George Seurat: Place de la Concorde, Winter 1882-83
I know Seurat is known for his colorful pointillist paintings but this crayon work, along with his other monochrome crayon papers, is beautiful. Why must we use colors anyway? They only complicate the world and distract us from what is essential.
Seurat’s black lines look as if a spider wove it with its silk. It is mystically dark and light. The lampposts, the carriage, and the fountain are only mysterious shades. Without colors, the scene is more dreamlike, even sad. It is like a long-faded silent movie’s scratched scene. The blackness keeps everything together and highlights the snow’s whiteness. Seurat named this chromoluminarism.
The Place de la Concorde is whist and peaceful, unlike about ninety years earlier when the vengeful mob watched their queen’s, Marie Antoinette’s, guillotining here, at the same place. In the painting it is deserted, unlike in our days, when tourists, cars, and motorcycles crush each other, cutting angrily across like giddy poultries in the chicken coop. The place on this drawing timelessly floats in the void consciousness.
I wonder how many more beautiful drawings and paintings Seurat would have done if his life had not been cut short. He died at the age of thirty one. When his family offered his artworks to the Louvre, the museum rejected them and they still does not possess any of Seurat’s works today.
