Читать книгу Claude Monet. Volume 2 - Nina Kalitina - Страница 4

It is light that becomes the ‘hero’ of each painting, dictating its own laws, colouring objects in various ways, imparting either solidity or transparency, and altering contours by either rendering the boundaries of forms uncertain, or making them perceptible only as sharp silhouettes.

At Giverny, series painting became one of Monet’s chief working procedures. Thirty years later he recounted how he had arrived at it:

I was painting some haystacks which had caught my eye and which made a terrific group, just a short distance from here. One day I noticed that my light had changed. I said to my stepdaughter, “Go to the house and get me another canvas, if you don’t mind.” She brought it to me, but shortly after, it was different again. Another! And one more! And I wouldn’t work on any of them unless I had my effect, and that was it.

The haystacks became a nearly endless series in his work.

He painted them at the very beginning of summer, on the green grass, and in winter, with a thin layer of snow covering them. To Monet’s sensitive eye there was an infinite diversity of colours in this mass of dry, yellowed grass.

In various combinations, his red, brown, green, and even blue brushstrokes depicted the way the colours change according to the distribution of light. Monet was remarkably consistent in his approach to his research.

He worked like a scholar stubbornly pursuing the objective he had set for himself. The poplar trees along the Epte river also became the object of his painting researches.

At first he was attracted to the rhythmic beauty of these soaring trees. Then came the phase of meticulously studying the modifications in their colour.

At the beginning of the 1890s Monet travelled to Rouen. In 1892 he went there to purchase back some of his own paintings that his half-sister Marie had inherited. Monet took a room facing the famous Gothic cathedral.

As he had to stay in Rouen for some time, he began to paint the cathedral from his window.

He had meant to return to Giverny after several days, but his work absorbed him completely. He painted the cathedral in all weather and at all times of day or night.

Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect (Le Parlement, effet de soleil), 1903.

Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 92.1 cm. Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Houses of Parliament, Stormy Sky, 1904.

Oil on canvas, 81 × 92 cm. Palais des Beaux-arts, Lille.

When lit by the sun at midday the enormous mass of the cathedral dissolved in the hazy heat, its contours became blurred, and the building became lighter and nearly transparent.

At night the blue shadows were deeper and denser, and the gothic-filigree stonework of the façade appeared in all its splendour. In reality the motif in Monet’s painting was not Rouen Cathedral at all, it was the light and air of Normandy.

The result was a veritable symphony of colours. Art had never, up to that point, seen anything like it.

In the spring of 1895 Monet opened his exhibition, where he showed twenty variations of his Rouen Cathedral. Sadly, the critics’ exhortations to the buyers to purchase the series as a whole went unheard, and Monet’s ‘Cathedrals’ were scattered throughout the world.

The meadows of Giverny always remained his favourite motif. In the luxuriantly flowering grass with its poppies exploding in tiny flames, Monet’s practiced eye, trained by years of work, could distinguish a vast number of graded nuances.

He created an extremely delicate mosaic on the canvas, composed of tiny brushstrokes of colour. Paul Cézanne, who had criticised Monet for copying unthinkingly from nature, said of him one day, “He’s nothing but an eye.”

But, quickly catching himself, he added “But what an eye!” These meadows became his permanent workplace.

When a journalist, who had come from Vétheuil to interview Monet, asked him where his studio was, the painter answered, “My studio! I’ve never had a studio, and I can’t see why one would lock oneself up in a room. To draw, yes – to paint, no.”

Then, broadly gesturing towards the Seine, the hills, and the silhouette of the little town, he declared, “There’s my real studio.”

He painted a field of poppies, and created the impression of wind not only with the rippling shapes of the trees, but also in the way the painting itself was executed. Brushstrokes of pure colour – red, blue, and green – are applied to the canvas with apparent randomness.

The tangle of these colours renders the effect of the grass stirring under the wind’s breath and, in addition, composes a wonderful tapestry.

Waterloo Bridge, London, at Dusk, 1904. Oil on canvas, 65.7 × 101.6 cm.

Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Waterloo Bridge, 1903. Oil on canvas,

63.5 × 96.5 cm. Denver Art Museum, Denver.

Charing Cross Bridge (Overcast Day), 1900.

Oil on canvas, 60.6 × 91.5 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Each fragment of such a landscape, taken separately, amounts to a complete colour composition in itself. Claude Monet was the first of the 19^th-century painters to understand the abstract beauty of the canvas’ painted surface.

