In Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim catches something of what makes Georges Seurat so brilliant – not just his technical flair, but his engagement with ordinary life. Sondheim has Seurat sing, or rather woof, a little duet between two dogs meeting on the island of La Grande Jatte; later, Sondheim gives Seurat a pointillist melody as he works, crotchet-dabs of blue, blue, blue, red, red… Seurat’s muse, meanwhile, is called Dot.
Seeing the National Gallery’s somewhat overloaded presentation made me long for the light touch of Sondheim. There are wonders here, and it is a great coup for the National Gallery to have drawn these 50-odd works together from collections all over the world, and made them into a brilliantly coherent whole; it is just a pity that the textual commentary runs to so many words without ever quite saying enough.
The first information board gives us, like an encouraging school teacher, science. ‘Seurat and the movement’s early adopters such as Paul Signac believed these separate dots of pure colour would fuse in the eye.’ Sounds painful. But we know what they mean.
The artists themselves didn’t like the term ‘pointillism’, preferring ‘chromoluminarism’ or ‘divisionism’. Presumably they liked ‘les bubonistes’ even less, a nickname that teased them for the rash-like surface of their canvases. Of course, this handmade, stippled quality is part of what makes them so attractive now. In this age of digital reproduction, they remain essential viewing in person. You hover, up-close, beside the busy, repetitive brushstrokes, and then find yourself reversing, still staring at the canvas, watching for the moment the marks cohere into shimmering shapes, while attempting not to crash into other people.
It is incredibly moving to look closely at Van Gogh’s ‘The Sower’ (1888) with its churning, clodded earth, its Mithraic sun. The masterworks here – by Pissarro, Van Gogh and Seurat – are given context by the lesser paintings, which are interesting, too. Theo Van Rysselberghe, Jan Toorop, Anna Boch, Maximilien Luce, Henri-Edmond Cross and Henry van de Velde are all given enough space to make an impact. The curators prefer to see these artists as individuals, and to differentiate them, which is scrupulous, but slightly overwhelming.
These pointillist paintings remain essential viewing in person
Although we tend to think of pointillism as lyrical, some of the artists had avowedly anarchist politics, hence the ‘radical’ of the show’s title. Luce was even imprisoned, briefly (and wrongly, we hope), after the assassination of Sadi Carnot. The new vision of pointillism allowed a reset on what could be considered beautiful: factories shining on the water, striking workers at sunset, the musty morning atmosphere of a neat attic bedroom where a labourer is putting on his shoes. Paul Signac’s ‘In the Time ofHarmony: The Golden Age Has Not Passed, It Is Still To Come’ (1893-95) shows happyworkers lying about eating figs made of red and blue dots.
But Seurat, the greatest of the pointillists, was looking instead at the follies. Seurat’s ‘Le Chahut’ (1889-90) is here, radiating celebrity. It rarely travels. The title means commotion, or can-can, and it has a soufflé quality, as if a million grains of fluff had assembled themselves into a mirage of a nightclub. It’s essentially a virtuosic poster, designed to tease; the dancers have their backs to us so we can’t see up their flaring skirts, and in our disappointed looking we become the creepy mac-wearing man in the bottom right-hand corner, the leering voyeur. It was prized by the collector Helene Kröller-Müller, who used to have it hanging above her chaise-longue.
Kröller-Mülller inherited coal, married steel and went into shipping. She bought a lot of pictures between 1908 and 1929, her bounty just too late for Van Gogh and Seurat, who had already died, although her support for Signac and Luce was important during their lifetimes. Thirty-five of the canvases here were purchased by her and have come on a rare holiday from the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, where they usually reside in the middle of a national park near Otterlo. She had originally wanted to build a mega-museum there, featuring a grand monument to Nietzsche, but in 1929 the money ran out, leaving creditors and a small railway to nothing.
Still, a museum was eventually built and her care for her collection was a great legacy to the world. It is an odd moment, then, when Luce’s ‘The Iron Foundry’ (1899), a powerful vision of flame and toil, is captioned thus: ‘It was without any apparent sense of irony that for many years it hung in the office of her husband Anton Kröller, who ran the family’s iron ore and shipping business.’ Presumably it was there because Kröller felt proud of the work his men were doing. The snarky tone seems inappropriate.
There is far too much waffly description of the paintings, and many questions aren’t asked, let alone answered. What are we to make of the fact that pointillism and the advent of photography coincided? Isn’t it, in a sense, pixelation? Was there a link with the advancements in colour printing?
I leave thinking of Sondheim, who seems to have noticed so much more about Seurat, and humming under my breath, ‘Art isn’t easy…’
Comments