Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [77]
In the nineteenth century, merchants become patrons when visionary Parisian dealers like Durand-Ruel, Père Tonguy, and Ambroise Vollard bought works by artists the Salon rejected — “outcasts” like Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. In New York in the 1940s, Peggy Guggenheim provided a similar cushion for innovators like Duchamp, Ernst, and Pollock at her Art of This Century Gallery. The most savvy contemporary dealer is Leo Castelli, who transformed the ’60s art world when he promoted Pop artists like Rouschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein, and Warhol, then later championed Minimalists and Conceptual artists.
MONET : LIGHT = COLOR. Claude Monet (1840-1926) once said he wished he had been born blind and then gained his sight so he could, without preconceptions, truly paint what he saw. As it was, revelation came at age 18 when he began to paint out-of-doors. “Suddenly a veil was torn away,” he said. “My destiny as a painter opened out to me.”
Monet began as a commercial artist and caricaturist but after roaming the coast of Normandy painting sunlit, water-drenched scenes, he became a leading exponent of recording nature directly to convey his immediate impression of a given moment. After studying landscapes by Constable and Turner in London, Monet contributed “Impression: Sunrise” to the first Impressionist exhibit in 1874, which summed up the new movement’s theme and gave it its name forevermore. For the next half-century, while others of the original group evolved their own variations on the theme, Monet remained true to the credo that light is color.
His dedication had its price. Like Renoir, during the 1860s and ’70s, Monet suffered appalling poverty, pawning his possessions for paint. In 1869 a visitor reported that Monet was desperate: “completely starved, his wings clipped.” He only survived because Renoir brought him bread from his own table. In 1875 he begged his friends for financial assistance, writing Zola, “We haven’t a single sou in the house, not even anything to keep the pot boiling today.” Monet pleaded with collectors to take his canvases at any price and burned 200 paintings rather than let them fall into his creditors’ hands. By 1886, things were different. At the Impressionists’ first New York exhibit, Monet was an established success and could afford to build a special studio to house his huge canvases.
OBSESSION. Monet’s unwavering devotion to Impressionist ideals entailed physical as well as economic hardship. He was so obsessed with accurately portraying fugitive conditions of light that the outdoors became his studio. Regardless of weather, he hauled thirty canvases to the field to record haystacks, replacing one canvas with the next as the light changed. In winter he planted his easel in the snow and waded through ice floes in hip boots, waiting patiently for just the right slant of light on the Seine. Once, when he painted on the beach during a storm, he was swept under by a wave.
CATHEDRAL SERIES
In the 1890s Monet fixed on the idea of painting the same subject under different lighting conditions at different seasons to show how color constantly changes according to the sun’s position. His series of haystacks, poplars, water lilies, and the Rouen Cathedral show how light and weather conditions define both form and color. In the cathedral sequence of more than thirty canvases, the Gothic stone building, dependent on fleeting atmospheric effects recorded from dawn to twilight, virtually dissolves. At left in glaring daylight the cathedral appears bleached out. At right, the projecting stone catches the fading yellow light, with flaming orange concavities and shadows in complementary blue.
Monet, “Rouen Cathedral, West Facade, Sunlight,” 1894, NG, Washington, DC.
Monet, “Rouen Cathedral, Sunset,” 1892-94, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Monet loved the water, once remarking that he wished to be buried in a buoy, and painted the sea frequently. He even converted a flat-bottomed boat, fitted