The Brooklyn Rail

To get to Seurat and the Sea you must first pass through a rousing visual symphony courtesy of the gallery housing the Courtauld’s Impressionist masterpieces. This provides a perfect foil for an artist who saw which way the prevailing artistic winds were blowing and instead decided to strike out on his own. Stepping into the exhibition, you feel a marked shift as acute as the change felt when entering an empty church from a bustling city street. The frenetic energy, the “instinct and inspiration,” as Paul Signac described Impressionism in 1899, is vanquished and in its place reigns a contemplative solemnity; Neo-Impressionism was, in Signac’s view, “methodical and scientific.”

Since his sudden death at the age of thirty-one, Seurat has become indelible to the architecture of modern art history. But an unintended consequence of this has been that his oeuvre has been prohibitively upstaged by his large-scale paintings Bathers at Asnières (1884) and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86), now considered to be two cornerstones of the movement. This goes some way to explaining why his “marines,” as his seascapes of northern France are referred to, which account for over half his known painted oeuvre, have never had a dedicated exhibition until now.

On light gray walls spanning two small adjoining galleries, the twenty-six paintings, oil sketches, and drawings that make up the exhibition glimmer softly like jewels. The curation follows a chronological order charting Seurat's subtle and incremental artistic evolution as he refined chromoluminarism, as he preferred his technique to be called, or pointillism, as his critics denigrated it. But his marines should not be viewed as conventional seascapes. First and foremost, they are experimental pursuits in capturing the effects of light in a way never seen before, for which the atmospheric conditions of the northern coasts of France were the optimal vehicle.

It begins in 1885, with Seurat’s first visit to Grandcamp, where his brushwork is composed of short dashes and elongated crosses, probing beyond the constraints of his academic education and the painterly traits of Impressionism. It ends in 1890, in Gravelines, a year before his untimely death. Here, he uses precisely arranged dots of pure colour that, when viewed from a certain distance and juxtaposed by complementary colours, merge in the viewer’s eye in what is known as “optical mixture” or “optical fusion,” becoming even more luminous and resplendent. This approach was greatly informed by contemporary writings on optical science and colour theory by the likes of Charles Blanc and Michel Eugène Chevreul, among others.

Illustrating the breadth of this evolution in one work is Le Bec du Hoc (1885). It is named for the beak-like rock formation in the center of the composition. The initial landscape is rendered in a fluid fashion with horizontal marks tightly packed together like schools of fish. The result is flat and lifeless, but not without potential. This is evidenced by the thin border constructed of dark blue, orange, and red dots Seurat painted around the outer edge of the work later on. As a pictorial device, this border, which he retroactively added and built into many of his works, allows for a more keenly felt optical mixture to take place. It also refocuses our attention on his application of paint rather than, as it would have been without it in Le Bec du Hoc, pushing us to try and glean a narrative or symbolism from the conventional landscape presented to us. By the time Seurat painted The Semaphores and the Cliff (1888), it is clear that he had worked out most of the kinks. The work is constructed predominantly through dots, with some longer dashes and a border device, all working harmoniously to create a spectacular and dynamic image that verges on transcendent. It is Seurat arguably reaching an artistic zenith, showcasing the full potential of his new method of painting.

Unlike his marines, which were more often than not celebrated during his lifetime, a common criticism of Seurat’s larger figural works, which he would make in the winter months in Paris, was that they were stiff and lifeless. A fantastic example of this body of work, Young Woman Powdering Herself (1888–90), hangs next to the entrance of the exhibition. Having this comparison so close by allows for a fascinating cross-examination. There is an intriguing overlap with some of the works in the exhibition where Seurat incorporates figures and other objects. Today, with the benefit of understanding how modern painting evolved during the twentieth century, we have a greater capacity for appreciating Seurat’s inventiveness. Port-en-Bessin – The Bridge and Quays (1888) and Port-en-Bessin, a Sunday (1888) are arguably some of the strongest works on view because of it. Their relative stiffness and the strangeness this evokes indirectly anticipates a movement like Surrealism—particularly an artist like Giorgio de Chirico or even to something further removed such as Edward Hopper’s psychologically loaded landscapes—while his reduction of flags, sailboats, figures, and architectural and geographical features to geometric forms suggests Cubist painting, most excitingly in La Maria, Honfleur (1886). 

But it is the inclusion of three Conté drawings that steal the show. Across the drawings, the highly textured surface of the Michallet Ingres paper provided fertile ground for Seurat to exploit the depth of black and tonal possibilities of the Conté crayon, while white dots of negative space where the crayon hasn’t taken radiate. These characteristics richly echo his approach to painting. But each drawing contains something rarely found in the paintings: atmosphere. In particular, The Port of Honfleur (1886), reunited with its painted counterpart for the first time since 1891, possesses a highly seductive, film-noir–like gravitas, an entire cinematic experience condensed into a single image. As Seurat’s drawings tend to do, it holds our attention and stimulates our imagination in ways the painting can’t.