In the past three days, I have visited four museums pertaining to Claude Monet, the impressionist painter, and one of the greatest French artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I have long enjoyed the blues, greens, and purples I associate with Monet’s painting, the hues found swirling among and around the water-lilies, the Japanese bridge, the setting sun, the haystacks, etc.
The first trip was a visit with the other EDUCO students to Giverny, a small village in Normandy, where Monet lived for half of his life, and most of his career. His house has become a museum. The curators have restored the rooms where he and his family lived (complete with the art that they hung on their walls), his studio (with reproductions on easels), and, best of all, his gardens. I remember reading once that an 18th-century visitor to Shakespeare’s house was disappointed because there was absolutely nothing to indicate how the great poet had concocted his rhymes. Chez Monet, one can approximate the artistic influence of the natural surroundings: subtracting the tourists, it becomes easy to imagine the great painter immersing himself in the beauty of the light, the color of the flowers, the reflections of the water, etc. I even managed to take a few pictures; it’s not difficult to find a beautiful sight, and capture it on film (see Facebook).
The next day, I braved some of the worst (and worst-behaved) crowds of tourists I have seen since I arrived in France, and visited the Musee d’Orsay; in addition to seeing some really wonderful seascapes by Monet, I saw works by many of the other big names in impressionism: Renoir Degas, Manet, Cezanne, Gauguin, etc. Although the paintings, unfortunately, were not in alphabetical order, looking at the ensemble, it became easier to notice differences between the artists. Renoir is excellent at painting bearded men in hats; Pissarro painted landscapes and portraits; Degas painted mostly painted human subjects (and one beautifully mournful painting of a café); Manet had some portraits, and several still-lives; Cezanne painted still-lives and portraits. When I was younger and visited the d’Orsay, I remember not really liking Manet; now, I enjoy his Sur la Plage, and its Cezanne whom I fail to appreciate, even after having seen his famous Pommes et oranges. Visiting the d’Orsay also led me to discover the lesser-known members of the Impressionist school -- Morisot, Caillebotte, Sisley, Barnard, Ranson, Roussel, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, and so many more French names.
The curators at the d’Orsay subdivided the post-impressionism (don’t let the name fool you: the style is contemporaneous with impressionism) into several sub-categories: nabi, neo-impressionsim, the Pont-Avon school (Gauguin), and Van Gogh, the latter deserving his own category. The Nabis, whose name is actually cognate with Hebrew Navi, meaning prophet (as in Eliyahu Ha-Navi, the song we sing during the Seder each year), considered themselves prophets of a new style of artwork, protégés of Gauguin. According to the critics, their work is full of subjectivism, symbolism, and dream; they were highly influenced by Japanese prints, and were divided into two groups, based on their subjects of choice: the esotiricists and the intimists. I found that there was one Nabi, Bonnard, whose work I enjoyed nearly as much as I enjoyed Monet’s: his lone yellow boat on the purple skein of the Seine, his women toiling by lamplight, his depictions of gardens and croquet parties, and his graceful nude, not only are very touching, but are infinitely better in their originals than in the hyperlinks I have posted for you. Neo-Impressionism, meanwhile, is marked by an amazing style officially called pointillisme, but which I privately refer to as pixelism. Instead of the sort of blending and bleeding of colors at which Monet was so adroit, the neo-impressionists achieved the effects of light with tiny dots of color. At times, I had the feeling that pointillisme had more potential as a style, but that the artists that implemented it simply weren’t as talented as Monet and friends. Neo-impressionism, nevertheless, produced excellent paintings of fields of flowers, boats in the harbor, Notre-Dame, and a man with a beard. Van Gogh, meanwhile, was off in his own world, experimenting with color. I saw the famous self-portrait, and the famous La Sieste, as well as a painting I had never heard of before, Fritillaires couronne imperial dans un vase de cuivre.
Also on display at the d’Orsay was a room of pictorialist art, pictorialism being the first artistic “movement” in photography. To paraphrase the sign in the museum, the intention of the movement was to create an “aesthetic ambiguity,” to some extent nullifying the reproductive perfection of the camera. Pictures were blurry, and photographers used all sorts of development techniques to insure unusual effects. What I found most interesting was the choice of subjects. It apparently was quite popular to get one’s friends to dress up in Greco-Roman robes, and pose romantically in the forest: I saw Pan, Iris, Orpheus, a libation bearer, and Adam and Eve (nude). In other words, the very subjects that painters had been taking throughout the 17th, 18th, and part of the 19th centuries in France (pictorialism, however, was based in America).
