Seurat: Drawings and Paintings [Anglais] [Relié]

Eminent art historian Robert L. Herbert (Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society) is emeritus professor at Mount Holyoke College after a long career at Yale. His commonsense approach to 19th-century art has long been a refreshment; his pioneering method of studying Impressionists, by turning the paintings upside down to see how the paint was applied, remains legendary. Seurat: Drawings and Paintings is a collection of his various articles on 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat, one of his specialties, written over the years for various hard-to-find journals, including a particularly well-reasoned essay on the painting Parade. Often summed up as "the dot painter" for his pointillist style, Seurat in fact had many other intriguing preoccupations as an artist, which Herbert expertly reveals.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In gathering this excellent selection of his previously published studies of Seurat's art, Herbert has shaped a synthesis of the artist's achievement that is simultaneously profound, accessible, and concise. In addition to his sharp articulation of the artist's creative processes and rapid stylistic development, the examination of individual paintings and drawings is marked by a sharply honed and refined formalistic sensibility. The author's ability to evoke the works' distinctive visual qualities combines with a cautious articulation of the theoretical and scientific ideas, which impacted upon the formulation of Seurat's Neo-Impressionist style. At the same time, and without a tinge of partisan crie de coeur, Seurat's work is accommodated within a context of late 19th-century social thought. Not slighted either are the varied and disparate art historical sources that infused and helped shape his genius. Like the artist's work itself, Herbert's study is marked by a clarity of structure, a luminous yet meticulous touch, and a profound undergirding of rigorous intelligence. Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

. . .[A] still-current and coherent, if necessarily selective, account of Seurat's artistic and intellectual development. . .

Georges Seurat, painter of Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, had a meteoric career that ended in 1891 with his death at age 31. In this generously illustrated book, the leading specialist on Seurat examines the entire range of the artist's work, focusing on individual paintings and drawings and interpreting the personal and social meanings of their subjects.

Robert L. Herbert closely examines Seurat's early oil panels of rural and suburban settings, early drawings of Parisians at work and leisure, and later canvases and drawings of café- concerts and circuses. Showing that Seurat's work drew on classical tradition as well as on popular arts, Herbert reevaluates the artist's painting technique and argues that individual pictures reveal artistic craft and trial and error rather than a "scientific" nature. And he demonstrates that although Seurat's drawings and paintings have striking formal structures, they are not "abstract," but rather poetic distillations of social and psychological meanings.

This collection of the most influential of Herbert's writings on Seurat, long out of print, bear out the praise he has received for "his ability to mix a deep knowledge of paintings and drawings as physical objects with an acute awareness of the way they embody ideas and can be understood as social documents" (Jack Flam, New York Review of Books). This attractive book will appeal both to the general reader and to the student of French nineteenth-century art.

Robert L. Herbert, Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Mount Holyoke College, is also the author of Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society, Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867–1886, and, most recently, Nature's Workshop: Renoir's Writings on the Decorative Arts, all published by Yale University Press.