Against The Cult of the Moment

By ROBERT HUGHES

In the past decade the American public, mainly in New York City and Washington, has been treated to one of the historic events in the life of the modern museum: the collaboration between U.S. institutions and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux on a series of retrospectives of the great French artists of the 19th century. Edouard Manet in 1983; Vincent van Gogh in 1984 and 1986; Paul Gauguin, Gustave Courbet and Edgar Degas in 1988; Claude Monet in 1990 -- all these, done at the highest pitch of curatorial skill, have redefined the School of Paris for us.

Nor is the sense of exaltation these shows leave behind untinged with regret: one knows that this golden moment of the museum retrospective, flourishing amid the corrosive vulgarity that overtook the American art world in the 1980s, will not return. Its coda, and in some ways its climax, is the show of paintings and drawings by Georges Seurat that, having spent the summer at the Grand Palais in Paris, opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York next week.

Seurat, like Masaccio or Mozart, was a true prodigy. Born in 1859, he succumbed to an attack of galloping diphtheria in 1891, at 31. This all too early death has had the effect of concentrating his life around a single stylistic effort, the invention of pointillism. The one thing everyone knows about Seurat is that he painted rather stiff pictures composed of dots, in the belief that this system of breaking down color into its constituent parts was scientific and not, like Monet's Impressionism, intuitive.

Had he lived as long as Monet, Seurat would have been a hale duffer of 70 when his many heirs, like Mondrian, were coming into their maturity as artists. What would he have left behind him by then? Possibly -- if one can guess from his last big paintings like Chahut, 1889-90, and Cirque, 1890-91 -- something quite different from the calm, composed "Egyptian" classicism of his best-known work, the sublime Un Dimanche a la Grande Jatte of 1884-86. For the last paintings are more frenetic, more consciously urban and, above all, more influenced by mass culture (the posters of Jules Cheret, for instance) and working-class entertainment (fairgrounds, circuses, cafes concerts) than anything he had made before.

We would then remember Seurat not only as a great synthesizer of classical order and modernist perception but also as the artist who fused both with the exacerbated delights of the mass culture that was emerging at the turn of the century: the true "painter of modern life," as anticipated by Baudelaire. The history of modern art, in terms of its engagement with "low" culture, might then have been quite different. Because he died so young, we have the first artist but only hints of the second.

When this show was first mooted, there were doubts. The rarity and fragility of some of Seurat's major paintings meant they could not travel. No Grande Jatte, therefore; no Baignade, Asnieres, 1883-84; no Chahut. Was this like staging Hamlet without the prince? As it turns out, no. Apart from the fact that some works of art should never travel, and deserve the tribute of a pilgrimage, their absence forces one to concentrate on the abundance of others that the curatorial team, headed by Francoise Cachin of the Musee d'Orsay, has assembled.

Here we have the most complete group of Seurat's drawings -- and drawing, for him, was absolutely fundamental -- ever assembled, together with the oil sketches and finished studies for the big works (more than 30 for La Grande Jatte alone); the landscapes of the Ile de France; the exquisite seascapes of Gravelines and Honfleur; and the theater scenes, like the brooding and mysterious frieze of musicians and chattering spectators at the Cirque Corvi known as the Parade de Cirque, 1887-88. In the studies, particularly, one sees Seurat's major ambition working itself out: his conservative but in fact deeply radical desire to reconstruct an art opposed to the Impressionist cult of the moment, his hope of making grand, complex, time-resistant images whose mysterious permanence could take its place beside Greek and Assyrian bas- reliefs or the works of Ingres in the Louvre.

From this body of material, a rather different Seurat emerges from the one we are used to. The "scientific" painter with his abstruse color theories recedes somewhat, and an inspired lyricist comes to the fore -- a 19th century Giorgione. As the art historian Robert L. Herbert puts it in his catalog essay, Seurat "wanted to be perceived as a technician of art, and so he borrowed from science some of the signs of its authority, including regularity and clarity of pattern."

But, as Herbert points out, Seurat's dots are not really dots either. Far from laboring away at a mechanical surface programmed in advance by theories of complementary color, Seurat displayed the most intuitive and mobile sense of the relations between sight and mark. One of the miracles of his art is his ability to analyze light, not through the simple juxtaposition of dabs of color but by a layering of tiny brush marks built up from the underpainted ground, so that the eventual surface becomes a fine-grained pelt, seamless and yet infinitely nuanced, from which captured light slowly radiates.

The tawny blond and blue surfaces of the seascapes, like Le Chenal de Gravelines: Petit-Fort-Philippe, 1890, mediate between solidity (the molecular structure of the skin of paint) and transparency in a way that is unique in 19th century painting, and as a result they can absorb and reward all the contemplation the eye can give them. The port, under its light-suffused spell, its unpeopled high-summer sleep, becomes a subject of reverie but not a fantasy, anchored in the real by such declarative touches as the iron bollard placed dead center in the foreground, yet located in the ideal as well by Seurat's profound attentiveness.

Seurat was a brilliant and highly self-conscious metteur en scene. His landscapes often possess the sense of anticipation one associates with an empty stage. (Hence they were a powerful influence on De Chirico, and on Surrealism generally.) Nowhere is this more piercing than in the large study for the landscape of La Grande Jatte, without its 50 or so people, its monkey and two dogs. The curtain has risen on this green paradise, and the cast will filter on, one at a time, throughout the subsequent studies -- the St.-Cyr cadet, the lady with the monkey but without her attendant gentleman.

All the time Seurat is thinking, editing, adjusting. Throughout his career, his efforts are directed to refracting what he sees through what he knows. He quotes Poussin, Ingres, classical marbles, Han figurines; the boy hollering in the water in Une Baignade, Asnieres was once a classical Triton blowing a conch. But the sources are perfectly absorbed in his pictorial intents. For this reason alone, Seurat was an artist of a kind unimaginable in our own fin de siecle, now that art education has been lobotomized by the excision of formal drawing and the study of prototypes.

The record of Seurat's thought lies as much in his drawings as in his final paintings. He drew on Ingres paper with Conte crayon, a waxy black stick that, stroked over the rough surface, produced a slightly blurred line and deep granular tones -- the equivalent of his intricately speckled surfaces in painting. And he was a great draftsman -- one of the greatest since the Renaissance, worthy, at the top of his form, of being compared to Rembrandt or Goya.

The economy of his means is stunning. Form floats to your eye out of velvety blackness, and each drawing is a record of becoming. Seurat's personages -- friends like the painter Aman-Jean, strangers glimpsed in the street, women with the mannered gravity of Greek kouroi -- have an immense dignity and distance. Watch how a mere lightening of tone on a woman's face in profile, in the studies for La Grande Jatte, records the head's twist toward the light; or how wittily the curve of a little girl's highlighted slouch hat reflects that of her back. Such style, one realizes, is in essence moral. Seurat, one of the wittiest and most logical artists who ever lived, was simply incapable of triviality.