For many years, what I read about
Monet
seemed to indicate an artist with a prodigious work ethic, who went
about the labor of his profession without the hindrance of temperament.
His unwavering focus was almost intimidating. Finally, I read a book
which described his behavior on the bad weather days - when he couldn't
go out to paint the landscape. According to this book, at such times
Monet was so inconsolable that he wouldn't get out of bed. What a
relief to find him human!
He had to have
the best
eyesight in human history. What Cezanne was to cerebral painting, Monet
was to visual painting. Cezanne supposedly said of him, "Monet is just
an eye - but God, what an eye!" His placement of forms, large and
miniscule, was so precise that everything in the image was perfectly
formed and placed, just like it is when we see it in nature. But anyone
who has ever painted, particularly landscapes, knows that to achieve
the same coherence on a blank canvas is not nearly as easy as Monet
makes it look. The forms and colors are constantly misbehaving, in the
wrong places, with the wrong color.
This facility
with paint has
led some to dismiss Monet's work, along with Impressionism,
as merely
visual, naturalistic, and committing the ultimate sin - formlessness.
But to those who prize color over form, Monet's work is colossal in its
nature - just as colossal in its own way as Cezanne. Though he began
with Impressionism's fleeting moment in time, Monet's work over time
became less interested in external reality, and more in the abstract
qualities of paint on canvas. This development peaked with his late
water lilies series of large paintings, in which color, light and paint
were the subjects, anticipating mid-20th century painterly abstraction.
Claude Monet
was born in Paris
in 1840, but grew up in Le Havre, France. As a young man, he drew
caricatures of his teachers, which revealed a draftsman's ability with
portraiture. When he met the landscape painter Boudin, while Boudin was
working en plein
air (outside, rather than in his studio), he listened
to Boudin's ideas on the value of working directly from nature.
Painting outdoors didn't really become common until paint became
available in metal tubes in the 1840's. Still, artists only did oil
sketches outdoors, in preparation for their more ambitious work in
their studio. Of the 19th century Barbizon school of French landscape
painters, only Daubigny had completed his paintings outside. Boudin
stressed that a painter should retain his first impression of a scene;
and that working from life quickly and with great concentration added a
power to the work which was lost in the studio. Boudin did many small
studies, often of beach scenes, from life, which had a freshness and
spontaneity very unusual for this time period. His idea raised the
level of the "sketch" to a valid work in its own right. Monet was much
influenced by these ideas, and soon began painting landscapes from life
himself. When he announced that he wanted to study art, his business
merchant father was not enthusiastic, but reluctantly gave his
permission. So Monet went to Paris to study in the studio of the
academic painter Gleyre.
In Gleyre's
studio he met
Renoir and other young students. They sometimes were resistant to the
master's relatively academic methods, which included working from
plaster casts of antique Roman statues in the studio. This academic
training caused many 19th century paintings to be so carefully modeled
and blended that the very life was sucked out of them, and the colors
brown and dull, the colors of the studio, not the blue sky and green
grass, red flowers of the world outside. Classicism and Romanticism had
previously dueled in the 19th century official French art academy, the
Ecole des Beaux Arts (School of Fine Arts). Classicism was represented
by painters such as Ingres, who considered line and drawing to be the
important elements of painting. Delacroix represented the Romantic
school of painting, more concerned with color and brushwork. Then
Courbet, with his ideas of Realism,
challenged both Classicism and
Romanticism, with his idea that painting should only represent the real
world, with real figures, landscapes and objects of the present-day
world - not the idealized world of history, mythology and classical
subjects of Classicism and Romanticism. Monet was influenced by
Courbet's realism, however of the two other approaches, he was
definitely closer to that of Delacroix. He had experienced his military
service in Algeria shortly before his student experience of 1862-63,
and was most affected, as was Delacroix, by the intense light and color
of Africa.
