Seurat: Drawings and Paintings

Eminent art historian Robert L. Herbert (Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society) is emeritus professor at Mount Holyoke College after a long career at Yale. His commonsense approach to 19th-century art has long been a refreshment; his pioneering method of studying Impressionists, by turning the paintings upside down to see how the paint was applied, remains legendary. Seurat: Drawings and Paintings is a collection of his various articles on 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat, one of his specialties, written over the years for various hard-to-find journals, including a particularly well-reasoned essay on the painting Parade. Often summed up as ""the dot painter"" for his pointillist style, Seurat in fact had many other intriguing preoccupations as an artist, which Herbert expertly reveals. ( June)