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.
I fully agree, having just seen the painting in Washington, DC
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.
The point is, that ‘changing the art form’ is never a proper inspiration for real artists, because it rings like a matter of the ‘language’. The difference in manner / style that original artists present, i.e. their originality, their individualism, may have an influence on other, later artists, as a result but not as a conscious goal. It is quite trivial to think that way.
It is well-known that Beethoven wanted to ‘change his manner’, but obviously because he had different inner, musical visions that he wanted to express, and thus needed to adapt his manner of writing to be able to express these musical visions. I know of only one serious composer who consciously and rationally set-out to change ‘the historic development of music’ and imagined he had found ‘a system that would garantee the supremacy of German music for the next hundreds of years’: Schönberg. And we know what the result was. This historicism was adapted later-on by 20C avantgardes which led to the destruction of that very tradition.
Interestingly, Debussy (heavily inspired by both painting and poetry) rejected all conventional rules and deleted all forced rationality from his composition style. During his life time he was often referred to as a revolutionary who had changed music. He himself denied that entirely in 1910: “I don’t revolutionise anything, I don’t break-down anything. I calmly go my own way, without the slightest propaganda for my ideas, that is how revolutionaries do it.” Yet he has been classified as a great revolutionary who drastically changed music and who influenced numerous composers after him, notably Stravinsky, Bartok, Scriabine, Szymanowski and hordes of cheap foggy imitators. His works have entered the repertoire, Schönberg’s not – apart from his early, traditional works.
I had to chuckle, because it appears that you presciently read my mind. I was all ready to post “But what about Gurrelieder?,” but your final six words put the Kibosh on that!
That said, I am a big fan of Harold Bloom’s “The Anxiety of Influence.” “Because poets historically emphasize an original poetic vision in order to guarantee their survival into posterity, the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence
Bloom died in 2019, so I never got the chance to drop him a line along the lines of: “Hey, Buddy; I loved your book. But what you wrote about poets goes double for composers! It took Brahms something like 14 years to overcome his Anxiety over Beethoven’s Influence.”
FWIW & YMMV.
Pax, Lux, et Veritas,
john
Our perspectives are likely closer than you think. I’m not suggesting that Monet, or Beethoven, *set out* thinking “how can I change the course of my artform” and then settle on impressionism or romanticism as their solution, merely that they wanted to do something both significant to themselves personally and — not incidentally — distinct from the work of their forebears. I think Schoenberg was the same, all the way through his atonal but pre-serial phase. After all, he considered himself a continuation of Brahms… But then he tried to set up a new formalism, and (with exceptions) that led to an overemphasis on the intellectual aspects of his art and an unwelcome rigor, hand in hand with his insistence on making it a prescription for his successors.
Academia may be too prone to put works of art in a historic context, but how do you explain that the Impressionists all came along at the same time? I’ll quote from Sebastian Smee’s new book, “Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism” (pp. 80-81):
“At the beginning of 1870 … [n]one of these future ‘impressionists,’ as they were to be labeled, were clear about where they were going or how best to proceed. They knew they didn’t want to paint like … artists who won plaudits … at the Salon by painting flawless, fantasy nudes and finely detailed historical scenes…. Light, and the way it fell on bodies and things. was what interested them.”
Based on this, Smee would apparently say that the Impressionists, to quote your comment, were following “their own individual tastes, talents, opinions,” yet they were also deliberately establishing a new approach. That seems the essence of Peter San Diego’s comment below.
I think that is interpreted entirely wrong. This group of young artists agreed among themselves that the officially-approved way of painting, in terms of subject and of execution, did not appeal to them as something authentic, but as something superficial and lacking taste, in spite of its technical brilliance. So, it was a matter of seeking real visual experience, and not ‘changing the development of painting’ or anything. They reacted against a contemporary academic version of tradition, not against tradition itself. They did not set-out to launch te movement of impressionism, that was only the result, never their motivation. Imagine Monet deciding one day: we are going to be the impressionists and be modern.
After artists do something of value, there lands a sauce of academic interpretation that they themselves did not create.