At this time,
Monet also
admired the Dutch landscape painter Jongkind, the American painter
Whistler, and French painters Corot and Edouard Manet. Edouard Manet at
this time (1860's) was making a big splash in the Parisian art world,
and ruffling many academic feathers with his new way of painting.
Though he was a reluctant revolutionary, Manet's work, influenced by
the painting of Velazquez, dared to paint without the tradition of
modeling forms with shading, and blending colors smoothly together. Not
only that, it didn't deal with images from history, mythology,
classical Greece and Rome, which were currently considered to be the
acme of painting. He painted scenes of modern life, with men and women
dressed in mid-19th century Parisian fashion; though some of these
women were nude, and seemed to be frankly courtesans.
Manet was
infamous for his new
work - it was reviled by most critics and public alike, as scandalous
and improper and revolutionary. The young painters Monet, Renoir and
others were inspired to paint the life around them, in unmodeled flat
areas of paint, like Manet; and out in the open air, like Boudin and
the Barbizon painters, who painted from life in the forests of
Fountainbleau, such as Daubigny, Corot and others. In 1863, Monet saw
Manet's painting Dejeuner sur
l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) at the
Salon des Refuses exhibition (for those who had been rejected from the
official Salon).
Monet was inspired to paint a large image (20
feet wide) similar to Manet's, his own Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, from life out-of-doors, with
his friends posing for him. In the same year, the Salon exhibition
became an annual event. Monet first submitted a work to the Salon in
1865, and was accepted by the jury. He only exhibited there twice more
after this - like the other Impressionists, his work was often rejected
from the Salon. Later, in 1874, Monet convinced Manet to also paint en
plein air, rather than in the studio.
Manet had begun
the revolution
in painting - switching from the accepted tradition of chiaroscuro
(shading of lights and darks to define three-dimensional form), to the
new way of applying flat, unblended patches of color ("broken" color),
rather than lights and darks to indicate rounded forms. This new
approach was flat, rather than three-dimensional, a result of the
influence of Japanese prints at this time. Rather than using
perspective and other spatial cues to indicate depth into space, the
new approach favored a decorative flatness, with no illusion of depth.
Monet extended this pictorial idea to use dots and patches to indicate
forms, such as trees and foliage. Rather than drawing with line, then
filling the shapes with color, Monet drew and painted simultaneously -
the color, light, value
and form of the subject, with strokes of
precisely related hues and values. His forms were exact - but without
the use of line, and with superb paint handling. It seems to me that he
was the first painter to use the color violet - as a color in itself,
and as a "substitute" for black in defining forms. This reflected the
new emphasis on color, rather than values of light and dark. He
approached the problem of indicating the whole tree, versus indicating
all the individual leaves, by inventing a visual equivalent of multiple
forms (leaves) with patches of light and color, without actually
painting each leaf (spelling out). Like Cezanne and all great painters,
each stroke served multiple functions of value, color, spatial
position, form and light. A new way of representing reality was also
the replacement of the former static quality of painting with a blurry
sense of flux (movement) - particularly attuned to the increased pace
of life during the Industrial Revolution occuring at this time. And
though earth tones were still used, they were used in conjunction with
a new palette of primary and secondary colors - bright, undiluted reds,
yellows, blues, greens, violets, etc.
Monet, as
everyone knows, was
primarily a landscape painter. But early in his career, he painted
portraits, still lifes and interiors which showed amazing ability in
these types of images, also. He simply preferred the landscape, and
water in particular, first the seacoast, then the Seine River, and
finally the pond in his garden at Giverny. Monet, Renoir, and by this
time Pissarro, Morisot, Sisley, Bazille, and at this point Cezanne, and
others were now joining together in their new vision of painting.