Whenever he left Giverny, Monet would most often hurry to the sea. Arriving in Brittany in September 1886, he went to the island of Belle-Île. “I’ve set up residence in the little hamlet of Belle-Île,” he wrote to his dealer.

“I’m working a lot, the location is very lovely but very wild, but the sea is incomparably beautiful, and has amazing rocks. The place is even called ‘the wild sea’.”

The Breton landscape resembled no other. “I’m excited by this dark country exactly because it takes me away from what I’m used to doing.” The autumn weather was not favourable for his work: “For three days there’s been a terrible storm, and I’ve never seen such a sight.”

He worked whether it was raining or there was a raging storm, and at times he was forced to cling to the rocks.

This extraordinarily hard work brought its rewards: the seascapes painted in Brittany are remarkably expressive. The brushstrokes of white lead, blue, and green create the impression of perpetually agitated water, and of the incessant noise of the Atlantic Ocean, which gives eerie shapes to the shingles tossed up by its tides.

The young critic Geffroy, an acquaintance who would later become a friend, witnessed Monet’s heroic open-air work.

But Monet painted most often in Normandy. It had an inexhaustible diversity, and his fondness for it had begun long before. “The area is very lovely and I truly regret that I didn’t come to it earlier,” he wrote to Alice in 1882. “One couldn’t be closer to the sea than I am, right on the shingle, in fact, and the waves are beating against the base of the house.”

He dreamt of showing Alice and the children the cliffs in the region of Caux, the flowering fields overlooking the sea, and the little fishing hamlets tucked into the recesses of the coast.

Earlier, in his youth, Boudin had brought him onto the cliffs near Dieppe, where he experienced the revelation of the Normandy landscape’s diversity. From the end of the 1860s onward, Monet explored the beauty of Étretat. Courbet had previously painted the arch the waters had sculpted into the coastal cliffs.

Waterloo Bridge in London, 1902. Oil on canvas,

65.7 × 100.5 cm. The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

Charing Cross Bridge in London, c. 1902. Oil on canvas,

65.3 × 100. The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

It seemed gigantic when used as a backdrop for the little boats gliding along the shore. But Monet found his own motifs there.

What most interested him were the atmospheric phenomena that alter nature’s colour. The reflections of the water shifted constantly, and alighted in coloured patches on the cliffs. The cliffs themselves seemed to go into motion, together with the sea and the clouds.

In Normandy, Blanche Hoschedé, Alice’s daughter, made her first attempts at painting. Monet’s example inspired his children. One day the writer Guy de Maupassant happened to see Claude Monet at work. This is how, in an unfinished tale, he described the painter on the cliffs of Étretat:

Last year, […] I often followed Claude Monet searching for impressions. He was no longer a painter, actually, he was a hunter. He would go along, followed by children who carried his canvasses – five or six canvasses representing the same subject at various times and with different effects.

He would take them up and put them aside one by one, according to the changes in the sky. The painter waited in front of his subject, keeping an eye on the sun and the shadows, then snatching, in a few brushstrokes, a descending ray of sunlight or a passing cloud and, disdainful of the false and the conventional, placing them rapidly on the canvas.

A few paintings of haystacks at Giverny suggested to Monet the idea of creating a whole series on this theme. He began in 1890 and by 1891 he was already able to show his Haystacks at Durand-Ruel’s – fifteen variations with a glowing or darkening sky, bright green or ashen-grey meadow, haystacks shot with red, yellow, or lilac, and the multi-coloured shadows they produced.

In critical works on Monet it is frequently suggested that in all his series the artist strove only for objective recording of optical impressions.

Monet did indeed set himself this task, but that did not prevent him from remaining an involved, creative artist, conveying his own emotional state to the viewer. Moreover, in his first series the lyrical impulse was still strongly in evidence. The politician and art critic Anatoly Lunacharsky remarked:

Claude Monet made countless pictures of a single object, for example, a haystack, painting it in the morning, at noon, in the evening, in the moonlight, in the rain, and so on.

One might expect these exercises – which link Monet with the Japanese – to produce something like a set of scientific colouristic statements about the celebrated haystack, but instead they prove to be miniature poems. The haystack is at times majestically proud, at times sentimentally pensive, or mournful…

Rouen Cathedral, 1892. Oil on canvas,

100 × 65 cm. Private collection, France.

Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight), 1894.

Oil on canvas, 99.7 × 65.7 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight, 1894.

Oil on canvas, 100.1 × 65.8 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Rouen Cathedral, Full Sunlight: Harmony in Blue and Gold, 1893. Oil on canvas,

107 × 73.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

It is justifiable to ask whether in Haystacks and his other series of the 1890s Monet was deviating from Impressionism. The answer would seem to be that he was not.

He was simply paying attention primarily to the rendering of light, one of the cardinal problems of Impressionism. This was how painters and critics close to Monet understood his new works, acknowledging the talent they revealed.

When Durand-Ruel exhibited the Rouen Cathedral series in 1895, the friends of Monet’s youth accepted it, albeit not without certain reservations. Pissarro wrote to his son: “The Cathedrals are criticised by many, but praised by, among others, Degas, Renoir, and me. I so wanted you to see them all together, for I find in them the magnificent unity towards which I myself so aspire.” Shortly before this, Pissarro had informed his son that Cézanne liked the Cathedrals.

The idea of creating the series came to Monet in 1892 whilst he was staying in Rouen, where, enchanted by the cathedral, he lodged directly opposite it. From the window of his room he could see not the whole building but only the portal, and this determined the composition of the canvasses in the first part of the cycle.

In these the artist’s field of vision is invariably limited to the portal and the patch of sky above it. It is a ‘close-up’ composition with a part of the cathedral, transformed by the skilled hands of mason and sculptor into stone lacework, occupying the entire area of the canvas. Previously, looking from a cliff, a hill, or the window of a room, he liked to impart a sense of space by leaving the foreground free.

Now the subject was almost approached to point-blank range, and yet its proximity did not help to elucidate its nature, for light reduced it to next to nothing.

The other part of the cycle was produced in 1893 during a second visit to Rouen, when Monet took with him the canvasses he had already executed, intending to add the finishing touches to them.

He again studied the movement of light across the portal and, when he saw the effect he wanted, finished the work he had begun a year earlier; where the moment from the past did not recur, he took a fresh canvas and started again from scratch.

Rouen Cathedral, the Portal, Morning Sun: Harmony in Blue, 1893.

Oil on canvas, 92.2 × 63 cm. Bequest of Comte Isaac de

Camondo to the Louvre, 1911. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Rouen Cathedral: Setting Sun, 1892–1894.

Oil on canvas, 100 × 65 cm.

National Museum Wales, Cardiff.

During this second visit Monet did not only paint the cathedral from the viewpoint he had used in 1892; he rented another apartment as well, one which enjoyed a slightly different view of the building. From here a considerable portion of Saint-Romain’s tower was visible to the left of the entrance, and also some houses situated close to the tower.

On both his first and second visits Monet turned to his Cathedrals with an enthusiasm which bordered on frenzy. “I am worn out, I can’t go on”, he wrote to his wife in 1892. “And, something that I have never experienced before, I have spent a night filled with nightmarish dreams: the cathedral kept falling on me, and at times it seemed blue, at others pink, at others yellow.”

The following words come from a letter dated 1893: “I am painting like a madman, but no matter what you all say I am quite played out and am now good for nothing else.”

What is known of the creation of the Rouen Cathedral series and other pictures of these years makes it clear that Monet could now not only paint on the spot, but could continue work in his workshop, then return to paintings on location, and then again add finishing touches in the studio.

Monet had worked in the studio previously, although to all questions put to him on this point he invariably replied that nature was his workshop, but with the years, work in the studio became increasingly important for the artist.

It is unlikely that the canvasses executed in Rouen in 1892 remained untouched in Giverny, and it is certain that after his return from the second visit to Rouen he was still bringing them to perfection.

One cannot disagree with Pissarro’s judgement that the Rouen Cathedral series must create its strongest impression when all twenty canvasses are collected together – alas, a spectacle almost unrealisable today, since the paintings are scattered among numerous museums and private collections throughout the world.

Best endowed in this respect is the Musée d’Orsay in Paris which holds five paintings: Rouen Cathedral, the West Portal, Dull Weather (1892), Rouen Cathedral, the Portal and the Saint-Romain Tower, Morning Effect: Harmony in White (1893), Rouen Cathedral, the Portal, Morning Sun: Harmony in Blue, Rouen Cathedral, Full Sunlight: Harmony in Blue and Gold, and the cathedral without indication of the time it was painted, Rouen Cathedral, the Portal Seen from the Front: Harmony in Brown (1892).

