Claude Monet. Volume 2. Nina Kalitina
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dress gave way to a more profound grasp of the aesthetic of Japanese art, although here too Monet did not merely follow the lead of other artists, and was swayed more by inner impulse than outside influence.
Throughout Monet’s series the basic subject remains unchanged but the lighting varies. Thus as the eye becomes accustomed to looking at one and the same object, it gradually loses interest in the thing itself and, like the artist, the viewer is no longer attracted by the subject as such, but rather by the changing light playing on its surfaces.
Poplars on the Epte, 1891. Oil on canvas,
81.8 × 81.3 cm. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
His Life – His Series
It is light that becomes the ‘hero’ of each painting, dictating its own laws, colouring objects in various ways, imparting either solidity or transparency, and altering contours by either rendering the boundaries of forms uncertain, or making them perceptible only as sharp silhouettes.
At Giverny, series painting became one of Monet’s chief working procedures. Thirty years later he recounted how he had arrived at it:
I was painting some haystacks which had caught my eye and which made a terrific group, just a short distance from here. One day I noticed that my light had changed. I said to my stepdaughter, “Go to the house and get me another canvas, if you don’t mind.” She brought it to me, but shortly after, it was different again. Another! And one more! And I wouldn’t work on any of them unless I had my effect, and that was it.
The haystacks became a nearly endless series in his work.
He painted them at the very beginning of summer, on the green grass, and in winter, with a thin layer of snow covering them. To Monet’s sensitive eye there was an infinite diversity of colours in this mass of dry, yellowed grass.
In various combinations, his red, brown, green, and even blue brushstrokes depicted the way the colours change according to the distribution of light. Monet was remarkably consistent in his approach to his research.
He worked like a scholar stubbornly pursuing the objective he had set for himself. The poplar trees along the Epte river also became the object of his painting researches.
At first he was attracted to the rhythmic beauty of these soaring trees. Then came the phase of meticulously studying the modifications in their colour.
At the beginning of the 1890s Monet travelled to Rouen. In 1892 he went there to purchase back some of his own paintings that his half-sister Marie had inherited. Monet took a room facing the famous Gothic cathedral.
As he had to stay in Rouen for some time, he began to paint the cathedral from his window.
He had meant to return to Giverny after several days, but his work absorbed him completely. He painted the cathedral in all weather and at all times of day or night.
Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect (Le Parlement, effet de soleil), 1903.
Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 92.1 cm. Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Houses of Parliament, Stormy Sky, 1904.
Oil on canvas, 81 × 92 cm. Palais des Beaux-arts, Lille.
When lit by the sun at midday the enormous mass of the cathedral dissolved in the hazy heat, its contours became blurred, and the building became lighter and nearly transparent.
At night the blue shadows were deeper and denser, and the gothic-filigree stonework of the façade appeared in all its splendour. In reality the motif in Monet’s painting was not Rouen Cathedral at all, it was the light and air of Normandy.
The result was a veritable symphony of colours. Art had never, up to that point, seen anything like it.
In the spring of 1895 Monet opened his exhibition, where he showed twenty variations of his Rouen Cathedral. Sadly, the critics’ exhortations to the buyers to purchase the series as a whole went unheard, and Monet’s ‘Cathedrals’ were scattered throughout the world.
The meadows of Giverny always remained his favourite motif. In the luxuriantly flowering grass with its poppies exploding in tiny flames, Monet’s practiced eye, trained by years of work, could distinguish a vast number of graded nuances.
He created an extremely delicate mosaic on the canvas, composed of tiny brushstrokes of colour. Paul Cézanne, who had criticised Monet for copying unthinkingly from nature, said of him one day, “He’s nothing but an eye.”
But, quickly catching himself, he added “But what an eye!” These meadows became his permanent workplace.
When a journalist, who had come from Vétheuil to interview Monet, asked him where his studio was, the painter answered, “My studio! I’ve never had a studio, and I can’t see why one would lock oneself up in a room. To draw, yes – to paint, no.”
Then, broadly gesturing towards the Seine, the hills, and the silhouette of the little town, he declared, “There’s my real studio.”
He painted a field of poppies, and created the impression of wind not only with the rippling shapes of the trees, but also in the way the painting itself was executed. Brushstrokes of pure colour – red, blue, and green – are applied to the canvas with apparent randomness.
The tangle of these colours renders the effect of the grass stirring under the wind’s breath and, in addition, composes a wonderful tapestry.
Waterloo Bridge, London, at Dusk, 1904. Oil on canvas, 65.7 × 101.6 cm.
Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Waterloo Bridge, 1903. Oil on canvas,
63.5 × 96.5 cm. Denver Art Museum, Denver.
Charing Cross Bridge (Overcast Day), 1900.
Oil on canvas, 60.6 × 91.5 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Each fragment of such a landscape, taken separately, amounts to a complete colour composition in itself. Claude Monet was the first of the 19th-century painters to understand the abstract beauty of the canvas’ painted surface.
Whenever he left Giverny, Monet would most often hurry to the sea. Arriving in Brittany in September 1886, he went to the island of Belle-Île. “I’ve set up residence in the little hamlet of Belle-Île,” he wrote to his dealer.
“I’m working a lot, the location is very lovely but very wild, but the sea is incomparably beautiful, and has amazing rocks. The place is even called ‘the wild sea’.”
The Breton landscape resembled no other. “I’m excited by this dark country exactly because it takes me away from what I’m used to doing.” The autumn weather was not favourable for his work: “For three days there’s been a terrible storm, and I’ve never seen such a sight.”
He worked whether it was raining or there was a raging storm, and at times he was forced to cling to the rocks.
This extraordinarily hard work brought its rewards: the seascapes painted in Brittany are remarkably expressive. The brushstrokes of white lead, blue, and green create the impression of perpetually agitated water, and of the incessant noise of the Atlantic Ocean, which gives eerie shapes to the shingles tossed up by its tides.
The young critic Geffroy, an acquaintance who would later become a friend, witnessed Monet’s heroic open-air work.
But Monet painted most often in Normandy. It had an inexhaustible diversity, and his fondness for it had begun long before. “The area is very lovely and I truly regret that I didn’t come to it earlier,” he wrote to Alice in 1882. “One couldn’t be closer to the sea than I am, right on the shingle, in fact, and the waves are beating against the