Monet's first landscapes, although freshly and boldly painted, had not
been so very far from the officially accepted rules of painting. Now he
used his friends as models, at picnics under shady trees - his female
companion Camille among them. They were very large, and at times his
ambition exceeded his ability to pull them off. He and Renoir, in
particular, began to develop their new way of applying paint, often
painting together. At this early stage, their paintings are very hard
to tell apart, such as their images of the boathouse parties on
weekends in La Grenouillere in suburban Paris in 1869.
Meanwhile,
Monet's father was
not thrilled with his son's lifestyle; when Camille was pregnant with
Monet's child, his father forced him to come home, leaving Camille to
fend for herself. When the baby was born, Monet had the heavy
responsibility of caring for them both, with the earnings of a very
young, very unsuccessful painter. He carried this burden for many
years, and struggled mightily with poverty and the stress caused by
Camille's poor health, and his inability to pay for her medical care.
His friend, the wealthy Bazille, whose family fortune and profession as
a doctor enabled him to paint without worries, helped Monet financially
many times. There are a number of letters from Monet to Bazille, in
which Monet pleaded his financial crises. Bazille, being unfamiliar
with such situations, sometimes forgot to send money. At one point,
Monet threw himself in the river; after he changed his mind, he wrote
to Bazille, telling him of his near fatality.
Renoir also
struggled. He had
been born into a working class family, and had no assistance either.
But the two, as well as the other future Impressionists, kept on their
path, though only a few critics and friends were supportive of their
work, and much of the time they were not only rejected from the Salon,
but jeered by a public used to the drab brown of the successful
painters, and the careful modeling of their images. To them, it seemed
that these misguided painters were simply flinging paint at the canvas
randomly, not displaying the important skills of an artist - correct
drawing, blended colors, subdued colors, classical subjects, etc.
Monet's historic painting, Impression
Sunrise, gave them the ammunition they
needed, to dub the new movement Impressionism. These paintings made use
of spontaneous painting - dabs, smears and scribble-type marks. Not
much chance of them earning a living as a painter there... One true
friend, Victor Chocquet, championed them actively by standing in front
of their work and defending it to mocking passersby, trying to explain
this new vision. Renoir and Cezanne both painted Chocquet's portrait in
a very sympathetic manner (and very differently from one another). They
were insulted, of course, by the rejection from the official Salon
every year; but they also joked about it, and Cezanne supposedly
considered it a badge of honor. Around 1872 was the beginning of 'true'
Impressionism. In 1874 the group held the first Impressionist
exhibition, the first of many over many years' time, since they
couldn't show their work at the official Salon much.
Monet was never
interested in
aesthetic battles, or in theories of painting. It was just him and
nature. The characteristic visual qualities of Impressionism were never
carried out systematically, but rather with joyous spontaneity. The
juxtapositions of color patches, looking haphazard close up, merged
when the viewer stepped back a few feet from the canvas. There was a
great new freedom in their work, but it was also carefully composed,
though often on the spot. In their work, the identity of individual
objects and forms merged to form the collective whole of the
composition. They didn't use linear perspective or other spatial cues
to indicate distance. Their images were not of solid forms - they were
interested in an atmospheric rather than a volumetric quality. When
Monet painted his series of Poplars, his interest was in creating
an atmosphere - the poplars were just the vehicle he used to do this.
He was not only interested in light on objects, he was interested in
the light between objects - the atmosphere. He also was interested in
an underlying rectilinear structure, or skeleton; his Rouen Cathedral and Poplar series are examples of this.
He, more than any other Impressionist, remained true to its character,
in one way or another, to the end of his career. His late water lily
series of paintings realized a long quest to work from life, on a
mural-sized scale. They also were open compositions,
meaning that the
painting and the space seemed to continue beyond the four edges of the
canvas - a modern tendency, and that there was free movement between
the forms in the painting.
It wasn't until
about the age
of 40 that Monet began to achieve some acceptance and success. In the
meantime he continued to struggle, but he also continued to paint.
