Painting. World artists. Claude Monet (1840-1926)

The use of the name Impressionism to characterise the new style came from the first exhibition of members of the group at the recently vacated former studio of photographer Nadar in 1874, where they had often encountered the leaders of Parisian intellectual and cultural life. Claude Monet exhibited among others an extraordinary painting entitled Impression - Sunrise, Le Havre, painted two years earlier, described by Monet himself as "sun in the mist and few masts of boats sticking up in the foreground." The title gave rise to the name applied to the entire movement. The exhibition was greeted with public derision, the like of which had never been experienced in Paris. Every tradition of European painting seemed to have been thrown aside. Not only form but substance itself has vanished. The picture was a mere collection of coloured streaks and blobs on a light blue ground. Today observers have no difficulty recognising a sailboat and a rowboat in the foreground, masts and equipment, haze, and smoke, all reflected in the rippled surface of the water. This revolutionary painting intended to correspond to the image the eye sees in an instantaneous glimpse of the port of Le Havre at sunrise, summed up the beliefs of the school. In retrospect, the name Impressionism seems one of the few appropriate names in the history of art.

Monet was born in Paris, his father was a grocer, and the family soon moved to Le Havre on the coast of Normandy, where his father became a ship chandler, and the boy could constantly observe ships and the sea. This was very important for his later preoccupation with light, water, and human experience in relation to the unending stream of time. He started as a caricaturist. In 1858 he was introduced to landscape painting.
In 1867 Monet submitted to the Salon a revolutionary work. the huge Women in the Garden. The entire picture, more than eight feet high, was painted outdoors and required him to devise new methods in order to record the immediate impression of light on the dresses, the flowers, and the trees. The feeling of sunlight is warm and rich, but the colours are still local, though soft blue and lavender shadow does reflect into the faces of the women and their flowing dresses. The leaves are coloured in varying shades of green. In this and other pictures Monet established the new Impressionist subject - the moment of experience in light.

However successful from an artistic and historical point of view, the painting was a worldly failure. Manet made fun at it. But a few years later when he had come to understand Monet's style and adopted his brilliant colouring, Manet bought this picture for himself.
During the disorder of 1870-71 Monet fled, first to London, where he studied the art of Constable and Turner, then to Holland and Belgium, where he was interested chiefly in landscape. On his return to France Monet's style changed radically: he dissolved the object. In Impression - Sunrise, Le Havre, he demonstrated that colour belongs not to the object but to the moment of the visual experience. This was hard for his contemporaries to accept.
In 1873 Monet set up a floating studio in a boat on the Seine. The world passing before his eyes formed a continuous stream of experience, from which he singled out moments, recorded in series.

At the financially disastrous third Impressionist exhibition of 1877 Monet showed eight canvases devoted to the railway. In the Gare Saint - Lazare in Paris, of 1877, Monet depicted a locomotive drawing cars into a station. The iron-and-glass train shed offered to him a tissue of changing light and colour, dominated by blue and silver, but touched on the ground with tan, green, rose and gold. The Impressionists eliminated black from their palette and the shadows and the massive black locomotive were painted in blue. The people in Monet's picture are spots of blue; the puffs of steam are bubbles of blue and pearl. The locomotive's bumper is red, and this is the only bright colour in the picture. The fleeting effects that absorbed Monet's attention could not pause long enough for him to paint them. A picture like this was the product of several sessions.

By 1880 Monet's paintings were beginning to sell and he threw himself into the work with a passion as if nature were at once a friend and an enemy. He painted on a beach during a storm to ascertain the height and power of wind-driven waves, one of which swept him under (he was rescued by fishermen).
To achieve his effects Monet had to work systematically in series. By the 1890s, still faithful to Impressionist principles when others had long deserted them, Monet brought with him daily in a carriage, to the place chosen to paint, stacks of canvases on each of which he had begun the study of a certain light effect at a given moment of the day.

Monet painted series of cliffs, of haystacks, of poplars bordering a river, of the Thames in London, and the Grand Canal in Venice. But the most impressive was the series of views of Rouen Cathedral. This building an example of Flamboyant Gothic dematerialisation of stone appealed to him as an analogue of his own Impressionist insubstantiality. Systematically he studied the effects of light and colour on the lacy facade. In 1895 he exhibited eighteen views of the facade and two other views of the Cathedral. Monet's moments had, in the process of being painted, become the work of art.

The painting known as Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight represents the moment just about noon when the low winter sun is still striking the southern flanks of the masses masonry, and has not yet entered the west portals, illuminated by reflections from the square in front. Dazzling as the cathedral paintings are, Monet was discouraged by the impossibility of registering with his hand what he saw with his eyes.

In 1899 Monet began a series of water landscapes that occupied him till his death twenty seven-years later. These late pictures are the most magical of all. He won his battle with nature by annexing it. He constructed an environment that he could control absolutely, a water garden filled with water-loving trees and flowers, and crossed at one point by a Japanese footbridge. Here in the gigantic canvases he submerged himself in the world of changing colour, a poetic fabric in which visual and emotional experience merge. Abandoning the banks the aged artist gazed into the water, and these paintings show a surface in which the reflections of sky and trees blend between the floating water lilies. In Monet's last works the stream of experience has become timeless. Monet symbolically conquered time.

Literature: Book "Western European art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva