Georges Seurat: The Drawings at MoMA

(Image from MoMA website)

Saw the drawings of the pontillist at MoMa the Sunday before last. I like the drawings much better than the paintings. Drawn with conte crayon on Michellet paper, the drawings are velvety, as a friend puts it. They are certainly softer, more tender, than the stiff and isolated figures in the big iconic paintings such as A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.


One drawing, of a boy in the artist's studio, shows such a gentle, vulnerable back shoulder of the boy that it almost made me weep. The drawing was a study for another big painting called Bathing at Asniers. In that painting, the boy has been transformed by so-called rational, scientific technique into a minor figure in the frieze of land and water.

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