Georges Seurat, 1859–1891 - Softcover

Herbert, Robert L.; Cachin, Francoise; Distel, Anne; Stein, Susan Alyson; Tinterow, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300199880 ISBN 13: 9780300199888

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013

Synopsis

To mark the centenary of Georges Seurat's death in 1891, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Musée d'Orsay and The Metropolitan Museum of Art organized a landmark retrospective, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, which will be seen on both sides of the Atlantic. In this exhibition and publication, such masterpieces as Parade de cirque, Cirque, and Jeune femme se poudrant, and an extraordinary group of seascapes testify to Seurat's pictorial ambitions. His splendid drawings in conté crayon place him, with Ingres, among the greatest draftsmen of the nineteenth century. These sheets and the beautiful series of small paintings on wood―his croquetons (little sketches)―give a more intimate view of Seurat. A large number of works are exhibited together for the first time, thanks to the generosity of private collectors.

This publication is meant to stimulate a fresh view of Seurat as well as to display his work. A century after Seurat's death, we are now able to correct some of the myths that grew up around him. Because he died at the age of thirty-one, he was long believed to have produced only a few pictures and to have died of consumption or some other frailty (so tenacious is the romantic paradigm of an early death). To the contrary, he was tall for his era (five feet, nine and one-half inches), and his friends always described him as being robust, but he ultimately succumbed to an epidemic of virulent diphtheria. As for his productivity, from his one decade of maturity there survive six huge canvases and sixty smaller ones, about 170 wood panels, 230 completed drawings, and fourty-five studies or fragmentary drawings, among other works. Harder to overcome than the myth of a frail, unproductive artist is the idea that Seurat's work was all but abstract, that the heart of his art lay not in his subjects but in his geometric compositions which presented summary types rather than individual humans. This book contests that Seurat's types are not "abstract"―that they are not the residue of a purely formal instinct but are brilliant visual distillations of psychological and social meanings. [This book was originally published in 1991 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

About this title

About the Author

Robert L. Herbert is Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Mount Holyoke College. Among his publications are "Seurat's Drawings "(1962), "Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society "(1988), "Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting "(1994), "Nature's Workshop: Renoir's Writings on the Decorative Arts "(2000), and "Seurat: Drawings and Paintings "(2001). Neil Harris is Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Among his publications is "Chicago's Dream, a World's Treasure: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1893-1993 "(1993).

From Publishers Weekly

This extraordinary volume presents a Seurat far more fascinating and complex than the standard image of the coolly scientific dot painter of picnickers and circuses. Cataloguing a large retrospective now at New York's Metropolitan Museum on the centenary of the artist's death, the book gives us a Seurat of many moods and styles. His drawings include powerful naturalistic pictures of laborers, as well as shadowy, mystical portraits and symbolic landscapes suggestive of Odilon Redon. His meditative seascapes suggest a spiritual cleansing, and the solitary figures on dusky streets prefigure the modern age of urban atomization. Seurat mocked commercialized big-city entertainment with his puppetlike figures. His rarely seen female nudes bring impetuosity and freshness to a classic theme. The reproductions are superb. The text, written by Herbert ( Seurat's Drawings ) in collaboration with scholars from the Met and the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, intertwines the life and work of the enormously prolific artist who died at the age of 31.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300199880
• ISBN 13: 9780300199888
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 460