MPRESSIONISM
CLAUDE MONET,EDOUARD MANET
ART LESSON 12:
Study the following texts and be prepared to answer any question on the content.
a) Delacroix once said that Nature was a kind of dictionary useful for information, the raw material with which the painter could work. A generation later painters were insisting that Nature also provided forms of expression, of style, - that each subject in Nature had its proper pictorial form which the painter was obliged to learn from. It was not until the Impressionists - and Monet in particular - that this kind of collaboration matured. With them there is continual exchange. Once the look of the subject became all-important, had taken precedence over what the subject signified in itself, or over the traditional laws of drawing or composition, it was possible for the things painters discovered by observation and practice to become part of a new kind of pictorial structure.
b) By the 1890-s Monet’s main output was of pictures painted in series. With these he could work for a short while only on each canvas just as long as the particular effect of sunlight and atmosphere held, and would then switch to another, not returning to the original canvas until another day saw the return of the original effect.
c) Monet’s art, whose roots were firmly embedded in realism, was becoming, in a certain sense, less real, more abstract, more aesthetic, more self-contained. How else to paint when your subject lasted no more than half an hour a day and you had committed yourself to work from observation? What was looked at became less important as the act of looking became more.
d) The most important of Monet’s series was one of Rouen Cathedral. It comprises more than twenty variations. Nothing illustrates more clearly that the essential thing for Monet was not the subject but the effect it produced at different times of the day, in fair weather or cloud, in clear air or mist. Never before had anyone changed their position so little and discovered so many facets in a single subject; or, rather, never before had anyone caught with such sensibility the miraculous and multiple reality of light and atmosphere; nor ever, it is true, had anyone sacrificed to such a degree the substance, consistency and weight of things; the facade of the cathedral is reduced to subtly coloured veil and there remains only a reminder of its structure.
e) Manet is different from the others in that he is an artist of the preceding generation and is therefore a “precursor”, painting with the same powerful brush, faces or “still life”. In his art, by technique and subject, he is certainly revolutionary. But he still retains something from his “grand bourgeois” background. His portraits are many and his compositions with characters as well. All his work, no matter what was thought at the time, remains more or less traditional, but one feels that the artist has introduced a more intimate feeling than that found in the classical school.
f) Monet: No one presents impressionism better than Monet (1840-1926), no one has illustrated it with greater boldness, more logic and less compromise.
By the beginning of the 1880-s Monet, common with most of his colleagues, had begun to take stock of his position and to look for ways of extending the impressionist style that he had developed to such a fine pitch during the preceding decade. He began to search for new subjects and his attitude alternated between two extremes: on the one hand travelling restlessly after exotic motifs and extreme effects - going all over France, to the Riviera, to Brittany, exploring the challenge offered by powerful local colour, by spectacular light, or natural formations; and, on the other, admitting to himself that the subject was nothing but a pretext, more or less favourable, for observing particular conditions of light and atmosphere.
It was out of the second frame of mind that there developed the practice which he was increasingly to follow, of painting pictures of the same subjects in series. The first move in this direction had been made in the winter of 1876-77 when he painted a number of canvases at the Gare St Lazare, several of them identical in viewpoint, but each exploring with intense attention both the changing disposition of the trains and the changing combinations of smoke and steam and of light filtered through them. By the 1890s his main output was of pictures painted in series, the most famous being the “Haystacks”.
What colours are shadows really? How does sunlight effect the edges of things? What is the relationship between local colours and the colours of the ensemble, the envelope of light and atmosphere that covers everything? To answer questions like these Monet worked at the seaside, in snow-covered landscapes or from models posed by the banks of rivers and under sunlit foliage. Artistic theory absorbed more and more of the visible world and was in turn extended by the material that it absorbed. It is impossible to imagine how the tonality of Monet’s painting would have developed if it had not been for the vast skies and the reflective, glittering surfaces of sea and sand and shingle; or his colour, if it had not been for the blues and violets that are the shadows of sunlit snow, or his handling if it had not been for the fragmentation and inter-penetration that is brought about by leaves or ripples or reflections. His art was founded on looking. Cezanne once said, “Monet was only an eye, but what an eye!”
Thus the subjects he painted were of formative importance. They seemed in themselves to be taking a hand in the stylistic experimentation that was central to his work. Yet, in another sense, subject-matter meant less than it had ever been done before. If it was just the look of the subject that mattered, then it hardly mattered what it was in itself. A satisfactory subject could be no more than an effect of light, of atmosphere - it could happen anywhere - it had no history, no association, no place in earlier art, no broader, human meaning.
