Seurat

 

Georges Seurat is most famous by far for his great pointillist paintings, morphing from out of Impressionism, but great as they are, on the human level the figures therein tend to resemble statues more than living beings with real inner lives - though with the vital point being this parade of unreality is an intentional and natural outpouring of Seurat’s spirit rather than in some sense an artistic deficiency in his expression. I find it is maybe his drawings are the more interesting and intimate of his output, where Seurat as a feeling being living in the moment is more alive and present, and here this sense of spirit struggling to maintain reality within a modernising world is more nakedly obvious rather than masked and maybe normalised as it is by the monumentality of his paintings - and where focus tends to be put on the technical aspects of the art. What I’m talking about especially obvious with this drawing below, Child in White, and where never mind the spirit, even the physicality of the person is all but gone.