As the poet-critic Gustave Kahn put it, Seurat was “a young man crazy about drawing.” He worked in conté crayon (a kind of greasy charcoal) on toothy Michallet paper, without the safety net of lines. Seurat just filled in tone, progressing from light, speckled grays to velvety blacks, until the drawing “developed” like a photographic print in the darkroom. Nominally, “Railway Tracks” is a precise view of a railroad embankment punctuated by electrical power poles and a tall stand of trees. But to me, Seurat’s disbursement of just a few grams of conté is a meditation on the natural versus the industrial, on finding beauty amid the ordinary, and an aching expression of the melancholy Seurat felt about it. His drawing reminds me that small, modest art is often the most profound art of all.