The more Monet pursued these fleeting changes of light, the more sensitive he became to them. He was to make several rueful remarks later about his naïve belief that he could capture what he wanted with a few canvases only. The more he painted, the faster he had to move to keep up.
g) Manet: Manet “…neither claimed to throw over old forms of painting, nor to create new ones. He simply sought to be himself and no one else.” If Manet (1832-1883) thought it necessary to write this in the catalogue of his exhibition in 1867, it was undoubtedly less to reveal his true intentions than to camouflage them before the eyes of a hostile public. He, whose Dejeuner sur l’Herbe had been inspired by Raphael and Giorgione, who had painted his Olympia inspired by Titian’s Venus of Urbano, could not fail to realise the novelty of his paintings since they immediately invited one to measure distance which separated them from their models. … The two men in the Dejeuner l’Herbe, you might have met them, wearing the same clothes on the boulevards of Paris. Far from any idealisation, the body of this naked woman is as individualised as her face. As for the light, it is cold and ordinary. The whole picture possesses a realistic note which contradicts the absurd situation in which the figures are shown. The same applies to Olympia. A critic wrote: ”Mr. Manet who paints sullied virgins will not be accused of idealising foolish virgins.” What was the meaning, beside that sickly anaemic, “cadaverous” nude, in the presence of the Negress and that black cat, which “leaves the imprint of its paws on the bed?” The truth is that in these two works the subject is nothing more than a pretext; essential is not the relationship which might exist between the principal figures, it is that which exists between the colours, between the forms. When Manet wanted to add a light patch with a dark note, he painted a man in a black jacket, a Negress, a cat. In other words painting, which up to then had been nothing but a means, becomes an end in itself.
The style of Olympia was disconcerting, too. These flattened volumes, these wiry outlines, these shadows which “are indicated by streaks of boot polish of varying width”, these vast light areas that collide with dark ones without any intermediate transitional stage, this reduction of depth that brings out the figures with precision, like close-ups on a screen; all this is contrary to painting as it had been practised in Europe ever since the 15th century, all this heralds the painting to the future.
In 1874 Berthe Morisot drew him closer to the impressionists. Manet altered his palette making use of brighter, more luminous colours, but he very rarely got down to painting a pure landscape. Although he was ready to observe the play of light, atmospheric effects on the Seine or on the Grand Canal in Venice, he refused to sacrifice tangible elements; he continued to value the presence of human forms, their firmness and their balance.
Without any doubt he remained faithful to the human image also because he enjoyed watching the society of his period. The elegant, strolling crowd attracted by the music in the Tuileries or a masked ball at the Opera, road-menders in the rue de Berne, these were some of his subjects. He looked at them with detachment as if they were objects in front of a camera. Yet his art goes beyond a cold objectivity; although Manet was not passionately involved when he was looking, he was when he was painting. Alert, carried away, at the same time very free and very evocative, his touch resembles that of Franz Hals and Velasquez.
As for his colouring it appears to have nothing far-fetched, yet it is distinguished. His somewhat acid freshness at times becomes frigid, but the effect is rich and heady. When Manet adopted the palette of the Impressionists he did not, however, give up permanently the greys and blacks with which he had before 1874 been able to create such superb effects.
2. Render the following piece into English and go on speaking describing a picture by Manet or Monet, teacher’s choice:
Становление импрессионизма как направления в 70-е годы особенно сблизило Мане с младшими коллегами. Выезды на натуру и пленэр в парижские окрестности вместе с Клодом Моне дали ему новые мотивы, ещё решительнее очистили палитру, омыли её солнечными потоками, пронизали воздухом, научили кисть большей текучести и лёгкости…. Однако, в отличие от некоторых слишком радикально настроенных собратьев по импрессионизму, Мане сохраняет определённость форм, ценит ритм линейно-красочных контуров и остроту продуманной сюжетной детали.
3. Comment on the idea expressed in the underlined sentences:
Time and again Monet, who was going blind, wrote that he could do no more. But once and again he would immerse himself in his pool of memories and sensations. Total immersion: this is the ultimate reason why the love of nature has been for so long accepted as a religion. It is a means by which we can lose our identity in the whole and gain thereby a more intense consciousness of being.