provides a treasure trove of practical techniques and ingenious approaches. In this captivating guide, noted artist
Jane Freeman shows readers, step by step, how to use modified kit components, and found and handmade objects to create intensely detailed miniature constructions.
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November 5, 2007
Que Seurat Seurat
At the beginning of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, in the voice of Miss Toklas, writes: “I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken. . .” * When I stand in front of artworks of indubitable genius, I have my own telltale signs, which are as reliable as Alice’s bells: a prickle behind the eyes, a tickle in the throat, quickened breath. Such was my response upon seeing Seurat’s drawings last Friday at the Museum of Modern Art. On the sixth floor of the museum, far above an installation of colossal, aggressively gesticulating sculptures dangling in the museum’s rarefied air, was an intimate gallery of rooms full of Seurats. I’ve had a book of Seurat drawings by Robert L. Herbert since I was 13, and have always preferred them to the famous Pointillist paintings. Most of those mysterious conte crayon drawings in my book were now hanging on the walls in front of me, along with a number of small (about 6” x 9 or 10”), brilliant oil studies on wood. Seurat is surely a master of the grisaille range from velvety blacks to luminous whites. The pictures are at once weighty and ineffable, and seem to emerge from the paper like a scene glimpsed through half-closed eyes, or out of a half-remembered dream, when half indicates the whole, when less, as the modernists say, is more. One stunner is “Courbevoie, Factories by Moonlight” (1882-83), a near abstraction: black line, white circle, dark rectangle anchored by grays. The “facts” of a stack, a moon, a building, chimney smoke and landscape register more or less subliminally and throb with impact. Here’s how reduction resonates with truth more eloquently than does an accurate record of literal narrative detail; here is how poetry beggars prose as the far more qualitatively Real.
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*For the curious, these are Gertrude Stein [first on the list], Pablo Picasso, and Alfred [North] Whitehead.
Posted by Jane on November 5, 2007 2:42 PM
