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WORLD'S GREATEST
ARTWORKS
For a list of the Top 10 painters/
sculptors: Best Artists of All
Time.
WORLD'S TOP PAINTERS
For details of the best
modern painters, see:
Famous Painters.
BEST MODERN ART
For a list of great pictures in
oils, watercolours, acrylics,
see: Greatest Modern Paintings.
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By 1872 all the Impressionist
painters have returned to Paris or its immediate environs. Monet,
after his return, goes to Argenteuil and stays there for six years. His
house, buried in greenery, shrubbery and flowers, becomes the favourite
haunt of his friends. The meetings are unrestrained, animated by the charm
of young women, companions or friends of the artists. Painting is never
forgotten. Its part is great, as proved by the anecdote of the portrait
of Camille, Monet painted at the same time by Renoir and Manet. Now Monet
ascends rapidly above all the others. If in the years before the war the
movement which they led together found its first major fruits in the works
of Manet, now it is
crystallised around Monet. His engaging personality imposes itself on
the other painters; they are struck by the energy he uses to achieve his
end despite the handicaps and misfortunes which fate flings in his way.
A strange strength, stemming mostly from his own great faith in himself,
and a power of persuasion develop in him. His first conquest is Manet.
Hesitant up to now and even resisting the persuasion and example of Berthe
Morisot, whose charming personality has captivated him, Manet decides
to paint in the "plein-air" manner. Almost from the first, as
shown by his painting "Claude Monet in his Studio," Manet plunges
his forms into scintillation and vibration of light. In avoiding a precise
contour he succeeds, with magnificent ease, essentially by colour, in
an atmosphere sparkling with light.
Manet, who has come to Gennevilliers to
spend his holidays, has only to cross the river to join Monet. He depicts
his friend in the picturesque floating studio that Monet uses on the Seine,
as Daubigny once did. It was a vast bark on which the painter, in the
shade of an awning stretched in front of the cabin under which sometimes
his wife and friends would sit, was able to work quietly beside the water.
Moving between the banks, under the arches that reflect the shimmer of
the water, Monet felt himself really in the heart of this world of fluid
forms whose evolution he sought to capture under the turning movement
of the sun.
It was undoubtedly at this time that he
became acquainted with a young neighbour, keen on boating and painting,
Gustave Caillebotte,
who, in 1873, had inherited a fortune which enabled him to pursue his
taste for the arts. After entering the Fine Arts School in the class of
Bonna, he leaves after a short time to work alongside Monet and Renoir,
who have become his friends. He begins buying works that he likes and
in several years builds up an important collection of Impressionist paintings,
with the intention of leaving them to the State for the museums of the
future. In his noble and generous character, and the seriousness of his
convictions, he recalls to some extent Bazille, whose role of benefactor
he assumes.
The processes of Monet's thought are rich and complex, his motivations
always conscious. From 1872 to 1874, he uses jagged patches, broadly spread
out, as in "Bateaux de Plaisance," or strokes boldly drawn with
a free and sensitive hand, such as in "Regates par Temps gris a Argenteuil."
In 1872, at Le Havre, he paints "Impression au Soleil Levant",
in an extremely spontaneous and fluid treatment. These canvases, premonitory
in that they provide the pretext for baptising the movement when the group
stages its first exhibition, fix Monet's destiny. In the rapid transcription
of sensation Monet takes away all weight from his forms. He concentrates
his attention on variations of light which then become the unique reality
of things, the ideal means of reproducing the image he sees. Finally,
in 1873, once more with Renoir, he paints "Mare aux Canards"
(Duck Pond) in the vicinity of Argenteuil. As at La Grenouillere, the
two are together again to work on the same subject. Together they study
tones and spare no effort to note even the most infinitesimal nuance.
In depicting the iridescent foliage and the sparkling water of the pond
they adopt a touch in very tiny commas which enables them to note each
burst of colour, each change of light, and to spread a luminous resonance
pver the whole surface.
These paintings of Renoir and Monet, painted together, show the marks
of a desperately hard effort and an extraordinary tension of the mind.
As is commonly said in art circles they are "tired". The successive
changes of mind, corrections and adjustments in the pigment leave a certain
feeling of heaviness. Later Monet is perhaps to recall this when he resumes
his famous series of cathedrals in the studio. Sensible of the criticism
levelled against him of diluting shape in the light, he succeeds in finding,
with a thick, gritty paste, the equivalent of the density of matter. The
effects of light glide over it. The object assumes a porous character
and becomes something of a screen; and if it does not really succeed in
showing its weight, it does assume a physical presence.
During the summer of 1874 the creative
processes of Monet are accelerated. His activity reaches almost fever
pitch. A brief period, but of great importance to his painting. In a series
of canvases blooming with freshness ("The Bridge at Argenteuil,"
"The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil," "The Seine at Argenteuil"
and "Sailing Boats at Argenteuil"), he sets off in search of
reflections and rippling in the water, of bursts of light. Varying his
technique, with vigorous strokes of the brush, wide or sharp-pointed or
in the form or large or small commas, decomposing tones and making local
tones burst out, using space to the maximum effect and breaking up masses
and surfaces, he observes the phenomenon of light and its multiple facets.
But behind the light and graceful effect he produces, there lies a more
serious question. Taking the experiment as a whole it shows that it was
not so much a matter of Monet capturing the ephemeral, as one likes to
say, as his expressing duration, a developed duration, dynamic as is realised
by the experience of sensation. Thus, in the apt words of Rene Berger,
the Impressionists approach the the world "in process of developing".
See also Impressionism's finest supporter:
the art dealer Paul Durand-Durel.
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