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The series of five outstanding works by Georges Seurat (1859-1891) to be offered in Christie's New York Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale provides a complete overview of the artist's oeuvre and working methods until the achievement of his most famous large composition, the masterpiece Un Dimanche d'été à l'Ile de La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886, now at the Art Institute of Chicago. His contemporaries such as Signac or Pissarro considered Seurat the inventor of divisionism and a revolutionary. In 1884, Seurat was one of the founding members of the Société des artistes indépendants that created the same year the first independent salon allowing artists to show their work freely to the public.

Seurat, who died prematurely in 1891 when he was 31 years old, was considered a forerunner of modern art by artists of the early 20th century and more particularly by cubist painters. In 1929, examples of Seurat's work were included in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art alongside works by Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne. Alfred Barr, first director of the museum, viewed these artists as the pioneers of the 19th century, a reference for the modern art that would be presented at the museum.

Seurat created a new method of painting and renewed the Impressionist genre by juxtaposing touches of pure color directly on the surface of the canvas, instead of mixing the pigments on the palette. Focused on the scientific research into division of tones conducted by Chevreul in De la Loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, 1839, Seurat would place small dots of color that would mix in the observer's eye to create vivid three dimensional forms. Thus, Seurat discovered a new way to re p resent art through large compositions that he liked to call "canvases of combat".

The monumental Un Dimanche d'été à l'Ile de La Grande Jatte was called "a manifesto-painting" by critic Félix Fénéon at its first public appearance in May 1886 and remains among the most renowned paintings of the 19th century. The rare oil panel Paysage, homme assis, circa 1884 (lot 9), belongs to the series of studies realized on the site of La Grande Jatte in late 1884. 

To complete the painting, the artist moved back and forth between drawings, outdoor sketches, preparatory canvases and the final composition in his studio. For a year he studied the framing of the scene and the illumination of the figures. The oil sketches played a crucial role in defining the Grande Jatte and Paysage is one the few panels focused on the effect of light in the landscape.

Though Seurat's painted oeuvre is often characterized as luminous, paradoxically the artist first explored light and shadows in his black and white drawings. Enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studio of Henri Lehmann in 1878, he studied academic theories for only a year, preferring to learn by himself. For three years, he concentrated on drawings, filling pages of sketches from scenes in the street, men sitting on park's benches, laborers, or passersby. These vigorous life-sketches of people in action enabled the artist to surpass the academic boundaries in order to create a personal style of drawing: depicting figures without marking their outlines. Seurat then developed a system of parallel strokes to model the shapes and cross-hatching lines to render light and contrast. The drawing Le Peintre à sa palette, circa 1881 (lot 12) is a perfect example of Seurat's emerging process and is also one of the first works he executed with his thereafter signature medium, black Conté crayon. The subject of the work is distinctive and can be grasped at a glimpse. This drawing is the only one of this series of sixty depicting a painter at work. Femme s'éloignant, circa 1881 (lot 13) also belongs to the early career of Seurat but should be understood as a transitional work relative to his later mature drawings, and particularly for his drawings depicting elegant and mysterious women in which he plays with the crayon to create shadows and reinforce the mysterious ambience.

From 1882, the artist achieved in drawings a method of chiaroscuro without any parallel in the 19th century that paved the way to his revelatory dot paintings. Using a black Conté crayon on a thick textured paper, called Michallet, he made light emerge from the paper. The crayon rubbed on the white paper with varying degrees of intensity leaves velvety black areas irradicated with the light of white dots that irradiate the darker zones. In very subtle La Promenade, circa 1882 (lot 10), the artist focused the tension on the black bow and on the boa fur succeeding to render the sensuous fabric in opacity but also creating deep contrast by juxtaposing these rich blacks with lighter zones. The figure seems indeed to walk toward the light. In Faneur (Le Casseur de pierres), circa 1882 (lot 11) the man's bust is drawn by the lone application of Conté crayon on the paper surface, his legs melting to the fore g round. These two drawings illustrate Seurat at the height of his mastery of draughtsmanship and link his two primary subjects: agrarian and city workers directly inspired by Naturalist literature on one side and intimate scenes and representations of elegant and mysterious urbane women on the other.

In either case, Seurat's figures are always rep esented from profile or from behind, extracted from any anecdotal context. To quote Alfred Barr: "Seurat was the inventor of a method, the constructor of a system without parallel in the history of art for its logical completeness. What other man, artist or layman, came so near realizing the 19th century illusion of possible perfection through science? But Seurat, the artist, was greater that Seurat, the scientist. In his work, from the least drawing to the most elaborate composition, great intelligence is completed by consummate sensibility" (The Museum of Modern Art, First Loan Exhibition, New York, 1929, p. 26).

     - Vérane Tasseau