home | art & architecture | books & cds | dance | destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives..
home | art &
architecture | books & cds | dance | destinations
| film | opera
| television | theater | archives..
Monet in Normandy
|
||||
Buy the print at Art.com |
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Monet's early painting, Garden at Sainte-Adresse, has been
so often reproduced that it is familiar to most anyone with even a fleeting interest in
art. But, as is invariably the case, reproductions can only hint at the sensual and
tactile pleasures of viewing the original, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and
included in this splendid exhibit that focuses on Monet's Normandy paintings.
At the time of the painting, Sainte-Adresse was a vacation haven for
the wealthy who built villas to take advantage of the water views. In the painting, a
series of horizontal layers (sky, clouds, water, garden) is countered by the strong
verticals of two flagpoles. Two elegantly dressed couples enjoy both the rich colors of
the garden and the water view with sailboats and steamers dotting the horizon. There's a
lot going on in this painting, but, for all its complexity, the composition is so assured,
the colors so luminous, and the subject matter so beguiling that it inevitably elicits a
response of pure joy, no matter how often viewed.
Monet (1840-1926) spent time throughout his career in various Normandy
locations and Monet in Normandy provides a wealth of geographical information
along with the paintings from such places as Trouville, Rouen and Giverny. While the
documentation of place surely is useful, art lovers will find that, since the exhibit
temporally includes most of the artist's working years, it is a sort of sneak
retrospective. From Garden at Sainte-Adresse (1867) to the water lily paintings
of the 1920's, Monet moves from the more traditional, three-dimensional perspective of
realism (influenced by Millet and Courbet) into flattened perspectives (influenced by
Japanese prints), the abstraction that evolved out of the Impressionist concern with
capturing the quality of light, and an ever-increasing awareness of the brush stroke.
The Cliff Walk, Pourville (1882), seen from a distance,
retains a strong connection with the recognizable. But get up close to this painting and
it is a veritable abstraction created with multiple, highly energetic brush strokes; the
two women on the cliff are deftly, if barely, sketched in, lost in the vastness of land
and seascape.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Monet executed series of paintings in which he
focused on one subject in varying light and weather and from different viewpoints. The
uniquely shaped haystacks in the fields near Giverny were the subject of more than two
dozen canvasses. Poplars, symbols of liberty in France, were the subject of another
series. In a departure from nature as subject matter, Rouen Cathedral, from different
points of view and at different times of the day, became the subject of a series in the
1890s. And effet de neige canvases such as Frost (1885) and Snow
Effect at Giverny (1895) proved Monet to be as adept at winter whites as he was with
summer greens; his lively brushstrokes add significant energy even to these works of more
restricted palette.
Brushstroke capturing the play of light and shadow continued to
challenge Monet, even as he reached the culmination of his series paintings in the
masterful water lilies from the turn of the century into the 1920s. In 1883, the painter
created a lily pond on his Giverny property; he later expanded the pond and continued to
develop the surrounding gardens. In the paintings, he continued to pare away all but
the essentials of color and light until what remained were nearly fully abstracted
impressions of the shimmering beauty of the controlled nature of his exotic gardens.
On these works, curator Lynn Orr concludes: "Their subtly
abstracted motifs and delicate tonal surfaces bespeak the soothing properties of nature.
As such they are the summation of the artist's intimate relationship with the natural
world. Monet's profound understanding of and ability to convey nature's ineffable gifts
proceeded from a life spent out of doors watching, listening, and absorbing the visual
lessons that the landscape of Normandy offered."
June 15, 2006 - Arthur Lazere
|
