On Art

...It is chastening, therefore, to see the Neo-Im-pressionist exhibition that Professor Robert L. Herbert of Yale University has arranged for the Guggenheim Museum, which will be on view there until April...

...The Impressionists, for all the brightness and vivacity of their color, trusted the customary evidence of the eye...

...in other words, a transitional period much like our own...

...Where the paintings seem public in their ambitions and formidably structured, the drawings often maintain a personal touch: a fondness for laborers engaged in menial tasks, for the crepuscular tones that Seurat admired in Millet's twilight scenes of lowly shepherds and farmers...

...It is now clear that the Neo-Impressionist style developed by Seurat, and promoted by Signac and a host of previously unsung practitioners, contributed significantly to the furtherance of abstraction...

...He so thoroughly rationalized the earlier style that it became the perfect transitional means...

...Seurat remained a formalist...

...In the Guggenheim exhibition, one can see Seurat's lesson being taken over by the Fauves—in Derain's Big Ben, or in Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Vo-lupte with its unreal clamor of magenta and orange offsetting the nominally realistic style of the drawing...

...its resurgence in the first decade of the 20th was only of minor concern...

...It has taken Herbert's exhibition, and the invaluable and scholarly catalogue he has provided for it, to show us 60 years later that Neo-Impressionism was an essential link —a missing link, almost—between Impressionism and the formalist modes that came after it...

...The manner in the drawings is more expressive, more sensitive to the pressures of hand and feeling, than the systematized technique of Seurat's oils...

...One can see the expressive detail succumbing to the demands of abstraction even as the face of his Aunt Anais, lying white and still, begins to fade from sight—a memory of the particular sinking beneath the hard realities of form...

...in the train of the Neo-Impressionist style followed Art Nouveau, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, the austerities of Mondrian's pure geometry...

...It places Seurat, usefully, within the context of other French painters like Paul Signac and Maximilian Luce, and it rehabilitates a host of less familiar but commendable artists: Henri-Edmond Cross, Theo Van Rysselberghe, Charles Angrand, Willy Finch...

...Our ability to arrive at that judgment is perhaps another indication of the affinity of present day art—with its conceptualized sculpture and its color-field painting—to a painter like Seurat and a movement like Neo-Impressionism...

...This work not only summed up, but seemed to wrap up as well the significance of the movement...

...Pissarro, with his son Lucien, adopted the stippled technique and divided color of Neo-Impressionism during a certain period in his career...

...a sunlit stretch of grass would include not only the visible greens but theoretic blues and their opposite, the sunlight's orange-yellow...

...As a style, Neo-Impressionism had its polemicists—Signac, for example, whose From Eugene Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism became the Bible of the movement—and its recording angels, the Symbolist critics Felix Feneon and Gustave Kahn...

...The Guggenheim exhibition includes one of Seurat's masterpieces in the genre: a sketch of his aunt lying on her deathbed, the figure seen from the side against a backdrop of a black crucifix and two candles...

...The tendencies in art were no less diverse...

...But even in his most mysterious and touching moments...

...Further, he has demonstrated that the style, so often considered a sport, has a striking relevance to the color practices and formal commitments of much contemporary art...

...It records, crucially, the relationship of this style to the later developments of Fauve, Cubist and Futurist painting...

...Even Pissarro and Monet, founders of the Impressionist style, fell under its sway...

...What is impressive about Professor Herbert's re-evaluation of the Neo-Impressionists is the manner in which it modifies, without erasing, that prior genealogy...

...Monet, particularly in his studies of poplar trees along the Epte River, favored the taut structural look of this mode...

...And it was his interest in the gloomy forms of the new industrialism invading the northern districts of Paris—the factory chimneys, and the brutalist shapes of drawbridges and locomotives—that set him apart from the Impressionists with their scenes of middle-class pleasures and days...

...More important, it prepared the way for the ascendancy of color...

...its tyrannical insistence upon the flatness of the picture plane, its hardening of shapes, its favoring of decorative silhouettes, its homogenous surfaces all presaged the doctrinal practices of later abstraction...

...Georges Pierre Seurat virtually originated Neo-Impressionism with his poinlillist technique: the painstaking system of colored dots evenly applied over the surface of a canvas to summon up scenes of middle-class pleasure, or sun-blanched landscape views of busy harbors...

...Seurat's use of color was more conceptual...

...their trees were created out of the greens one expected of a tree in full summer plumage...

...What Seurat accomplished, almost single-handedly, was a sweeping revision of Impressionist practice...

...Herbert's exhibition demonstrates that Neo-Impressionism proved helpful to Fauves like Matisse and Derain, that it continued to function in the early Cubist work of Braque, Delaunay and Juan Gris, and that it was also found serviceable by Mon-drian in his attempt to bridge the gap between a figurative art and one of pure abstraction...

...Equally important, through his reading of the color theories of Chev-reul and Rood, 19th-century theorists of color and color perception, Seurat hit upon a method of dividing color into spots of complementary or contrasting hues, liberating it from the descriptive concerns of the Impressionists...

...The medium itself, the black Conte crayon stroked across the grainy surface of the Ingres paper, produces a world of clotted light and dense shadow, a kind of indeterminate chiaroscura that is less in keeping with the formal demands of the painting...

...His method set color free from its strictly local functions and sent it on its way toward the autonomy it now enjoys in contemporary painting...

...It was not exclusive, however, in the jealous and doctrinaire manner of later styles in art...

...The superb documentation of Herbert's catalogue, along with the selection of works, charts the course of the movement (in some cases, year by year) from its emergence in France to its spread through the Low Countries...

...Seurat's drawings, several of which are included in the exhibition, are a key to understanding his formal accomplishment and his greatness as an artist...

...Seurat remains the leading figure of the movement, but the Guggenheim exhibition, comprising 175 paintings, watercolors and drawings, reveals the style as a good deal more complex in its ambitions and more widespread in its influence than one had supposed...

...He systematized the rapid, expressive brushwork of the Impressionist masters into patterns of evenly registered dots of color...

...But the drawings—their forms massive and dark, lying close to the surface—represent a night side of Seurat's talent very different from the luminous clarity of a painting like the Grande Jatte...

...For it seems to be through the mature drawings, with their subtle shifts in tone and their remarkably simplified contrasts of light against dark, dark against light, that Seurat was able to achieve the homogeneity of surface which characterizes his painting...

...It has always been assumed that Cubism was the generating impulse behind all modern developments in art prior to World War II, and that Cubism itself issued directly from Cezanne's dissatisfaction with the Impressionist technique, with his need to structure that lyrical style into an art for all the ages...

...This drawing is so subtle that only as one backs away from it does one begin to get the merest suggestion of the old woman's face, the features of a loved one growing painfully dim...

...He took the loosely realistic and lyrical suburban views of the Impressionists and ordered them into tightly constructed machines where the forms, whatever their representational burdens, were locked functionally into the flat surface plane of the canvas...

...Seurat's anarchist sympathies, which he shared with many of the Neo-Im-pressionists, drew him close to such subject matter...

...Seurat's masterly achievement was a series of major pictures—Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Julie, The Circus, The Parade—all executed within the last seven years of a short life (he died in 1891 at the age of 32...

...It was a time of political conservatism, Socialist fervor, exuberant decor, Dandyism, eroticism, engineering...

...This style was known to everyone familiar with the history of modern art as a spin-off from, and a reaction to, Impressionist practices...

...Its period of importance in the last decade or more of the 19th century was thoroughly accounted for...

...Few periods in modern art present such a wealth of contradictory ambitions as the two decades of Neo-Im-pressionism's rise to prominence...