Seurat & Pointilism

It's interesting that while Schapiro's main focus was Seurat's method while Eisenman focuses on his subject matter, they both put forth the idea that Seurat's art has a conflicting aspect to it. Schapiro writes that Seurat's art had many "striking polarities" while Eisenman describes it using the antinomy of "'photographic literalness' and a condition 'as abstract ... as pictorial art ever attained.'" Schapiro describes Seurat's dots as "a refined device" that "serves the painter as a means of ordering, proportioning, and nuancing sensation beyond the familiar qualities of the objects that the color evokes." He dejects the notion that Seurat's touch is mechanical, citing the nuances of the dots: the directionality of some, the size, the color, and densities. They look the same, but when closely examined, no dot is actually the same. Yet Seurat becomes interested in the mechanical, eventually becoming "the first modern painter who expressed in the basic fabric and orms of his art an appreciation of the beauty of modern techniques." He mechanized/systematized a way of expressing his "sensations" in a way that is still personal, however, his interest in the mechanical manifests itself in his later paintings when "the figures in the late paintings are more and more impersonal."