Camille succumbed early on to ill health, and died in 1879, leaving
Monet with his young sons, Jean and Michel. Monet eventually married a
family friend, Mme. Hoschede, and they lived happily, with her
children, for many years. In 1883 the family moved to Giverny, where he
constructed his famous garden. His work went through a long transition,
from early naturalism to Impressionism, to studies of fleeting light
effects, to views of his prized garden and the Japanese footbridge he
had built specially. Japanese prints had a significant effect on
European artists in the second half of the 19th century, with their
decorative, flat quality, and the frontal quality of their
compositions. He began to paint his water lilies, first as part of the
Giverny garden ensemble of water, bridge and flowers. But in his later
life he began to zero in on the water lilies almost exclusively, using
the surface of the water as a metaphor for the painting's surface, with
freely moving lines, areas, and dabs of color. The orchestration of the
color relationships is also the subject of the paintings. They were
large rectangles, much wider than high, which he placed next to one
another in a continuous circle, inside a specially constructed
building, so that the viewer could turn 360 degrees and see all water -
all painting.
In his later
years he finally
achieved the respect and success he had waited for. When his second
wife died, he became very depressed, and stopped painting for a time -
probably the only time. But he came back to it, as always, and lived a
long life, until 1926. Toward the end of his life, he became so blind
as to barely see, and still he painted. Some of these last paintings
are very loose in handling, and the colors are so garish that you have
to wonder if maybe he couldn't really see at all. But he couldn't stop,
just like his fellow Impressionist Degas, who suffered the same fate
and responded to it in the same way. Just keep painting.
Needless to
say, many artists
have been influenced by Monet's work. Probably 20th century color
field
painting owes him a large debt, as well as painterly
abstractionists
such as Jules Olitski, Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, and many others. His
mastery of color is unmatched; like Cezanne, his every touch is
absolute without question. As all painters know, his perfection may
look facile, but actually is nigh impossible to duplicate. As a young
man looking at nature and trying to come up with a visual equivalent,
he supposedly asked, "What do you do with all those leaves?" (other
than paint each one, one by one). He figured it out, without painting
each one - by just suggesting, not spelling out. Yet his images have
the conviction of nature. The Impressionists are so-called not just
because they worked loosely, with small spontaneous dabs. Their
important contribution was their use of color - by using the color
theories developed in the 19th century, they optically mixed color with
red next to yellow, rather than orange, and many more subtle, unnamable
colors in this fashion. Their use of color complementaries and
harmonies changed the entire course of painting, going from the
value-based traditional painting, to the color-based modern vision.
Where black had been the common denominator, violet, red, green,
yellow, and blue now described a modern world in constant motion, with
casual and spontaneous force.
In this way,
the Impressionists
revolutionized painting; they were the first modern artists, who
changed the way we see the world. And Monet was the unquestionable
leader of this group - ambitious, hard-working, bold, focused - he was
a damn good painter. To my mind, Impressionism is a good starting point
- both historically and artistically. For a young artist, nothing is
more liberating than to see color and form abstractly - not as 'leaf,'
'tree,' 'house' - but as Monet advised an American painter, an oblong
of pink, a square of blue, a streak of yellow. It is the first step in
learning to see form and color visually, abstractly, rather than in the
conventional, non-visual way. From this freeing beginning, young
artists can develop their own vision in new and unexpected ways. It is
the beginning of an improvisational approach to painting.
Monet painted
his Giverny water
landscapes for 27 years; they reflected peace and contemplation. When
he died in 1926, the foremost French painter, these landscapes were
installed in two oval rooms in the Orangerie of the Tuileries Gardens.
Like his mature work, they were of a kind of metaphysical naturalism.
Monet's remarks to his friend Georges Clemenceau described this as not
reducing the world to your measure; but to enlarge your knowledge of
the world. You will then enlarge yourself and your self-knowledge. Like
other creators of perfection - Cezanne, Beethoven - there is a tacit
acknowledgement of a reality existing beyond appearances.
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