Seurat at MoMA

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If you associate Seurat with pointillism, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and not much more, then you probably need to visit the exhibition of his drawings currently on show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. While the show focuses a lot of attention on the relationship of his drawings to his paintings, what struck me was how brilliant he was working in black and white. His portraits and studies of the human form are mesmerizing in the way he draws the form out through shading with his comté crayon. Aside from the obvious contribution to painting, the drawings are better compared to a kind of impressionistic black and white photography.

Georges Seurat – The Drawings runs through January 7, 2008

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