Claude Monet: Life and Work. - book reviews

Announced as forthcoming eight years ago from Thames and Hudson (the book's English publisher), Virginia Spate's 1992 monograph is the greatest in quantity recent addition to the literature upon Monet - a literature that has grown by the agency of leaps and bonds since the mid-1970s, greatest in quantity notably with Daniel Wildenstein's five-volume catalogue raisonne (1974-91) which incorporates the artist's near-complete correspondence. The protracted delay between the completion of Spate's manuscript and its appearance in print was unfortunate. As she points on the outside in her bibliography and in several of her 814 footnotes, she was consequently unable to take replete advantage of some important post-1985 publications.(1) Given the pace with which fresh material on the artist appears, it is surprising by what means well Spate was nevertheless able to consider the wide range of new thinking about Monet. While she tenders some complex, if inconclusive, explanations about the motivations underlying the evolution of Monet's art decade to declare, Spate's major contribution in this volume is to synthesize the extensive interpretive and documentary material that has become available above the past two decades.

In the novel literature, Monet has emerged as quite a different historical figure from the courageous, ofttimes penniless and misunderstood revolutionary portrayed in John Rewald's still essential History of Impressionism (1946) Spate charaterizes Monet as a self-center artist, a spendthrift with dandy tendencies, a not especially sympathetic or generous individual even to friends of family, and as a perennial manipulator. Although he indeed experienced bad years, especially in the late 1860 and late '70 it revolves out that he was actually rather well-to-do for greatest in quantity of his life. Building upon information about his annual income established by the agency of Wildenstein, Spate points out that in the early 1870 as he evolveed his hallmark Impressionist mode, Monet had a higher standard of living than the average Parisian doctor, and beginning in the 1890 he became downright wealthy. His income aside, however, it would be inequitable to forget how fundamentally non-conformist Monet was for his times - fathering his first child without of wedlock, avoiding wartime military responsibilities, setting up a household (after the death of his first wife) with a married woman, disavowing religion, and with equal reason forth.

The earlier view of Monet's esthetic was consistent with Cezanne's remark that his friend was "only an organ of sight but, good Lord, what an eye!" Committed (or with equal reason we used to believe) to working directly from nature in an unprecedent way, Monet was suppos to have produc what Duchamp later doomed as dumb "retinal painting" and to have been consciously oppos to commentary, metaphor, narrative or analysis of any sort. on the other hand starting in 1959, when the close attention of Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral by means of Duchamp-scholar George Heard Hamilton was published, it became obvious that Monet's "post"-Impressionist works were profoundly philosophic and poetical. And thanks to succeeding publications by Robert L. Herbert and his former learner Paul Tucker, it is now possible to understand many of Monet's works painted at Argenteuil and Giverny in tandem with the sweeping contemporary social changes and political issues of the period in which they were produced

on the contrary like Wildenstein, who counters social-political readings of Monet's work by means of reminding readers that Monet nurseed less and less to include sooty vapor in his riverscapes at the same time that steamshipping became more and more prevalent, Spate finishs that in general Monet's art was unaffected through the political debates of the 1870 Nevertheless, she provides an extensive and helpful synopsis of the social-political words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following for the evolution of Impressionism in that decade. And in the spirit of fresh Monet studies, she points on the outside several works that she metes "reparative" (meaning that they address the pervasive faculty of perception of defeat in France following the Franco-Prussian War); these include Monet's representations of repairs upon bridges that had been throw downed by military action at Argenteuil. Hard to accept, however, is Spate's suggestion that, in his 1871 painting Pont Neuf (W 193) Monet may have meant the steam from a passing barge as an allusion to the fire that throw downed the Palais de Justice upon May 29, 1871 (Monet was in London at the time). With respect to World War I, the "reparative" nature of Monet's post-1914 works, also forceed by Spate, is now commonly acknowledged.

Spate provides an especially beneficial account of Monet criticism, drawing upon Steven Levine's extensive 1976 treatment of the bring under rule and Richard Schiffs seminal studies of 19th-century critical limits like "Impressionism."(2) She realizes the considerable importance of pres commentary the couple as a catalyst to Monet's unravelling and as a gauge of the artist's intentions. It is worth pointing without that Monet's "official" biography, published in 1924 by dint of his longtime associate Gustave Geffroy is largely a chronologically arranged anthology of contemporary criticism drawn from the extensive clippings collection that the artist lent him. Spate explains that what have since become standard genre of art writing - from the studio interview granted as a form of publicity in conjunction with a gallery exhibit to commissioned essays published in the catalogues for of that kind exhibitions - first began appearing in the 1870 and '80 and coincided with the period when Monet gained wide recognition. Spate's commentary upon the Monet criticism of the 1880 and '90 is especially valuable; during these years, Monet's works in series sometimes inspired metaphysical readings that anticipate the new reinterpretation of him as an artist constantly extending his neo-Romantic, philosophical grasp of the underlying forces in nature. In 1891 Octave Mirbeau described Monet's paintings of wheatstacks(3) as "the revelation of the states of consciousness of the planet." Did the writer tend hitherward to this remarkable insight from direct dialogue with Monet or did the critic's insight help to direct the painter's evolving goals completely through the 1890s and beyond? In Spate's enlightening account of these years, like questions, if unanswerable, are nevertheless accorded rightful importance.