Why Monet gave up figure painting - Claude Monet

biographer E Lemaitre, Arsene Houssaye: Notes et souvenirs; Bibliographie, Reims, 1897 118 Houssaye's many pseudonyms included, in addition to Rene de la Ferte: Lord Pilgrim, Henri Trianon, Valet de Carreau, Octave de Parisis, G de Chastenay, Franz Lariviere, Comte de Moussy, Un Parisien, G de Montbeyraud, Maurice Duvernay, P de l'Estoile, Princesse X Charles Coligny, and Hector Callias. He also used the names Pierre Dax and Alfred Mousse. Houssaye appear to bes to have been accustomed to employing L'Artiste for low-key whiffs of his own activities and possessions. In 1870 for example, beneath the name Karl Bertrand, he writes of the point of time when he will give the two Camille--La Robe verte and his Renoir to the Musee du Luxembourg (L'Artiste, VI, June 1 1870 319-20)

Why did Monet give up figure painting? wherefore does it matter? My essay attempts to answer these questions at a certain number of length, and with as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of precision as could reasonably be awaited from any effort at causal explanation which admits from the starting-point the problematic nature of its task. We shall not at any time "really know" why Monet gave up figure painting, and indeed it might well be claimed he at no time did so, if "figure painting" means representing men women and children in oils. on the contrary if by figure painting is meant an investment in a particular practice of representation established in the Paris Salons of the 1860 and 1870 limited on the one hand through works of Manet and Courbet, upon the other by Stevens and Cabanel; if figure painting names, in other words, the practice which in these years best indexed the ambitions of the painter's relationship to innovation and tradition and contemporaneity, then Monet's scattered later exercises at figures--from La Japonaise (1876) to the sum of two units Essais de figure en plein air of 1886 (better known as the Femme a l'ombrelle--do not stand for any kind of continuity with it.(1) When upon occasions like these Monet get backed to the figure, regression looks mostly to have been the order of the day, level when it took pictorially innovative form. The tone of the later figure paintings may be elegaic or haunted, nostalgic or barely (intentionally?) vacuous, but in any case they had become in each sense secondary to Monet's landscape work.

I mean to argue that Monet gave up figure painting as the vehicle and measure of his contribution to a fresh painting not--or at least not simply--because he "preferred" landscape, on the contrary because figure painting, as he conceived its demands, was an activity ultimately emotionally intolerable to him; it was overdetermined from the start, since it involved a difficult positioning of himself as control in relation to the fiction of reality exhibited with such studied urgency in his pictures. Monet I will claim, gave up figure painting because he could not continue favorably to accommodate the emotional conflicts aroused by means of the discrepancies between the rhetoric of novel life offered in his pictures, and the subjective materials from which they were sweetmeated That failure at accommodation matters--it is more than, or not barely a personal failure--because it provides evidence, at a site where it is still emergencyed of the artificiality and volatility of "the modern" as a bound to name both a category of experience and a category of representation. Its unsustainability in Monet's case is decisive for representation; it is decisive, in other words, for the account of subjectivity and sociability proffered within these works; they are images whose implications ultimately leave behind the welter of evidence concerning their making which is proffered here--despite the key role that evidence plays in generating this account. The Monet who made his pictures, in other words, and the individual produced by and within them are not identical.

My propositions read rather baldly, I realize, and may appear more ambitious than present the appearances justifiable, given their necessarily speculative sods After all, the ultimate confirmation of an argument concerning emotional conflicts experienced by dint of Monet would be his acceptance of its terms; failing that, my readers' acceptance will have to suffice. And they will accept or eject what is unabashedly argument; I have single a few new bits of information to proffer in my support, though present them I will in owed course. The main burden of my effort here will instead move toward a rereading of published sources and familiar pictures--an effort launched, needles to say, without of disagreements to be located (without however citing chapter and verse) in the general reductiveness and imprecision of other authors, especially as be of importance tos the inevitable points of overlap and disjunction between Monet's intents as a painter and his identity as a someone I aim, for my part, to tender an account which will place understanding of both "purposes" and "identity" beneath a certain stress.

It is not simply in the effort to avoid the failings of my predecessors that my argument is built around the research of a single picture, Le morning meal [The Luncheon] (1868-69; Figs. 1-3) a work which tenders the viewer the father's seat at a bourgeois family meal.(2) The painting effectively marks the final point of Monet's engagement with "figure painting" as a specially ambitious practice, the termination of preoccupations of five years' standing. This is not to say that the picture itself was then disowned by the agency of its maker: he could not have afforded its los notwithstanding that he held it back from the Salon of 1869 (the Salon for which it was first conceived), he sent it along in 1870 took it abiding-place again when it was refused, and, evidently hopeful that the naure of his accomplishment-would be apparent in another, more adventurous context, put it on present to view four years later as the centerpiece of his contribution to the first Impressionist exhibition. All this by dint of way of explanation: Le morning meal appears here as the figure of figure painting for Monet at one time the locus of his ambitions in and for the genre and the site of their abandonment. The author's ambition and abdication are the couple legible in the picture, condens with telling economy within the image of the destitute of contents chair. Equally important to the picture's workings is the comfort the same chair tenders to the viewer's gaze.