The next day, I visited two more museums, both of them quite small: the Orangerie and the Musee Rodin. The Orangerie contains one of Monet’s great oeuvres: an eight-part panorama of the water-lilies of Giverny, saturated with blue, green, and purple. The work was completed during World War I, and Monet dedicated the masterpiece to France on November 12th, 1918, the day after the signing of the armistice (Monet and Clemenceau were apparently fast friends). By the time the paintings were finally presented to the public, however, nobody cared about impressionism, and the paintings were badly damaged during the renovation of the Orangerie, and by shrapnel in World War II. Nobody really cared about the paintings until the 1970s, and it as only in the first decade of the 21st century that the paintings were restored (Ben Yavitt witnessed this event). Downstairs, the Orangerie shelters the Paul Guillaume collection; Guillaume was the principal art-dealer for the great impressionists (he actually organized his first art expo in the garage where he worked), and he managed to accumulate a great deal of art for himself, now on display in the museum. There are a few excellent Renoirs beside some Cezannes in one room (alongside a painting of a red boat by Monet), where it finally occurred to me that the latter never seemed to ever put enough color into his pieces. Rousseau’s paintings all looked smug to me; Modigliani’s painted portraits of subjects who all looked as if they had just been sucking lemons; there were some chalk-like Matisses, as well as a few paintings by Picasso, some good, some not so good. There was one artist, Chaim Soutine, who seemed obsessed with deplumed birds and dead mammals, and who shared a room with a painter named Utrillo, whose sublime dreariness reminded me of Ithaca. Just take a look at the painting I shot, now posted on Facebook, to see what I mean. The Orangerie was really quite excellent, and is, moreover, short enough to visit in just a few hours.
After quitting the Orangerie, I trotted over to the Rodin Museum, not far from les Invalides. I thought that I had left Monet behind me, but I found one of his seascapes, and several of his letters, among the statues of the eminent sculptor. Not only were the two French artists born in the same year, but they were close friends, and in the summer of 1889, an exclusive Monet-Rodin exposition opened in Paris. You can still read Monet’s letter to Rodin, explaining how absolutely wonderful he considered the latter’s statue of Balzac (of which I saw many, many versions).
But to speak about Rodin for a moment, the man seemed to sculpt nothing but hands and nudes. I saw no fewer than seven distinct sculptures of hands, not counting roughcasts, and versions in different materials. Almost all of the hands, though, were very interesting, whether they were forming a Gothic arch, creating the first human being, emerging from the tomb, or concealing an unknown object. And alongside the obviously nude sculptures that Rodin produced, are the clothed nudes, whose powerful, twisting forms, with their tortuous curves, rippling surfaces, and exaggerated ridges and crevices, are fully visible.
Two of the few subjects to be portrayed standing straight are Balzac and (one version of) Victor Hugo. There are quite amusing stories surrounding both subjects: two years before the great author’s death, Rodin asked Victor Hugo to pose for him; Hugo refused, but agreed to leave his window open for a short time. Rodin hurriedly sketched the basic form of Hugo’s head on a few scraps of cigarette paper cradled in his palm, and later used these sketches to produce the work commissioned by the state soon after Hugo’s funeral. There were two final copies: a sitting nude and a standing clothed. As for Balzac, Rodin had never met him, but when the Zola-led committee commissioned a sculpture, Rodin meticulously researched his subject, gathering information in Tours, as well as using a pre-existing portrait as a guide. The final product, more artistically symbolic than realistic, became the subject of a heated controversy, partially because Emile Zola had recently become a Dreyfusard. The committee refused to even recognize Balzac’s likeness in the statue, claiming that it resembled him not at all.
Well, that’s it for Monet and friends. Today, I took my first course, at Paris VII. I’m amazed at how exhausting it is to concentrate on a lecture delivered in a foreign language!
~JD
“La gloire du doleil sur la mer violette,/ La gloire des cites dans le soleil couchant,/ Allumaient dans nos coeurs une ardeur inquiete/ De plonger dans un ciel au reflet allechant” [The glory of the sun on the purple sea, the glory of the cities in the setting sun, sparking in our hearts a moving desire to dive into the sky of the alluring reflection] ~Beaudelaire, “CXXVI -- Le Voyage”
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