WONDER
WORKING MAGIC
Curated by Joy Pepe
Curated by Joy Pepe
Seurat’s Mother (After Georges Seurat)
1974
An homage to the exquisite crayon drawings of the Post-Impressionist painter, Georges Seurat, Sheldon Krevit re-presents Seurat’s 1882 drawing (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) of his mother. Her mature age counters the adoration of youthfulness in modern society.
The exact reproduction of the drawing can be placed in the PostModernist approach in the early 1980s of artist/photographer, Sherrie Levine, who took a photograph of a reproduction of Walker Evans’s famous Depression era photograph of Allie Mae Burroughs, thereby putting into question the authority and originality of the revered canon of Western male artists. It may also be seen as a re-take of Seurat’s Young Woman Powdering Herself (c. 1889–90, Courtauld Institute Gallery, London).
Rather than the vanity of youth, Krevit’s mature woman concentrates on her minute task. Embroidery was one of many learned domestic abilities that defined a woman’s character. And the intricacies of the craft created wondrous designs. However, this attention to her needlework craft can also remind us of the knitting of the imposing and frightening Madame LaFarge in Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities (1859) at the
guillotines in revolutionary France in the late eighteenth century, inscribing the names of the dead, even predicting them, in yarn.
Joy Pepe, Curator