A
frenzied gesticulation suddenly invades Seurat's art in the final two years
of his life. Seurat studied and collected Jules
Chéret's posters, and their compositional form is felt in Le
Chahut. The curled mustache repeated in the dancer's turned-up lips,
the decorations and ribbons on the dancers' shoulders and shoes, the strange
similarity of male and female legs, everything here expresses the taste for
peculiar detail.
This
exuberance, however, does not conceal the extreme rigor of the composition.
Seurat inscribes his network of diagonals on a regular geometrical background.
A figure in the foreground stabilizes the composition, as one does in Le
Cirque. Between background and foreground breaks occur. Seurat arranges
in the intermediary space of Le Chahut a series of arc-shaped
curves created by the dancers legs. Monsieur Seurat' wrote Félix
Fénéon in 1889, knows very well that a line, independent
of its representational role, has an appraisable abstract value.