Georges Seurat: The Drawings
Jodi Hauptman, with essays by Karl Buchberg, Hubert Damisch, Bridget Riley, Richard Shiff and Richard Thomson MoMA, $49.95

What could be more counterintuitive than a book on Georges Seurat with no color
in it? The Post-Impressionist’s name has been so indelibly dyed with complementarily colored dots that it is really a shock to open this book and see page after page of black and white. And yet Paul Signac called them "the most beautiful painter’s drawings in existence." Of the 138 drawings here reproduced, recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, some are preparatory sketches for paintings, but many are self-sufficient, and nearly all are powerfully expressive works in their own right. Seurat started his pitifully short career—he died at 31 of meningitis—as a draftsman, and periodically returned to drawing as a way to refresh his artistic practice. For a while, he actually gave up color altogether when he despaired of his ability to solve the optical problems he had posed to himself.

When drawing, Seurat used his medium in a particularly transparent way, and as several essays in this book observe, there is a visual analogy between the effect he got in his drawings and the famous "pointillism" of his mature painting style. (He and Signac preferred to call it Divisionism, a reference to the way colors could be divided up into their components on canvas and optically reunited in the viewer’s eye.)

Seurat was unvarying in his choice of drawing materials: black conté crayon and Michallet paper, a laid variety that clearly shows the grid of lines created by the mold. When the conté glides over the paper, it leaves a grainy pattern behind, which forms a substratum for the image. There are very few hard edges in Seurat’s drawings, and figures seems to blend into and out of the background. Light always emerges from darkness. As Jodi Hauptman points out, there is a quality of profound silence in these drawings, as if we were "watching through soundproof plate glass." Seurat himself was known as a silent man, reluctant to speak except to close friends.

One of the most striking drawings in this book is a large portrait of the artist Aman-Jean, which was Seurat’s first publicly exhibited work. Classical in its composition, seen with today’s eyes it is pointillism in black and white. The portrait was shown in the ultra-establishmentarian Salon in 1883, which is ironic considering that after Seurat’s death, the Louvre refused to accept a gift of hundreds of works offered by his family. Today, he is remembered for paintings of monumental scale, such as "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" (1884–86; now at the Art Institute of Chicago), but as Aman-Jean wrote in a letter, "It is drawing, thoroughly understood, that put Seurat on the right path."