Claude Monet

French painter

• Born: November 14, 1840
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: December 5, 1926
• Place of death: Giverny, France

Monet is central to the development of Impressionist painting in the 1870’s. In the 1890’s, he developed the concept of multiple views of one subject, and in the 1940’s and 1950’s the abstract Impressionism of Monet’s late water lily paintings provided a stimulus for the American abstract expressionists.

Early Life

Although Claude Monet (klawd moh-nay) was born in Paris, he grew up on the Normandy coast at Le Havre. Yet the first intimations of his future vocation came not with landscape paintings but with a series of caricatures of local personalities that earned for him a considerable reputation by age sixteen. His direction changed after meeting the marine painter Eugène Boudin in 1858. Boudin, who was already a devotee of working outdoors, introduced Monet to plein air painting, which would eventually become the touchstone of the Impressionist landscape approach.

Monet used the proceeds from his lucrative caricature business to finance his first art studies in Paris in 1859, where he met the future Impressionist Camille Pissarro at the Académie Suisse. A photograph of Monet at age twenty suggests a romantic sensitivity, but later photographs portray a more rugged, stockier individual, with a square-cut, curly beard emphasizing his square face. Monet’s studies were interrupted in 1861 by obligatory military service, but in 1862 he became ill and was sent home, after which his parents bought an exemption from his remaining service.

Returning to Paris, Monet enrolled in the studio of the academic painter Charles Gleyre. His year there was notable only because three of his future colleagues and friends, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, were fellow students; all four quickly became disillusioned with the academic curriculum. Henceforth they developed on their own, discovering for themselves the forest of Fontainebleau and the Barbizon landscapists who had worked there since the 1830’s.

In the spring of 1865, Monet had two large landscapes of the Normandy coast accepted by the salon (the official government-sponsored exhibitions), achieving considerable success with them, as well as with the figure painting sent the next year, although some reviewers confused Monet with the slightly older painter Édouard Manet, who was creating scandals with the exhibition of such precedent-shattering paintings as Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863; luncheon on the grass). Manet’s revolutionary technique, which aimed, by the elimination of halftones, to produce the effect of forms seen in a blaze of light, was an additional stimulus toward Monet’s development as an Impressionist.

Life’s Work

Those early successes at the salon were almost the only official ones for Monet. As he became more individualistic, his paintings were increasingly refused by the tradition-bound salon juries. The first refusal was in 1867 of a major work, Women in the Garden , which has since been hailed as the first large whole-figure composition to be painted entirely outdoors. Though not a true Impressionist painting, since the treatment of light is static, it represents a major milestone in the stages leading toward the development of Impressionism.

The Impressionist movement actually began when Monet and Renoir painted together in the summer of 1869 at a suburban pleasure spot on the Seine, la Grenouillère, where the moving current of the river sparked the new approach and vocabulary of Impressionism, with its interest in transitory effects of light, color, and atmosphere. To capture these effects, the painters developed a broken technique of swift, small, separate strokes of pure color. Monet and Renoir also began developing the so-called rainbow palette, eliminating earth tones and bitumens to enhance the effects of prismatically refracted light. Throughout the 1870’s, this interest in capturing the moment was of paramount interest for the Impressionists. To achieve the effect they wanted, they required the plein air approach and subjects that lent themselves to a casual treatment, such as riverbank scenes, fields, the railway, and the crowded, newly created great boulevards of Paris.

In 1870, Monet went to London to escape the Franco-Prussian War and had a chance to study at first hand the paintings of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, whose interests in atmosphere prefigured those of the Impressionists. On his return, Monet moved with his family to Argenteuil, a Paris suburb on the Seine, where many of his most famous Impressionist landscape paintings were produced. Although Monet and his friends were now mature artists, the problem with salon juries did not improve, and the precarious financial situation of most of them was exacerbated by the depression that began in 1873. Therefore, in 1874, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Edgar Degas executed a plan they had been considering for some time: to bypass the salon altogether and mount their own juryless exhibition, to which each would contribute a sum for expenses. Thirty artists, not all of them Impressionists, took part in what has come to be known as the First Impressionist Exhibition, which was held from April 15 to May 15. There would be eight Impressionist exhibitions, the last one held in 1886; Monet took part in all but three. While at first the exhibitions were greeted mainly with derision (indeed, the name “Impressionism” comes from a sneering remark in a satirical review by the critic Louis Leroy, commenting on a Monet painting entitled Impression, Sunrise ), this approach finally proved to be the most viable way for avant-garde artists to get their work shown.

Monet painted many views of the St. Lazare station in 1877, showing eight of them together at the Third Impressionist Exhibition that April; the simultaneous showing may have provided the germ for his later series paintings. In the early 1880’s, all the Impressionists went through a crisis in reaction to all the criticism of “carelessness” and “formlessness.” While Monet does not seem to have reacted as much as Renoir, he was nevertheless affected by the criticism and attempted henceforth a more fully actualized treatment.

In 1890, Monet began to paint his first deliberate series of paintings: views of haystacks. These were produced at different seasons of the year and from different points of view, with different aspects of light, but in 1891 he showed fifteen of them in an exhibition at the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel’s; the series proved to be surprisingly successful. In 1892 and 1893, Monet painted the famous sequences of views of the facade of Rouen Cathedral, in which his serial procedure is fully developed. For these paintings, Monet worked on several canvases during the course of one day, moving from one to another as the light changed. To appreciate fully this serial progression, one must see several of the canvases in sequence.

