Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Georges-Pierre Seurat
French; 19th-century
Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art
91%
Port-en-Bessin. 1888. Oil on canvas
There's an odd little swaying painted border, broken and thin, that wraps around this scene. Its bottom edge is dots and dashes, just like the bottom edge of the bridge just above it; the dark hues in the picture's sky and in its house windows and in the clothes its people are wearing find a rhyme, as well, in the border's purple pigments. It seems like the whole scene is reducible to, expressed through, that painted border, but then again that can't be the case. There's something to the way the sand of the beach gleams, for instance, and to how that gleam is echoed by the clouds above, that the border has nothing to do with. There's something, too, to the blockish climb of the hills in middle distance that isn't contained by the painting's painted edge. But then again, literally, it is — it all is. It's hard to talk about the beauty of Seurat's paintings, which is on its face a small and a limiting beauty, without growing vague, almost mystical. But he makes, with his dots, the interconnectedness of all things seem obvious, inevitable — and then, with a wavering rectangle made up of those very same dots, he closes that inevitability off from the rest of its world. Seurat is what pictures are. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art
90%
Evening, Honfleur. 1886. Oil on canvas with painted wood frame
The appeal of pointillism lies in the way its additive technique can bring disconnected areas of a picture into intimate, uncanny connection with each other; it achieves this through its sprinkling of nonlocal colors all over the surface of the canvas. Seurat's brilliance lies in his ability to enhance this effect by introducing strange sympathies of form, in addition to strange sympathies of color, throughout his canvases. For instance: the arc of ocean in this picture's lower right corner, which echoes the clouds above in its shape while its few errant spots of purple and blue also recall the hues of the sky. Or, the rock at canvas right, which shares reds with the foliage at far left as well as a jutting vertical orientation with the boardwalk beside it. These combinations and recollections occur at all levels of Seurat's painting, such that the artwork appears infinitely nested within itself, infinitely emerging from its own depths. The colored frame enhances and expands this effect. Its shift in tone from dark lower left to bright upper right recalls the grading of the painting as a whole, but wherever edge of frame meets edge of image there's tension, a failure to gibe. Yet the seascape's horizon line, with its perfect horizontality, finds a rhyme in the squareness of the frame. (TFS, 2025)
Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum
86%
Le Chahut. 1889-90. Oil on canvas
The painted border does less than similar borders in other Seurats to activate weird recesses of the image by chromatic affinity. This is because it's too boldly and uniformly blue, and so it manages to converse only with the scene's blue and purply shadows, which, however numerous, are fairly cordoned off from, and so play second fiddle to, its many freely dispersed vibrations of gold. Apart from this minor failure of its frame, the painting is exquisite. The back of the bass player at the very front of the scene forces the predominantly light and popping rest of the picture into depth, while also ushering its shy receding dark tones toward the surface. This causes a sort of continuous flinging backwards and forwards within the very bones of the image, energized by the composition's density but grounded by the clinical uniformity of Seurat's million dots. That's almost a general description of Seurat's method, though it doesn't sufficiently touch on the dots' tendency to tear apart the picture's surface as much as they stitch it together. (TFS, 2026)
Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay
73%
Poseuse debout, de face. 1886. Oil on canvas
This is a study, so it ought not be run through the wringer. There's some inelegance to its pointillism, which is the result of the work's schematic nature. The blue umbra around the figure, for instance, is a little domineering, a little clunky in the way it infiltrates the figure's body, but the fat strokes and free application add in some verve that Seurat's much more finely tuned opuses lack. There's an atypically definitive figure-ground distinction, as well, which precludes this painting from achieving the quantum complexity of the main canvases, but which also allowed Seurat to decorate its surface more openly than usual. The jewelled periwinkle eyeballs are a bit much, but the way they interact with the blue accents near the hands and under the arms is mystifying. (TFS, 2026)