Likely Pairings: Seurat & WC Williams

These things are intersecting for me right now, due to some reading I'm doing for the art history discussion section I have to lead on Monday, and for the dissertation chapter I'm working on. I don't have a coherent story to wrench them all together right now, but it has something to do with modernism and modernity, populism, class consciousness in art, and the epic impulse in painting vs poetry.


Georges Seurat, Dimanche après-midi à l'île de La Grande Jatte (1886)


From William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Book Two, "Sunday in the Park" (1948)

So during the early afternoon, from place
to place he moves,
his voice mingling with other voices
--the voice in his voice
opening his old throat, blowing out his lips,
kindling his mind (more
than his mind will kindle)

--following the hikers.

At last he comes to the idlers' favorite
haunts, the picturesque summit, where
the blue-stone (rust-red where exposed)
has been faulted at various levels
(ferns rife among the stones)
into rough terraces and partly closed in
dens of sweet grass, the ground gently sloping.

Loiterers in groups straggle
over the bare rock-table--scratched by their
boot-nails more than the glacier scratched
them--walking indifferent though
each other's privacy .

in any case,
the center of movement, the core of gaiety.

From T.J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life (1984/1999)

"...[Seurat] wished the viewer to see a new version of Phidias's Panathenaic procession, with 'the moderns moving about the same way, friezelike, stripped down to their essentials.' The picture is epic, that presumably is what Seurat meant: large in scale and positive in its overall attitude to the events it chooses; concerned to give them definite form, and not afraid to repeat itself a bit in the process, or to relish the accidental intricacies thrown up by the hard, bright detail; certain, above all, that what was shown was somehow historical, a grand new ordering of the most important matters of the moment."

And... what the hell, why not?

Scene from Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George," Wyndham Theatre, London (2006)