GEORGE SEURAT & MARTIN PURYEAR @ MoMA

We took in these two big shows at the Art Barn of Modern Art (ABoMA) yesterday with friends. The museum's exhibitions crew have carved out five nice galleries on the sixth floor to exhibit George Seurat: The Drawings. It should be mentioned that SOMEONE felt the need to pepper the show with several small painted canvases, whose soul purpose seems to be to add a bit of color to this very black and white show. But oh what blacks!! The first image to pop out at you as you enter the first gallery, which is dedicated to early works and academic drawings, is a female nude. It is a fine example of this artist's mastery of the conté crayon, and the plump soft curves of the model seem to spring off the paper. And we see lots of women throughout the exhibit: nurses with babies, women from behind, women with parasols, singers, his mother. All are rendered with incredible sensitivity to the medium on the paper. In one drawing, Place de la Concorde, Winter, this touch allows you entrée into a snowy winter in Paris years ago. In others, like The Veil and The Lamp, the unusual chose of subject or angle along with his lightness of his hand almost seem to put Seurat in the Symbolist camp. This show, which is not traveling, is comprised of many works from private collections. It also allows visitors to see seven of nine Café Concert drawings. Done by Seurat late in his life (he died in 1891 at the age of 31), they become both academic and social studies, showing not only the gaslight reflecting off the performer, but a feel of the urban mix of the milieu. The final one of these works, Café Singer, 1887-88, is done on Gillot paper, very likely for gillotage, an early reproduction method, and shows the artist reclaiming many subtle details that he had foregone in pursuit of Pointillism. In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, would the artist have returned to his more academic roots to reach the broader masses that he documented? Discuss amongst yourselves.

I have passed through Martin Puryear exhibits over the years at various galleries, usually wandering in and out without too much to say. But seeing them at the artist's current retrospective at MoMA allowed me to see this artist in a new light. Things that were "well-crafted" and "interesting" in smaller spaces, became much more mesmerizing and fascinating when seen among their brethren in ABoMA's behemoth sixth floor gallery and second floor atrium. Forms and materials are revisited; shapes emerge and grow. Titles can reveal meaning or hide it, but what remains with Puryear is his uncanny ability to reinvent certain simple shapes: wall circles made from tree branches, turn into long weeping ovals of thin veneer, turn into images of tribal Fang masks. We are presented again and again with some unenterable space; are we being kept safe or kept out? Two large sculptures in the atrium, Ladder for Booker T. Washington and Ad Astra, both give us a feeling of monumental striving, but towards what? The tip of the latter work can be seen near the balcony of the sixth floor galleries! Oh, why reach for the moon when we have ABoMA!!