg. This look, together with the upturned wrist like a fly-away bird, marked the dancer as an unmistakable Balanchine ballerina."

Seurat

Portrait of Georges Seurat (ca. 1882-83) by his fellow artist Edmond Aman-Jean (1860-1936).


This version of Stone Breakers is maybe my single favorite painting by Georges Seurat, if I were forced at gunpoint to name just one.






I like to think this last image is another portrait of Seurat, drawn by himself, surrounded by light reflecting upward from an implied but unseen river.