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Seurat, Georges - Profiles of a Model 1887
Identifier
028454
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Georges Seurat – by John Rewald
After his death there were those who did not fail to say that he had not lived long enough to develop fully his aesthetic discovery, his new formula for beauty, that he had left "to men a stammering revelation which dazzled without enlightening them." He has even been saddled with the responsibility for the "pernicious confusion of art and science, the most dangerous error in the history of art."
It would be idle to discuss these questions today when the work of Seurat is understood and its fecundity proved. In the artist's lifetime his friends Felix Feneon and the Belgian poet, Emile Verhaeren. tried to point out that his scientific approach was not necessarily contradictory to the ends of art, since the most perfect knowledge of the laws of optics does not make one an artist.
Those who believed they had found an infallible recipe for art in the discoveries of Seurat simply forgot that no technique or theory is valid unless applied by a man of genius, and that no method, however subtle, can put a stop to mediocrity.
A description of the experience
