Seurat and the Sea: ‘revelatory’ paintings are ‘magnificently weird’

The Channel at Gravelines 1890 by Georges Seurat — ‘Shimmering seas’: Seurat’s The Channel at Gravelines, 1890

(Image credit: The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

The Courtauld Gallery is hosting an exhibition devoted entirely to Georges Seurat’s seascapes. The pointillist painter died in 1891, at the age of 31, probably from diphtheria, leaving behind just 45 paintings. This show brings together 26 of his works, made during summers spent on the northern coast of France between 1895 and 1890. “It is a quietly tremendous exhibition,” said Adrian Searle in The Guardian, filled with “blizzards of light”.

Despite his own claims to science and objectivity, Seurat’s paintings are undoubtedly “peculiar and strange”. His “cumulative little strokes and pustules of pigment” draw your attention to the artistic process, at times creating “a kind of veil of interference between yourself and the image”. But when everything “comes together”, his “unpeopled everyday scenes take on a quivering psychological sense of importance”.

This “revelatory” exhibition is London’s “most brightly enveloping winter show”, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. Our “understanding of Seurat’s aims, sensibility, inventiveness and relationship with his peers” is reoriented through this unique bringing-together of his “luminous Normandy seascapes”. The Courtauld’s “coup” is reuniting six canvasses Seurat completed in Port-en-Bessin: these paintings haven’t been displayed as a complete series since their inaugural exhibition in Brussels in 1889. “To experience these works together transforms our responses.”

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“I confess that I have generally found the neo-impressionists easy to admire (the discipline, the spirit of experiment, the light) but difficult to love (the stiffness, the fixity, the painstaking finickityness of it all),” said Laura Freeman in The Times. But no one could make that accusation here: there are no human figures to look stiff. Instead, Seurat’s subjects are “resolutely the sea, the sky, the almost magically transformative power of strong sun beating on water”.

Irenie Forshaw is the features editor at The Week, covering arts, culture and travel. She began her career in journalism at Leeds University, where she wrote for the student newspaper, The Gryphon, before working at The Guardian and The New Statesman Group. Irenie then became a senior writer at Elite Traveler, where she oversaw The Experts column.