Читать книгу Claude Monet - Nina Kalitina - Страница 3

Gustave Geffroy, the friend and biographer of Claude Monet, reproduced two portraits of the artist in his biography. In the first, painted by an artist of no particular distinction, Monet is eighteen years of age. A dark-haired young man in a striped shirt, he is perched astride a chair with his arms folded across its back. His pose suggests an impulsive and lively character; his face, framed by shoulder-length hair, shows both unease in the eyes and a strong will in the line of the mouth and the chin. Geffroy begins the second part of his book with a photographic portrait of Monet at the age of eighty-two. A stocky old man with a thick white beard stands confidently, his feet set wide apart; calm and wise, Monet knows the value of things and believed only in the undying power of art. It was not by chance that he chose to pose with a palette in his hand in front of a panel from the Waterlilies series. Numerous portraits of Monet have survived over the years – self-portraits, the works of his friends (Manet and Renoir among others), photographs by Carjat and Nadar – all of them reproducing his features at various stages in his life. Many literary descriptions of Monet’s physical appearance have come down to us as well, particularly after he had become well known and much in demand by art critics and journalists.

How then does Monet appear to us? Take a photograph from the 1870s. He is no longer a young man but a mature individual with a dense black beard and moustache, only the top of his forehead hidden by closely-cut hair. The expression of his brown eyes is decidedly lively, and his face as a whole exudes confidence and energy. This is Monet at the time of his uncompromising struggle for new aesthetic ideals. Now take his self-portrait in a beret dating from 1886, the year that Geffroy met him on the island of Belle-Île off the south coast of Brittany. “At first glance,” Geffroy recalls, “I could have taken him for a sailor, because he was dressed in a jacket, boots and hat very similar to the sort that they wear. He would put them on as protection against the sea breeze and the rain.” A few lines later Geffroy writes: “He was a sturdy man in a sweater and beret with a tangled beard and brilliant eyes which immediately pierced into me.”

In 1919, when Monet was living almost as a recluse at Giverny, not far from Vernon-sur-Seine, he was visited by Fernand Léger, who saw him as “a shortish gentleman in a panama hat and elegant light-grey suit of English cut… He had a large white beard, a pink face, little eyes that were bright and cheerful but with perhaps a slight hint of mistrust…” Both the visual and the literary portraits of Monet depict him as an unstable, restless figure. He was capable of producing an impression of boldness and audacity or he could seem, especially in the latter years of his life, confident and placid. But those who remarked on Monet’s calm and restraint were guided only by his external appearance. Both the friends of his youth, Bazille, Renoir, Cézanne, Manet, and the visitors to Giverny who were close to him – first and foremost Gustave Geffroy, Octave Mirbeau and Georges Clemenceau – were well aware of the attacks of tormenting dissatisfaction and nagging self-doubt to which he was prone. His gradually mounting annoyance and discontent with himself would frequently find an outlet in acts of unbridled and elemental fury, when Monet would destroy dozens of canvases, scraping off the paint, cutting them up into pieces, and sometimes even burning them. The art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, to whom Monet was bound by contract, received a whole host of letters from him requesting that the date for a showing of paintings be deferred. Monet would write that he had “not only scraped off, but simply torn up” the studies he had begun. He would say that for his own satisfaction it was essential to make alterations, and that the results he had achieved were “incommensurate with the amount of effort expended”, that he was in “a bad mood” or would even go so far as to say that he was “no good for anything.”

Bazille and Camille (study for Déjeuner sur l’Herbe), 1865.

Oil on canvas, 93 × 68.9 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Ladies in the Garden, 1866–1867.

Oil on canvas, 255 × 208 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1866.

Oil on canvas, 248 × 217 cm.

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Monet was capable of showing considerable civic courage, but was occasionally guilty of faint-heartedness and inconsistency. Thus, in 1872, Monet, together with the painter Eugène Boudin, visited the idol of his youth, Gustave Courbet in prison – an event perhaps not greatly significant in itself, but given the general hounding to which the Communard Courbet was subject at that time due not only to his political leanings but for suggesting the disassembly of the Column Vendôme, Monet and Boudin’s act was both brave and noble. With regard to the memory of Edouard Manet, Monet was the only member of the circle around the former leader of the Batignolle group to take action upon hearing, in 1889, from the American artist John Singer Sargent that Manet’s masterpiece Olympia might be sold to the United States. It was Monet who called upon the French public to collect the money to buy the painting for the Musée du Louvre. Again, at the time of the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s Monet sided with Dreyfus’ supporters and expressed his admiration for the courage of Emile Zola. A more domestic episode testifies to the warmth of Monet’s nature: after becoming a widower, he remarried in the 1880s. Alice Hoschedé had five children from her first marriage. Monet received them all with open arms and invariably referred to them as “my children”.

There was, however, another side to Monet. In the late 1860s, suffering acutely from poverty and lack of recognition, Monet deserted his first wife Camille and their young son Jean on several occasions, virtually abandoning them. Giving in to fits of despair, he would rush off somewhere, anywhere, just to change his surroundings and escape from an environment in which he had suffered personal and professional failure. On one occasion he even resolved to take his own life. Similarly hard to justify is Monet’s behaviour towards the other Impressionists when, following Renoir’s example, he broke their “sacred union” and refused to take part in the group’s fifth, sixth and eighth exhibitions. Degas was not unjustified in accusing him of thoughtless self-advertising when he learned of Monet’s refusal to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1880. Finally, Monet’s hostile attitude to Paul Gauguin was quite indefensible. These examples make the contradictions of Monet’s character quite clear.

Woman in the Garden. Sainte-Adresse, 1867.

Oil on canvas, 82 × 100 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

The Terrace at Sainte-Adresse, 1867.

Oil on canvas, 98.1 × 129.9 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The reader might justifiably ask: why write about personal features in an essay on an artist, particularly when some of these show Monet in a not especially attractive light?

It is always dangerous to divide a single, integral personality into two halves – on the one hand, the ordinary man with all the complexities and upheavals of his individual lot; on the other, the brilliant painter who wrote his name in the history of world art. Great works of art are not created by ideal people, and if knowledge of their personality does not actually assist us in understanding their masterpieces, then at least it can explain a great deal about the circumstances in which the masterpieces were created. Monet’s abrupt changes of mood, his constant personal dissatisfaction, his spontaneous decisions, stormy emotion and cold methodicalness, his consciousness of himself as a personality moulded by the preoccupations of his age, set against his extreme individualism – taken together these features elucidate much in Monet’s creative processes and attitudes towards his own work