The Paintings of Claude Monet
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The Art Institute of Chicago Homage to Claude Monet Author(s): A. C. Source: The Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Apr. 1, 1957), pp. 21-26 Published by: The Art Institute of Chicago Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4120394 . Accessed: 03/10/2011 13:32 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Art Institute of Chicago is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org HOMAGE TO CLAUDE MONET When we consider the amount of gallery space surface at first glance might seem an example and the lIumber of paintings in the permanent of pure painting entirely divorced from reality. collection by the other French Impressionists It is rather the heightened reality of nature who must be represented on those walls, it is that the painter has isolated so intuitively in an extraordinary event when all of the mu this great sonorous composition of light and seum's Monets are on exhibition for a whole color. The earliest paintings from the career month_ This lavish allotment is not only justi that led to this accomplishment are not repre fied by the great renewal in interest in the sented in the museum's collection. It lacks a work of Monet; it is also the occasion for hang painting done when Monet was under the in ing the painting from Monet's late period which fluence of Courbet, when his colors were the museum has recently acquired, Iris by the heavier and darker and his figures modeled Pond_ This astonishing canvas, one in the with light and dark. It is the period of his first style which has excited the most interest dur triumph with the Woman in a Green Dress, ing this new appraisal of Monet, is seen prop when he might have gone on to become a suc erly in its place as the end of a development cessful figure painter, if his passionate ideas that began on the windy, sunny beaches of the about painting had not been strong enough for Channel and ended in the quiet lily ponds of him to ignore easy success. When the museum the garden at Giverny_ acquires one of these early paintings, it will It is not strange that the taste of today, edu then have a complete picture of the develop cated to accept and possibly understand an ment of the artist who, alone of the group, abstract paint surface concealing or revealing carried the subjects and technical discoveries an interior vision, should feel a particular af of the Impressionists to their ultimate conclu finity for examples of Monet's work such as sions in his late paintings. this. Very large, a bit over six feet square, its The appearance of the subject under the Boats in Winter Quarters. The singer Jean Baptiste Faure invited Monet to stay with him at Etretat in October of 1885. Because of bad weather, Monet remained until December in order to finish the paintings he had planned. It was during these months that he painted two versions of Boats in Winter Quarters, both of which the Art Institute owns. The pictures are characteristic of Monet's development after his stay on the Riviera in 1884. This strongly designed can vas may recall both Manet and Japanese prints in its spotted arrangement and im mediacy of treatment. The color is rich and intense: the water a cold green, the sails a reddish violet and the shore and covered boats in different values of purple. 23 THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO Volume LI. Number 2 April 1, 1957 - The Beach al Sainle Adresse. TIle effects of sky and waler ill tflis serene composition $I.ill recall/he influence of Boudin and JOllgkind. In a !eUer 10 BOlldin, the painter Duh()Ilrg in 1867 writes thaI Monel passed Ihe winler in Honfleur, near Le Havre, where he painted a large marine compOsition, There is lillIe dou!'/ Ihal The Beach at Sainle Adresse is the pictllre dexribed. lIs succc$Sful combination of pearly lighl, mass and pattern, its unily of design and cowr combine /0 make this one of the finest paintings of Monel's early period. II wasfirSl exhi/;ited at the secotUllmpressioniSl gronp show of 1876, where it recei"ed Jaforable allention. II then entered the coliec/ion of the singer !enn.Baptiste Faure. COl'Cr: Old SI. Lazare Station, Paris. The almos· phere of Ihis huge, ughtfilled slalion, with all ilS ephemeral eiJeclS of light shining through smoke and steam fascinated Monet. He painted six tlersi.ons of this scene; all six wefe first exhibited at the third Impressionist This issue, devoted largely to the paintings by group exhibition in 1877. The Art Institute's Claude Monet in the permanent collection of painting may be the one ofSt . Lazare shown the Art Instil ute, was compiled with the assist· at the first Impres.sionist exhibition heM in ancc of Mrs. Katharine Kuh and Miss W. Van New York in 1886. der Rohe of the Department of Painting. 22 was over, and the individual members of the group like Renoir, Pissarro, and Cezanne, who were dist urbed by the imprecision in the method, went on to new explorations of form. Onl y Monet st ubbo rnly continued to attempt th e compl ete objective mastery of light. We ca n follow him in th is quest, beginning with th e early Beach at Sainte Adresse. painted in 1867. Its quiet harmonies are still touched with the pearly light of Boudin. Argenteu il sur-Seine, the painting where the subject and the impress ion seem to tremble in an exquisi te balance. has still touches of light and dark in the fo liage and the water. The paintings con· tinue in a higher key: the Cliff Wal k and Bordighera, where he met the challenge of th e blazing sun , then follow the experiments he pursued with such pat ience, fixing on the canvas the same subject seen under different effects of lights and seasons. His grow ing pow ers secm to demand the challengc of more Po"'oi/ of M. Coquere/.fils. M. COl/nere/. possibly on difficu lt and more fugitive effects. The Hay. ortist himself, I/;OS tile son of th e Fr fllch portrait stacks, Vlltheui l, the Mo rning on the Seine, painter, Achille Coqueret, who exhibited al Ihe sawn and the Water Lilies are the results of hi s during the years 1835 to 1849. This, {he only porrrail patience. There are the pictures from his in the Institute's collection of Man els, is on example of travels where he fo und new impressions: the the broa.d handling of paint that rei'eclS the injluence scenes of London with their fitful eolors, and of Mon el. Venice, seen as a web of reAections on water and marble. The final climax is the Wagnerian explosion of Iris by the Pond, hallucinatory in ils penetration of light and reneetions of color dom inance of light. the palette of light colors, on waler, fo liage, and Aowers. and the division of tones that blended in the In Ihe end. the struggle and the theory and eye of the spectator with a greater brilliance the technique have left an enchanted vision. than mixed colors, were discoveries that had The Impressionists. in conquering light opened been used in part by earlier painters. But it was another window on the world, and Monet, in the group effort of the Impressionists that his fugitive effects of light on water, in the formulated these discoveries with such empha transparency of his ski es, and the reAections sis and convict ion that they were abl e to bring of light on foliage and Rowers left a testimony abou t the revelation of a new visual beauty. to the beauty of nature and the poetry of the By the 1880's, th e main stru~gle for accep tance world. A. c. 24 Iris by Ihe Pond. Monel worked on his waler lily picillres for more Ihan a quarter of a century. The fuswII of reflected and reo.llighl, of lumillOUS colors on Ihe smface of Iris lillIe waler lily pond was a cenlral/heme in mosl of his lale work. ", his firM W(ller lily series, exJ,ibiled ill 1900, lire flowers MiU farmed parI of the wrrollnding landscape. PiClures from lhe second series, exhibiled in 1909, om illed the hori.on and gal'e ordy a seclion of Ihe waler wrface ilt which lhe wrrouruJing arcus were reflecltll. Iris by Ihe POlld has gOlle beyond Impressionism; here color ond form explode with Expressiollisl imIXluosily. Magnified details dissolve and swim in pul$Uling almosphertl. The roots of American Abslrocl Expre~· (){Iism can be found in M(){Iel's lale poinlings. 2S The Artist's Carden fli Argenteuil. The charm of this .scene, done in 1872 when Monet 's $lyle had become almost ron/ pklely impressionist, may obscure the mastery with which the painting has been handled. The strong bru.shstrokes and the exact values of color caleh the SUlllly light shining through the shadows.