«Among the greatest artistic surprises of the second half
of the 19th century is certainly Seurat's fundamental make-over
of the art of drawing, an astonishing rebirth. Even if we were unfamiliar
with the entire corpus of his paintings, we would consider him a first-rate
artist merely on the strength of his drawn oeuvre.»
Gottfried Boehm

Seurat began his career with drawing, and he never abandoned the medium. The intensive encounter with the human form that would become so characteristic of the mature artist was already visible in his attempts as a student, while in later drawings he was to achieve a remarkable balance between figurative contingency and technical autonomy. Pencil lines woven densely across the paper cause the subject to emerge as something vague and floating, or perhaps to vanish entirely. Striking chiaroscuro effects play about his figures, accentuating them and lending them an otherworldly aura, as in 'At the Concert Européen' (1886-88), from New York's Museum of Modern Art. In Seurat's paintings, too, the representation of people in space is of central importance. Another spectacular masterpiece on show at the Kunsthaus is 'Circus' (1890/91), on loan from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
Works such as 'The Gardener' (c. 1882), from the Kunsthaus Zürich collection, and 'Stone Breaker and Wheelbarrow, Le Raincy' (1882) can be adduced to indicate a caesura in Seurat's creative career. While he had initially oriented his work to the thinking of groups like the École de Barbizon, to periods such as the Renaissance, or to fellow artists including Puvis de Chavannes, in these pieces Seurat suddenly began painting his subjects with a new technique and setting them in innovative compositions. This avant-garde rebellion would be lent further impetus in later works in which he repeated or varied forms and subjects within the same painting. Seurat transformed his pictorial space and the figures placed within it into a geometrical phenomenon, and thus followed his invention of Pointillism with further proof of his avant-garde mettle, in this case with 'Eiffel Tower' (1889). The gigantic tower, a controversial feat of engineering erected between 1887 and 1889 for the World Fair in Paris, became Seurat's motif in 1889 even before it was complete. The painting is only 24 by 15 centimeters in size - and yet it glows like the very symbol of an entire era it portrays!
Artists like the Italian Futurists, Fernand Léger and Le Corbusier were enthusiastic about their debt to Seurat, and helped continue his scientifically informed work into the 20th century.