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Sep 14, 2011

At the Concert Parisien

1887–88

Georges Seurat

(French, 1859–1891)

France, 19th century

Conté crayon heightened with white chalk on cream handmade modern laid paper

Watermarks: MICHALLET

Support: Cream modern laid paper

Sheet: 31.4 x 23.6 cm (12 3/8 x 9 5/16 in.)

Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund 1958.344

Catalogue raisonné: Hauke 687

Location

not on view

Did you know?

Despite Georges Seurat's brief lifespan, he created a large number of drawings, working almost exclusively with the waxy Conté crayon and textured paper used for this sheet.

Description

Café-concerts were popular places of entertainment for the middle classes in Paris during the late 1800s and usually featured singers or other forms of vaudeville entertainers. Georges Seurat created eight drawings depicting café-concerts, some showing known establishments. This drawing has an innovative viewpoint, in which we peer through the bowler hats of male viewers listening to a female singer on stage. Seurat typically used a black crayon manufactured by the Conté company, and its waxy quality allowed him to exploit the texture of paper to striking effect.

Artist biography

Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat entered the École Municipale de Sculpture et de Dessin in Paris at the age of fifteen, where he studied with the sculptor Justin Lequien (1826-1882) and met Aman-Jean (q.v.). At the École des Beaux-Arts three years later he was taught by Henri Lehmann (1814-1882), a former pupil of Ingres (q.v.). He developed an interest in the color theory of Michel-Eugène Chevreul, who had postulated how the isolation and juxtaposition of colors can affect their perception. In the Louvre he studied the works of two master colorists, Rubens (1577-1640) and Delacroix (q.v.). Seurat attended the Fourth Impressionist Exhibit in 1879, and he later confessed to be particularly shocked by the works of Monet (q.v.) and Pissarro (q.v.). After spending a year in military service on the Breton coast, Seurat started experimenting with drawing, using conté crayon and heavily textured "Ingres" paper to build up his figures through a wide range of tones, avoiding contour outlines. He also probably read Ogden Rood's Théorie Scientifique des Couleurs, which further investigated the perception of color and advocated the use of pure color in painting. Seurat additionally undertook to analyze the optical and emotional effects of various color combinations in his paintings, initiating studies for the Bathers at Asnières (1883, National Gallery, London). This painting appeared at the 1884 Salon des Indépendants, where he met Paul Signac (1863-1935), who became an important spokesman for neo-impressionism. Seurat's next major painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago), established him as the leader of the neo-impressionists. He began spending his summers on the Normandy coast, where he often started his large canvases that he would finish in his Paris studio during the winter. He was protective of his position as leader of the neo-impressionists, causing arguments with Pissarro and Signac in the late 1880s. His interest in using pure color influenced the symbolists as well as later "hard edge" painters of the modern era.

Inscriptions

Inscription

inscribed on verso, at bottom, in blue crayon: G. Seurat / L (?) [upside down]; on verso, right center, in red crayon: 299 [posthumous inventory number]; watermark, upper left: MICHALLET

Provenance

1888-1891

Studio of the artist [1859-1891], Paris ¹

by 1926

(Galerie Hessel, Paris)

after 1926-by 1937

(Van Diemen-Lilienfeld Galleries, New York, NY)

after 1937-by 1944

(Buchholz Gallery, New York, NY)

by 1944-1958

Alexander Bing [1879-1959], New York, NY

1958

(César de Hauke, Paris, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art)

1958-

Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

Provenance Footnotes

¹Posthumous inv. no. 299 inscribed on verso.

Citations

Trente ans d'art indépendant, 1884-1914. Exh. Cat. Paris: Société des artistes indépendants, 1926. Mentioned: p. 203, no. 3323

Seurat: His Drawings. Exh. Cat. New York: Buchholz Gallery, 1947. Mentioned: no. 26

Seligman, Germain. The Drawings of Georges Seurat. New York: Curt Valentin, 1947. Mentioned: p. 84, no. 57; Reproduced: pl. XLV

Cleveland Museum of Art, “Recent Acquisitions Press Release,” July 20, 1959, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives. archive.org

Cleveland Museum of Art, “Recent Acquisitions Press Release,” July 24, 1959, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives. archive.org

Hauke, César M de. Seurat et son oeuvre. 2 vols. Paris: Gründ, 1961. Mentioned: vol. 2, p. 272, no. 687; Reproduced: p. 273

Herbert, Robert L. Seurat's Drawings. New York: Shorewood, 1962. Mentioned: pp. 141-42, 185, no. 124; Reproduced: p. 142

The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966. Reproduced: p. 180 archive.org

The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969. Reproduced: p. 180 archive.org

Rubin, J.H. "Seurat and Theory: The Near-Identical Drawings of the Café-Concert." Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6, no. 76 (October 1970): 237-46. Mentioned: p. 246 n. 2

Chastel, André. L'opera completa di Seurat. Milan: Rizzoli, 1972. Mentioned: p. 115; Reproduced: p. 114

The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978. Reproduced: p. 223 archive.org

Breitman, Ellen. Art and the Stage. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1981. Mentioned: pp. 57-59; Reproduced: p. 57

Webb, Sheila. Paper: The Continuous Thread. Exh. Cat. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art. 1982. Mentioned: pp. 22, 66, cat. no. 8; Reproduced: p. 22

O'Toole, Judith Hansen. "Henri-Gabriel Ibels and Georges Seurat: An Attribution Confirmed." Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 69, no. 7 (September 1982): 236-42. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 236 www.jstor.org

Franz, Erich and Bernd Growe. Georges Seurat: Zeichnungen. Exh. Cat. Bielefeld: Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1983. Mentioned: pp. 87, 193, 194, no. 82; Reproduced: pl. 82

Clark, T.J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. New York: Knopf, 1984. Reproduced: p. 215

Thomson, Richard. Seurat. Oxford: Phaidon, 1985. Mentioned: p. 197

Katzive, David H. Fringe Patterns: Six Contemporary Works with Scientific or Metaphoric Ties to the 1887 Michelson-Morley Experiment. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1987. Reproduced: p. 7

Miller, Michael J. Drawing: A Glossary of Materials, Selections from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1987. Reproduced: n.p.

Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude. Chahut. Paris: Hazan, 1989. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 140

Madeleine-Perdrillat, Alain. Seurat. New York: Rizzoli, 1990. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 123

Tinterow, Gary. “The Café-Concert, 1886–1888.” In Georges Seurat, 1859-1891, edited by Robert L. Herbert. Exh. Cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 302, no. 197

Zimmerman, Michael F. Seurat and the Art Theory of His Time. Antwerp: Mercator, 1991. Mentioned: pp. 366-68, 372; Reproduced: p. 372

Coven, Jeffrey. Baudelaire's Voyages: The Poet and His Painters. Exh. Cat. Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum, 1993. Mentioned: p. 86; Reproduced: p. 85

Hammacher, A.M. Silhouette of Seurat. Otterlo: Kröller-Müller Museum, 1994. Reproduced: p. 58

DeGrazia, Diane, and Carter E. Foster. Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2000. Mentioned: pp. 8, 138-39, 291; Reproduced: p. 139

Herbert, Robert L. Seurat: Drawings and Paintings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Mentioned: pp. 113-15; Reproduced: p. 114

Stuckey, Charles. "I mattini sulla Senna di Monet." In Monet, la Senna le ninfee: Il grande fiume e il nuovo secolo, edited by Marco Goldin, 119-22. Exh. Cat. Brescia: Museo di Santa Giulia, 2004. Reproduced: p. 122

Jodi Hauptman, ed. Georges Seurat: The Drawings. Exh. Cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007. Mentioned: pp. 180-81, 254; Reproduced: p. 237, no. 128

McCaughey, Patrick. "The Dark Side of Georges Seurat." Art in America (March 2008): 138-143. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 142

Getlein, Mark. Living with Art. 8th ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2008. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 158

Prendeville, Brendan. "Seurat and the Act of Sensing: Perception as Artifact." In Seurat Re-Viewed, edited by Paul Smith, 149-62. College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Mentioned: p. 158; Reproduced: p. 159

Krčma, Ed. "Film, Drawing and the Body." In Tacita Dean: Film, edited by Nicholas Cullinan. Exh. Cat. London: Tate Modern, 2012. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 91

Foa, Michelle. Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Mentioned: p. 192; Reproduced: p. 193

Thomson, Richard. "Seurat's Circus Sideshow: A Parade of Paradoxes." In Seurat's Circus Sideshow, edited by Richard Thomson, 15-106. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017. Mentioned: pp. 21, 77, 79-80, 130, Reproduced: p. 81

“Creativity in Action," Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 60, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 26. Reproduced and Mentioned: P. 26.

Exhibition history

Possibly Exposition posthume Seurat. La Revue Blanche, Paris (1892). [according to inscription on old backing].

Possibly Les dessins de Georges Seurat 1859-1891), Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (November 29 - December 24, 1926). [according to inscription on old backing].

Van Diemen-Lilienfeld Galleries, New York (1937).

Exhibition of Drawings of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. American-British Art Center, New York (January 5 - 22, 1944).

Seurat: His Drawings. Buchholz Gallery, New York (March 4 - 29, 1947).

Aspects of Drawing. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (January 10-April 2, 1961).

19th and 20th Century Drawings. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 19-March 24, 1965).

French Drawings. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 16, 1965-February 16, 1966).

Drawings. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (June 11-October 21, 1968).

Seventeenth-, Eighteenth-, and Early Nineteenth-Century Genre and French Prints and Drawings. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (May 31-August 19, 1979).

Art and the Stage. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (May 22-August 16, 1981).

Paper: The Continuous Thread. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 31-October 24, 1982).

National Schools of Style. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (June 14-September 18, 1983).

Georges Seurat: Zeichnungen. Kunsthalle Bielefeld, D-33602 Bielefeld, Germany (organizer) (October 30-December 25, 1983); Kunsthaus Zürich, CH-8024 Zürich, Switzerland (March 27-May 15, 1984).

Georges Seurat, 1859-1891. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (September 24, 1991-January 12, 1992).

French Drawings from the Collection. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (December 13, 1994-March 12, 1995).

Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 27-October 17, 2000); The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY (May 23-August 19, 2001); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX (October 14, 2001-January 6, 2002).

Georges Seurat: The Drawings. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (organizer) (October 23, 2007-January 7, 2008).

Seurat’s Circus Sideshow. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (organizer) (February 17-May 29, 2017).

Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (January 20-April 30, 2023).

Cite this page

{{cite web|title=At the Concert Parisien|url=https://clevelandart.org/art/1958.344|author=Georges Seurat|year=1887–88|access-date=31 March 2023|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

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At the Concert Parisien

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Georges Seurat

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Georges Seurat

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