Ruth Leon recommends…. How Claude Monet Transformed French Painting
Ruth Leon recommendsHow Claude Monet Transformed French Painting
Today would have been the 184th birthday of Claude Monet except that he died in 1926 at the age of 86.
He led the way to twentieth-century Modernism by developing a unique style that strove to capture on canvas the very act of perceiving nature. He learned to paint what he saw, not what he could recreate later in the studio, and some of his works even have traces of sand from the beaches where he worked.
In 1873 his painting, Impression, Sunrise, was displayed at an independent exhibition put on by Monet and his friends, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Manet, Pisarro and others. This painting drew particular scorn for the unfinished appearance of its loose handling and indistinct forms. Yet the artists saw the criticism as a badge of honour, and subsequently called themselves ‘Impressionists’ after the painting’s title’
Within this group, Impressionism was born, an “impression” of how a landscape, thing, or person appeared to them at a certain moment in time. This often meant using much lighter and looser brushwork than painters had up until that point, and painting out of doors.
Impressionism, broadly viewed, was a celebration of the pleasures of middle-class life; indeed Monet’s subject matter often involved domestic scenes featuring his family and garden. His homes and gardens became gathering places for friends, including Manet and Renoir, who often painted alongside him at Giverny.
Most of us know the work he painted late in his life. In the 1910s and 1920s, Monet focused almost exclusively on the picturesque water-lily pond that he created on his property at Giverny. His final series depicts the pond in a set of mural-sized canvases where abstract renderings of plant and water emerge from broad strokes of colour and intricately built-up textures. But there was so much more.
This biographical film gives a rounded picture of one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth or, for that matter, any century.
“Impression, Sunrise,” which usually resides at the Musée d’Orsay, is now on display in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in the “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment” exhibit, until January 19.
In 2002, I saw “Impression Sunrise” at the Musée Marmottan (since renamed Musée Marmottan Monet). It was larger than I had imagined and the colors were deeper and richer than 4 color printing can muster.
Yes, Monet was a great artist. But why are such people almost always described as ‘… he led the way to….’ and ‘… he transformed painting / music / literature / poetry into ….’ This way of thinking tries to asses the worth and importance of an artist as if he is working on a historic line of development, where his efforts can only be judged from historic perspectives. But that is utterly misleading of course, an artist achieves something that is, or is not, meaningful on its own. Artists don’t work from a historical perspective but from their own individual tastes, talents, opinions, and look at any material around them for learning and inspiration. Nothing less, nothing more.
Imagine Monet would set-out to the beach to paint his visual experiences of the sea with the idea of: ‘now I’m going a bit forward again to lead the way to the future’, or ‘I’m going to change painting again by what I see today’. It is the result of academia which wants to put works of art in a historic context to ‘explain’ them. And this was picked-up by modernism, to grab at any means to defend ideas which were indefensible in practice. And this mythology we find now everywhere.
I think both sorts of artists exist: those who paint exclusively via an inner drive (which sometimes leads them to new developments), and those who consciously strive to change the course of their art. “Impression, Sunrise” may have been expressive of Monet’s inner drive, but it certainly sparked an artistic movement of expressly progressive (pardon the use of a loaded term; I intend it as a neutral descriptor here) intent, and I’m willing to wager that Monet was aware of that, and of his role — and he didn’t shy away from it.
Most artists likely combine the two. Beethoven followed his inner drive, but he was certainly aware that he was changing the direction and nature of musical composition — and he wasn’t shy about it, either.