On the Origins of Abstraction: Seurat and the Screening of History

It has often been noted that Seurat’s early paintings and drawings downplay representation in favour of an increased attention to formal properties. What remains unexplored is how this quality can be understood in relation to the politics of the French Third Republic. This essay argues that Seurat’s early work was haunted by political events (most notably the Paris Commune), and by aspects of the artistic past (specifically the radical associations of naturalism) that many wished in the early 1880s to forget. With reference to the writings of Marx and Zola, each of whom offered perceptive diagnoses of the Third Republic’s uncertain relation to the past, I read Seurat’s depiction of the Tuileries Palace ruins and his series of stonebreaker images as reflections upon this crisis in historical memory. Whilst the repetitive weave of paint and conté crayon from which these images are constituted might seem to predict the emphasis on pictorial structure that characterized later forms of abstraction, it is argued here that in Seurat’s work it operates as a screen that occludes but at the same recalls repressed histories.