BILBAO.- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Serra/Seurat. Drawings, the exhibition that brings together a selection of 22 drawings by the late 19th-century master Georges Seurat, which in turn engage in dialogue with the drawings of Richard Serra, a great admirer of Seurat’s and without a doubt one of the most outstanding artists of the present day. Despite the years that separate them, both artists are notable for working with drawing as an end in itself and taking it to new levels, imbuing it with innovative characteristics and extrapolating it to other areas of their work.
The drawings of Georges Seurat were highly valued by artists of his time like Maximilien Luce, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Signac, who described them in 1899 as “the most beautiful painter’s drawings in existence,” and they have continued to win appreciation from later artists like Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Bridget Riley, and Richard Serra himself.
Seurat was able with very simple means to make appear shapes from the conte crayon darkness placed on the white paper. This is what Serra calls the weight of shapes. “The weight of the drawing derives not only from the number of layers of paintstick but mainly from the particular shape of the drawing. It is obvious – from Mantegna’s Christ to Cézanne’s apples – that shapes can imply weight, mass and volume”.
Especially important in Seurat’s drawings is the paper support he uses. He usually chooses a handmade French paper, Michallet, which is characterized by its irregularities, its heavy texture, and its undulations or crests, almost imperceptible to the naked eye but not to the crayon sliding over its surface. Besides the technical dexterity of the execution, it might be said that Seurat ‘feels’ the paper and brings it to life, allowing it to absorb exactly the right amount of crayon to create the lights, volumes, and contrasts that make him worthy to be considered one of the great masters of drawing.
This knowledge of the material which distinguishes the great artists was discovered by Richard Serra while he was studying with Josef Albers. He expressed it in these words:
"Once one you understood the basic lesson that procedure was dictated by the material, you also realized that matter imposed its own form on form."
Richard Serra thus saw early on that sculpture is not subject only to carving, modeling, and casting, but that the materials have a great influence on the spatial experience they generate. He also gives drawing a transcendent quality, for besides using it as a means to other ends, he turns it into an autonomous language and applies new techniques, formats, and materials. In his Ramble drawings, a series he began in 2015, Serra, like Seurat, revels in his materials, such as the handmade Japanese paper whose manufacturing process makes the fibers create ‘accidents’ so that every sheet is different from the others. This means that no Ramble is the same as any other, both because of the manner in which the artist works on the paper and because of the way the paper reacts.
In the Ramble drawings, Serra uses two different methods of applying the litho crayon. The first is transfer, and the second direct marking on the sheet. In the first case, the amount of pressure determines a greater or lesser degree of transfer, and so what looks in some works like a light mist becomes a dark blur in others. Direct application meanwhile allows greater control over the amount of grease used on the paper, leading to a wide variety of results with a wealth of fascinating nuances.
Serra creates these works on a moderate scale, but still endows them with a certain monumentality by arranging 33 of the smallest Ramble drawings in a grid formed by three rows of eleven. With this configuration, the artist shares his creative process with the viewer, who is enabled to perceive the effects created by each impression on the unique sheets of paper.
An Essential Activity
As Serra himself explained in 1977: “Drawing is a concentration on an essential activity, and the credibility of the statement is totally within your hands. It’s the most direct, conscious space in which I work. I can observe my process from beginning to end, and at times sustain a continuous concentration. It’s replenishing. It’s one of the few conditions in which I can understand the source of my work.”
For Seurat too, drawing is an essential activity, a fact demonstrated by the late date at which he started to paint and the small number of his paintings by contrast with the hundreds of drawings he produced. His contemporary Paul Signac recognized and extolled his importance: “Seurat's studies resulted in his wellconsidered and fertile theory of contrasts: a theory to which all his work was thereafter subjected. He applied it first to chiaroscuro: with the simplest of resources, the white of a sheet of Ingres paper and the black of a conté crayon, skillfully graded or contrasted, he executed some four hundred drawings, the most beautiful painters' drawings in existence. Thanks to their perfect science of values, we can say that these blacks and whites are more colorful and brighter than many paintings.”
Seurat’s drawing and painting may appear to be two separate worlds, but his profound knowledge of color, which is fragmented when applied to his canvases, is reflected earlier in his black and white drawings. As color is an effect of the light, an extensive knowledge of chromatic gradations and combinations allows him to illuminate the maximum darkness of black in the absence of color.
These words spoken by Serra in 2000 also stem from such a notion of black: “It’s definitely a color. [...] As soon as you think of Seurat’s drawings you think of black as a color.” Georges Seurat is a master at illuminating both darkness and brightness, an even more complicated task as this effect is harder to achieve when there is less contrast. His almost pointillist use of the grain of the paper allows him on occasions to work with ‘negative drawing’.
Constant Evolution
In this exhibition, viewers can appreciate the evolution of Seurat’s drawings after his training at the Lehmann school, which he subsequently left, abandoning the ‘traditional’ path with it. He also left behind him the drawings he made during his military service, some with colored pencils, in his famous Brest sketchbooks, which marked the artist’s development toward a definitive break with academicism and the beginning of his mature language.
The small drawings Seated Couple (Couple Assis, ca. 1881) and In Shirt Sleeves (En bras de chemise, ca. 1881), probably also from a sketchbook, show his attempts to break away from traditional delineation by means of diagonal hatching framed by short broken lines. In Two-horse hitch (Attelage à deux chevaux, 1882–83), he uses a tangle of brief movements to sketch out the main form of the two horses and the driver, occupying the whole sheet with similar strokes—but with crayon of less density—to create a continuum nuanced only by a change of direction in the execution and the concentration of material.
Somewhat similar is The Lamp (La Lampe, 1882–83), though the result is accentuated by making the neck and chin of the female figure disappear into the deep darkness of the crayon, allowing the lamp to frame her face and acquire presence even though hardly any light is projected on the rest of the scene. Seurat’s drawing evolved vertiginously during his mature phase, as demonstrated not only by the Impressionist modernity of the black and white landscapes of this period, such as The Edge of the Forest [Le Mur du chemin (La Forêt), ca. 1883] or Tree Trunks Reflected in Water (Homage to Stéphane Mallarmé) [Troncs d’arbres se reflétant dans l’eau (Hommage à Stéphane Mallarmé), 1883–84], but also by his figures, reclining, seated, or walking down a moonlit path, like those of Night Stroll (Promenoir, ca. 1882).
Seurat continued experimenting and working on paper until the end of his brief career, as is clearly seen in his painting and palpable in works on display in the exhibition like Study for A Summer Sunday on the Grande Jatte island: skirt detail (Étude pour Un Dimanche d’été sur l’île de la Grande Jatte: detail de jupe, 1984-85) and An Evening, Gravelines (Un Soir, Gravelines, 1890). Seurat sketched this landscape rapidly, but without wasting the opportunity to create chiaroscuros and occupy the whole surface of the paper. The show ends with the beautiful scene of The White Sail (Le voile blanche, 1890), one of his last drawings, where the light emanates from a small sail that dominates the composition, filled by the artist with details as he uses every inch of the sheet. This connects with Richard Serra’s Ramble drawings in a stimulating dialogue.
