Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Paul Smith is Professor of History of Art at the University of Warwick. He is also the editor of Penn State Press’s edition of Marius Roux’s The Substance and the Shadow (2007)
<p>“The book as a whole is eclectic and adventurous. There is a collective determination not to become mired in stale controversy. . . . Colour theory is not ignored, but there is far more here than Seurat’s palette and Chevreul’s colour disc. There is poetry and politics, ethics and edges, the family and the father, sensation, disenchantment, timelessness, irony and absence. It is by turns thrilling and demanding.”</p><p>—Alex Danchev <i>The Times Higher Education Supplement</i></p>
Georges Seurat is best known as the painter of A Sunday on the Grande Jatte—1884, one of the most recognizable and reproduced works of art in the world. In recent years the painting has been the subject of a highly successful exhibition, the inspiration for a Broadway musical (by Stephen Sondheim), and the subject of a television program. The Grande Jatte has achieved this iconic status for a number of reasons, but is unknown to most people except as a simulacrum. The Grande Jatte is also plagued by the long-standing cliché that it embodies a “scientific” way of painting. The painting is much more complex, however; so is Seurat’s body of work as a whole. In this collection of essays, Paul Smith has assembled a broader view of Seurat’s oeuvre. Seurat Re-viewed touches on its engagement with society, gender, politics, new artists’ materials, and developments in art theory.
Individual essays focus on the many facets of Seurat’s work and its context, including its use of color and its debt to color theory; its exploitation of different drawing media; its connection to the work of the artist’s contemporaries, including the poets Jules Laforgue and Stéphane Mallarmé; and its concern with nineteenth-century social issues. The contributions also show important links among the Grande Jatte, literary Symbolism, and the development of future Modernist practices. The book amounts to a major reevaluation of Seurat’s art in the culture of the late nineteenth century.
In addition to the editor, the contributors are Anthea Callen, S. Hollis Clayson, Jonathan Crary, Joan U. Halperin, Richard Hobbs, John House, Brendan Prendeville, Georges Roque, and Richard Shiff.
An anthology of essays exploring the work of Georges Seurat (1859-1891). Sections are devoted to technique and theory, Seurat's engagement with social issues, irony regarding the paintings' content, aesthetic effects, and the relation of his work to literary symbolism.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Paul Smith
Technique and Theory
1. Hors-d’œuvre: Edges, Boundaries, and Marginality, with Particular Reference to Seurat’s Drawings
Anthea Callen
2. Seurat and Color Theory
Georges Roque
Society and the Subject
3. The Family and the Father: The Grande Jatte and Its Absences
S. Hollis Clayson
4. Illuminations of Disenchantment: Seurat’s Parade de Cirque
Jonathan Crary
Irony
5. Interpreting Seurat’s Figure Paintings
John House
6. The Ironic Eye/I in Jules Laforgue and Georges Seurat
Joan U. Halperin
Sensation
7. Seurat and the Act of Sensing: Perception as Artifact
Brendan Prendeville
8. Grave Seurat
Richard Shiff
Stillness and Symbolism
9. “Souls of Glass”: Seurat and the Ethics of “Timeless” Experience
Paul Smith
10. Seurat and Mallarmean Thought
Richard Hobbs
Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
In this collection of essays, Paul Smith has assembled a broad view of Seurat’s work, touching on its engagement with society, gender, and politics.
Refiguring Modernism features cutting edge interdisciplinary approaches to
the study of art, literature, science, and cultural history.
Refiguring Modernism features cutting edge interdisciplinary approaches to the study of art, literature, science, and cultural history. With an eye to the different modernisms emerging throughout the world during the twentieth century and beyond, we seek to publish scholarship that engages creatively with canonical and eccentric works alike, bringing fresh concepts and original research to bear on modernist cultural production, whether aesthetic, social, or epistemological. What does it mean to study modernism in a global context characterized at once by decolonization and nation-building; international cooperation and conflict; changing ideas about subjectivity and identity; new understandings of language, religion, poetics, and myth; and new paradigms for science, politics, and religion? What did modernism offer artists, writers, and intellectuals? How do we theorize and historicize modernism? How do we rethink its forms, its past, and its futures?
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Paul Smith is Professor of History of Art at the University of Warwick. He is also the editor of Penn State Press’s edition of Marius Roux’s The Substance and the Shadow (2007)