Nocturnes

April 7, 2008 / Add comment

Updike's masterful descriptions shine as he reviews a collection of essays about the Museum of Modern Art's exhibit of Georges Seurat's drawings -- but he also offers his own ruminations on the drawings. They're fatiguing, he writes, in part because they're mostly black-and-white, but also because the pointillism technique takes on the feel of badly pixelated digital images when the bright colors are reduced to monochrome. Updike is at his best describing the social context of the pieces, from Paris' working-class industrial environs to the street fairs, carnivals, and theaters of Seurat's later work.