Georges Seurat's Muses, Abstracted: Abstract Anonymous Labor and the Beginnings of Aesthetic Abstraction

Through a reading of Georges Seurat’s last large painting, The Models (1888), this chapter argues that by situating the nude as a common worker—neither goddess nor prostitute—undressing for pay, the artist allegorizes the motivation for aesthetic abstraction in the labor relation of real abstraction. The question of the mythical body—Venus or the Other in an orientalist vein—and the material reality of the sex worker as Manet’s Olympia had posited it, is canceled and radicalized in the figure of the wageworker. Seurat adopts the theme of the model as common worker to locate a social unconscious forged in the sale of anonymous labor-time, but which also constitutes the only social synthesis in increasingly separated social relations. Seurat’s sensitivity to the problem of social cohesion through separation, procedurally reperformed at the level of painting itself, explores labor-time as a matrix of aesthetic abstraction.