Rouen Cathedral Façade and Tour d’Albane (Morning Effect), 1894. Oil on canvas,

106.1 × 73.9 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The Doge’s Palace (Le Palais ducal), 1908.

Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 99.1 cm. Brooklyn Museum, New York.

San Giorgio Maggiore, 1908. Oil on canvas,

59.2 × 81.2 cm. National Museum Wales, Cardiff.

The Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 1908.

Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 91.4 cm.

Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis.

The gaze of the visitor to the museum passes quickly from one picture to the next, then returns and runs again across the uneven surface of the canvasses, studying the changes of light. The repeated motif of the portal, painted, moreover, on vertical canvasses of approximately uniform dimensions, recedes, in proportion to the length of time spent in contemplation, further and further into the background, until the viewer is wholly enthralled by the astonishing skill of the painter.

The Rouen Cathedral at Noon and Rouen Cathedral in the Evening (1894, Pushkin Museum, Moscow) carry the intense blue of the sky above, the dark-blue and violet shadows below, and between them a scattering of golden, pink, and slightly lilac tones, alternating with light sprinklings of pale blue – these are the colours Monet used to reproduce the façade of the cathedral in the evening.

Darker blue and lilac tones are distinctly more evident in the second painting, where pinks are almost extinguished and gold is shot with orange and red.

Whilst on the Riviera in 1888 Monet wrote to Rodin: “I am arming myself and doing battle with the sun… Here one ought to paint with pure gold and precious stones.” These words could be related to the Rouen Cathedral series as well, for here too, Monet was waging war with the sun, and the surfaces of the canvasses really are reminiscent of a scattering of precious stones being played upon by rays of sunlight.

By the time the Cathedrals were being created, the nervousness of Monet’s brushstrokes and the intensity of his colour combinations had lessened noticeably, and he was now more concerned with shades and nuances of colour.

O. Reuterswärd has perceptively noted that one of the most remarkable features of the series lies in the variations of values: “…spots of paint, both strong and weak in terms of light, interlacing in ever-new combinations of tones, the vivid play of colours conveying almost imperceptible light effects.”

Critics within Monet’s circle, Mirbeau and Geffroy among them, greeted the Rouen Cathedral series ecstatically.

The greatest impression was, however, made by the review of Georges Clemenceau, a close acquaintance of Monet’s since the 1860s. Briefly abandoning questions of politics, the leader of the radicals took up his pen and published an enthusiastic article in Justice. Upon reading the article, Monet wrote to Clemenceau: “If one sets aside modesty and my person, then everything is said beautifully.”

The Grand Canal, Venice, 1908. Oil on canvas,

73.7 × 92.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

This delight was by no means shared by all artists and critics. The opposition’s opinion was most laconically expressed by the ageing Gérôme, himself crowned with all the laurels and distinctions of the official art world, when he called the Cathedrals and all Monet’s other works of this period “rubbish”. The following years saw no fundamental changes in Monet’s career, though the artist continued to experiment in spite of his age.

During the winter of 1895 the weather in Europe was unusually cold. The Seine froze all the way to Honfleur.

At a banquet in Paris, Monet met a Norwegian landscape painter, Fritz Thaulow. When he learned that Monet’s stepson was fulfilling his military service in Norway, Thaulow set about convincing Monet to go there precisely in winter.

Thus it came about that, at the end of January, Monet left for Christiania. Monet saw the winter there, which would have been strange to a Frenchman, in all its splendour.

The ice had blocked access to all the Scandinavian ports, and travellers on the sea routes were halted by numerous snow slides. At first he thought the ice and the wind would make working in the open air impossible.

But this Nordic land, with its clear air, was so lovely that Monet went out in the glacial cold. He took a four-day trip by sleigh in the mountains, towards the fjords and over the lakes.

In a letter to Geffroy, the painter wrote that he never saw any water anywhere because everything was frozen. During the day, the temperature was always around twenty-five degrees below zero! He felt wonderful in spite of all this and, most importantly, worked with enthusiasm.

For the winter motifs, Monet followed, above all, Courbet, who captured this theme in some of his genre paintings. In contrast to those by Courbet, Monet’s pictures are characterised by loneliness, in which man plays a subordinate role.