Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Georges-Pierre Seurat
French; 19th-century
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)