After 1900, the majority of Monet’s paintings were done in and around Giverny, on a tributary of the Seine halfway between Paris and Rouen, where he had lived since 1883. Monet gradually acquired the status of the dean of living painters, and Giverny became a mecca, especially for two types of visitors: young American Impressionists and young Symbolist writers, such as Gustave Geffroy, who became Monet’s biographer, and Octave Mirbeau, who elucidated one of the major reasons for Symbolist interest in later Monet works when he praised Monet for expressing the inexpressible and seizing the unseizable. Perhaps even more significant were Monet’s numerous contacts with the great Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, beginning in the mid-1880’s.

Once Monet had created his Japanese water garden on his Giverny property, he began, in 1899, to produce the stunning series of paintings of the pond that formed his chief endeavor in the twentieth century. Most of the sequences show the surface of the pond, its water lilies, its overhanging willows, and its reflections. These paintings, which Monet called “waterscapes,” tend increasingly toward a form of abstract Impressionism, partly because of Monet’s treatment of the entire surface of the canvas, which negates the idea of focus, and partly because of his elimination of the horizon line in his paintings after 1905, which meant that he painted the surface of the pond only, providing no clear sense of direction. A further impetus toward abstraction may have been provided by Monet’s increasing eye problems (cataracts in both eyes were diagnosed in 1912; in 1923, he underwent a partially successful operation on his right eye), which necessitated greater breadth of technique and the use of stronger color. Yet these bold, free strokes are still intended to record the specific nuances of Monet’s visual impressions of light and color.

The greatest of all the water lily series is the huge cycle housed in two large oval rooms in the Orangerie in Paris, a project originally suggested to Monet by Georges Clemenceau during World War I and intended as a donation to the state. Much of the painting was done during World War I, but Monet continued to rework and revise the sequence until close to his death in 1926. The cycle was dedicated in May of 1927, a fitting tribute to one of the most extraordinary artists of the modern era. The viewer, standing in the middle of each oval space engulfed by the huge size of the panels, is himself put into the picture. It is, as André Masson described it in 1952, the “Sistine Chapel of Impressionism . . . one of the summits of French art.”

Significance

Through the years, Monet has come to be considered the leading Impressionist painter, a position that is strengthened by the fact that he, unlike Renoir or Pissarro, who had periods when they retreated from the Impressionist approach, remained largely faithful to the Impressionist goal of transcribing every nuance of changing optical sensations for the whole of his exceptionally long career, which spanned a full sixty years. This mammoth oeuvre, consisting of approximately two thousand paintings, was not codified until the 1970’s and 1980’s in a definitive four-volume catalogue raisonné by Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet, biographie et catalogue raisonné (1974-1985). Monet’s vision remained remarkably consistent throughout the developments in his style.

It is, rather, outside judgments that have varied: Supporters in the 1870’s stressed the element of direct observation; Symbolist champions of the late 1880’s and 1890’s sensed an affinity with their aims in the infinitely nuanced transcription of his series paintings. In the wake of formalist movements of the early twentieth century, Impressionism was often judged as a short-lived, limited phenomenon and late Monet paintings, in particular, as a dead end. That was before the large “action paintings” of artists such as Jackson Pollock suddenly revealed the relevance of the late Monet works. Somewhat later, the interpretations of social historians stressed the contemporaneity of Impressionist themes in the 1870’s, such as the railroad, and questioned the famous judgment of Paul Cézanne, who became one of the foremost challengers of Impressionism, that “Monet is only an eye . . . but what an eye.” Most scholars, however, continue to stress the aspect of observation over interpretation, emphasizing that the Impressionists never comment on what they observe. In Monet’s case, the central importance of his essentially visual focus is amply supported by many of his own statements. Whether one’s interest in Monet centers on pure observation, on social concerns, or on the affinities with Symbolism, Monet’s central position in the late nineteenth century seems secure, and Giverny, refurbished and restored, has once again become a mecca for pilgrims.

Bibliography

Belloli, Andrew P. A., ed. A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984. This scholarly exhibition catalog provides a considerable treatment of Monet that enables one to see his work in the context of the Impressionist movement. Consists of a series of articles on different aspects of Impressionism, notes on each of the paintings exhibited, a bibliography, and an index.

House, John. Monet: Nature into Art. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. An excellent, detailed study of aspects of Monet’s themes, composition, techniques, and the like, as well as a discussion of the evolution of his series concept. Includes a chronology, footnotes, bibliography, and index. Amply illustrated.

Isaacson, Joel. Claude Monet: Observation and Reflection. Oxford, England: Phaidon Books, 1978. This study consists of a succinct essay chronicling the major phases of Monet’s career and stylistic development, followed by individual notes on each of the plates, a chronology, a bibliographical note, and an index.

Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism. Rev. ed. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973. This exhaustively detailed chronological treatment of Impressionism remains the most essential work on the movement. The treatment of Monet is interwoven throughout the volume to give a thorough presentation of his place in the Impressionist group. Excellent footnotes, a chronology, a superlative chronological bibliography, and an extensive index are included. Contains many plates.

Russell, Vivian. Monet’s Landscapes. Boston: Bullfinch Press Book/Little, Brown, 2000. This work analyzes Monet’s landscapes of both country and city scenes.

Stuckey, Charles F., ed. Monet: A Retrospective. New York: Park Lane, 1985. Consists of seventy-seven selections from a series of books and articles on Monet (dating from 1865 to 1957), a number of them eyewitness accounts, some translated from the French for the first time. Includes an index and plates.

Tucker, Paul Hayes, et al. Monet in the Twentieth Century. New ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. This collection of essays and color reproductions, written to accompany an exhibition, focuses on Monet’s work in the twentieth century. It recounts his disillusionment with France because of the Dreyfus affair, his despair about World War I, and how these and other events affected his art.