Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [78]
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 out with grooves to hold his canvases, into a floating studio where he painted stacks of pictures from dawn till dusk. A visitor recalled: “In one of his Poplars the effect lasted only seven minutes, or until the sunlight left a certain leaf, when he took out the next canvas and worked on that.”
Monet’s lifelong fervor for open-air painting appeared as early as 1866 when he painted “Women in the Garden.” Although the canvas was more than eight feet high, he was determined to paint it entirely outside and had a trench dug to hold the bottom of the canvas. He then raised and lowered the painting on pulleys as he worked on different levels. When the painter Courbet visited, he was astonished that Monet threw down his paint brush, refusing to paint even background leaves when the sun went behind a cloud.
Monet, “Waterlilies,” 1919-26, Cleveland Museum of Art.
GIVERNY. When Monet went to live in Giverny, 40 miles from Paris, in 1883, it was hardly what it would become — a living canvas he called “my most beautiful masterpiece.” At first he just planted a few flowers to provide still life subjects for rainy days. In 1890 Monet began to improve the garden, planting wisteria, weeping willows, and bamboo to create “a virgin forest of highly hued blossoms.”Each day a gardener removed weeds and insects from the pond and clipped lily pods to keep the surface reflective. He even “bathed” the water lilies daily to increase their lustre. “Aside from painting and gardening, ” Monet said, “I am good for nothing. ”
Each interest fed the other until, after 1911, the garden became his sole subject. Monet gradually expanded the size of the pond and the scale of his paintings, placing canvases 6 feet high and 14 feet long side by side in triptychs. When cataracts blurred his vision, Monet’s painted water lilies became hazier and finally indistinguishable from the water and reflections. He had invented a new kind of painting that foreshadowed abstraction. “The essence of the motif is the mirror of water whose appearance alters at every moment, thanks to the patches of sky which are reflected in it, and which give it light and movement, ” he said.
Monet’s compulsion to paint was so extreme he described himself as an animal endlessly turning a millstone. During his vigil at his first wife’s deathbed, instead of mourning, he could not refrain from painting, recording blue, gray, and yellow streaks on her face as the pallor of death replaced the flush of life.
TECHNIQUE. Monet’s style consisted of applying to the canvas small dabs of pigment corresponding to his immediate visual observations. Instead of the conventional gradations of tone, he placed vibrating spots of different colors side by side. In an effect called “optical mixing,” these “broken colors” blended at a distance. To represent shadows, instead of black Monet added the complementary (or opposite) color to the hue of the object casting a shadow.
In the 1880s, Monet changed his handling of pigment. Rather than many specks of paint, he lengthened his brushstrokes into sinuous sweeps of color. In his hundreds of water lily paintings of 1900-26, Monet eliminated outlines and contours until form and line almost disappeared in interwoven brushstrokes. Vibrant colors melt into each other just as flowers blend into water and foliage. No image is the central focus, perspective ceases to exist, and reflections and reality merge in a hazy mist of swirling color. In these near-abstractions foreshadowing twentieth-century art, paint alone representing a moment of experience in light became Monet’s subject.
Vision, for Monet, was supreme. He painted his colorful visions until his death at 86. “Monet is only an eye,” Cézanne said. “But what an eye.”
RENOIR: LOVE, LUST, AND LAUGHTER. “Renoir,” a contemporary writer said, “is perhaps the only painter who never produced a sad painting.” Pierre-Auguste