Circus Sideshow

 

Just to follow on from the short piece on Seurat, where I said I preferred his drawings as there was a greater spirit of reality to them - and there is a very unique depth and mystery of being to some of those works. To help with the point, this above a painting, and though actually given the colours are so muted I could have picked much more obvious examples but I prefer this to most of them so I picked this one! But anyway, it’s obviously brilliant and all very elegantly put together, but that’s much of the problem where Seurat’s psychological desire for order demands such mathematical elegance at the expense of freedom. And though the painting has something of that Seurat sense of physical reality emerging out of/ dissolving back into mysterious nothingness, still ultimately Seurat’s personality has imposed itself to create far more a world of stylised unreality by striking contrast to the sense of naked mystery in the previous two posts of his drawings.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s exactly the unusual dynamic at play with Seurat: his psychological mind desiring a solidity to reality - hence all the mathematical elegance - amidst this sense of mystery and uncertainty which he so uniquely manifested. And for example, in this painting above there is no real sense of living people with inner lives here. Inner lives are again freedom and mystery, whereas carefully placing these pictorial representations of physical objects in a highly ordered space offers the illusion of a victory over all this mind-defying mystery. He needed to commit more to the spirit and find truth there, but instead unconsciously he tried to back off and commit more to the physical - and at the living spirit’s expense.

The Port of Honfleur

Georges Seurat, 1886. There is a kind of stylised unreality to Seurat’s paintings, and for me in general it is his drawings that are more interesting and infused with being or spirit. The paintings, studiously and carefully created, are more prisoners of Seurat’s personality, his intellectual inclinations and so on, whilst the presumably much more immediate nature of the drawings’ creation allow them a greater freedom from those kind of psychological confines.

Ploughing

 

By Georges Seurat, 1882-83.

Lighthouse at Honfleur

 

By Georges Seurat, Summer 1886.

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.