The long summer of Georges Seurat

If not in person, Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” has to be seen large. There’s a very good scan on this page at the Athenaeum.
There are moments on hot summer days when we are prepared for a miracle. The stillness and the gently vibrating haze give to our perceptions a kind of finality, and we wait listening for some cosmic hum to enchant, like Papageno’s bells, the uncouth shapes and colours which surround us, so that they all dance to the same tune and finally come to rest in a harmonious order. — Kenneth Clark, “Looking at Pictures”
It’s a pretty Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1885 and we’re having a petit bourgeois luncheon on the grass on on an island in the Seine. La Grande Jatte — the Big Bowl — near Neuilly has been cleaned up considerably after all those years as an industrial canker. There are restaurants and joints where you can dance further along the island, though still lots of factories on the far riverbank, which is why not everyone wants to come here. But now this end of the Jatte is a marvellous green get-away for city folks like us, nice breezes off the river, and we’re doing our best to muck it up with dog shit.
That woman with the monkey is here again too. She keeps it on a leash but it still defecates at the drop of a peanut and alarms the old ladies. Someone ought to complain to the gendarme, but he’s only here for the flirting.
After our quiche we’ll go pester that young Seurat at his easel again. He’s here almost every day, same as last summer, pecking away at his canvases like a pigeon. Millions of little dots. One picture after another. What the hell can he be thinking? He’s such a grouch too — good-looking fellow, nicely dressed, but he definitely deserves to have both of his legs pulled!

Georges-Pierre Seurat was 25 that summer, and if was anti-social, he had a brace of fair reasons. His father, who was in the law game, was a stick in the mud who only showed up at home on Tuesdays; the rest of the week he was at his country villa pecking away at his flower garden like a pigeon. Georges came by his stand-offishness honestly. And besides that, he really had something to prove with his painting. Now was not the time for distractions. See the rest.


Good fun for the old bull of the Spanish plains, where it gets very hot. Still, us foreigners can get a chuckle out of these undated newspaper photos. The double image comes from the archives of the
He’s now keeping those memories alive and at the same time collecting dada and surreal items, especially movies, doing general video and film reviews and writing a surrealist novel called “The Cool Side of the Pillow”.
Carstairs Gallery in New York bought the oil painting when the paint was barely dry, and Sotheby’s was flogging it in the same city for an “important” private collector but didn’t say who, so it’s not clear whether his model ever actually owned the thing.
Of Portuguese and German descent, Madame Schlumberger and her husband, the French-American oil tycoon Pierre Schlumberger, were keen on art.
Dalí was pulled in to do her portrait two years after their wedding. São put on the same Givenchy gown for his several visits to their place on Sutton Place in Manhattan, and at the same time he made her a necklace, though perhaps not the one she’s holding in the painting. He was indeed in his neo-classicist era with the formal pose and fine details, so São, hankering for surrealism, had to make do with a dreamy background landscape. 

I’m still puzzled about this notion of getting to the centre of the earth (
No one outside of Norway had heard of a maelstrom before Poe (read about his 



The image resolution and my knowledge of wind instruments are unfortunately poor, but the ruined hull of a boat at the lower right is intriguing, as are the visages in the clouds. The smaller one reminds for all the world of JMW Turner’s “Sea Monster” (detail below).
The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation has “Saliva” at the moment, though it’s attributed to the collection of noted connoisseur Eugene Thaw of New Mexico, ever since a Sotheby’s auction in 1997. Jason Kaufman has an interesting 1994 interview with Thaw on his 





