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He gifted art with light and freed it from historical burden. His works seems to capture only a fl eeting moment but were nonetheless masterpieces of composition. His colours triumphed above the pressing competition of photography, still exclusively black and white at the time. He lived in a time of increasing acceleration. The world, just as his life, was full of movement only to fi nd bliss – in a paradise of water, of plants and blossoms…
Claude Monet transposed the Greek nymphs into the world of nymphéas, the water lilies. He transformed his garden in Giverny, Normandy into a dreamlike place of dissolution, which captivated eye and brush, leading to seemingly repetitive motifs, which he set into fl oating states by means of colour and light. Monet’s late work culminated in the Grande Décoration he created for the Orangerie in Paris: water lily murals cover the wide oval and allow the viewer to immerse himself in unique compositions...
MONET’S COLOUR
He was called the painter of colourful light, and he would become the teacher of colour for a younger generation of artists. Claude Monet starts his career as an academically trained artist. In his early paintings, he still uses colour in a traditional, subject-related fashion. The environment – nature, gardens, the sea, people – still dictates his colour palette. But soon he adapts the choice of colour to the atmospheric vibrations of the light and shows that it is colour which creates the connection between nature and art, between the moment and its image.
Everything is done through colour: Because light itself cannot be painted, Monet subjugates it to colour, which becomes his most important medium of expression. In the beginning, it helps him to capture motifs and thus, to stop time. Later he would go on to discover the intrinsic value of colour, separating it from the objects and imitating the shimmer of light by applying it in small strokes and circles. With great courage he is willing to risk his career and leave academic tradition behind him for the sake of colour.
In his late works between 1918 and 1924, Monet begins using colour in an almost abstract way. It becomes the mark of an artist who, through a long time of visual impairment, has learned to express more than just the visible through colour. His choice of colour becomes not only a reflection of the outside, but also of an expression of his internal seeing.
By repeating the same motifs, Monet conveys their inner state of being. How can one express the waves of a wheatfield in the summer wind? Or the sprawling of a rosebush? Monet tells us about sensations and feelings, forebodings and joy, but also about sorrow and worry, suffering and death with the help of colour. His paintings of a weeping willow murmur of farewell and death, but also of hope and new beginnings through their orgiastic colours.
Due to their colours, Monet’s late paintings of water lilies are the bridge between painting of the 19th and that of the 20th century. Nature is only the starting point for the soul of the artist. However, even that becomes irrelevant next to the abstract autonomy of colour. It will soon dominate the artistic landscape and change the art world forever as colour field painting.
MONET PAINTER OF LIGHT
Claude Monet painted it his entire life, in every hour end every season – in Paris, in the fog by the Thames, over the canals of Venice and by the sea: light, which was to become the hallmark of his art, was reflected in his richly coloured nature, and led him on a search for ideal atmospheres. Monet left the muted light of salon painting behind him and left the studio to work “plein air” outdoors. For the first time, paintings are created which don’t reproduce light, colour and shadows form memory, but from inspired interaction with them.
Who dedicates themselves to light must stay in motion. This is why Monet painted his fascinating gradations from luminous sky-blue to the deep black-green in ever-changing places. His hand and his brush moved him to paint cathedrals, haystacks, gardens and water lilies, and yet his eye was fixed on the effects of light and how it changes things. It followed the glowing rays of the sun and captured its shadows on canvas in equally luminous colours.
The history of painting is one of light. Repeatedly artists discovered new aspects, combining them with ideas of divinity and enlightenment, from the conquest of the everyday to the light direction of a Caravaggio, but it was Monet who first exposed the world. Exposed in the sense of an art form that had been invented a year before his birth: photography. As an omnipresent competitor it has accompanied the history of painting since 1839. It would soon be far superior in its ability to document and yet as an art of exposure, it was at a disadvantage for decades, because its precious little pictures showed the world in black and white only for the time being. Monet’s light, however, reflects the colourfulness of a day, of a night and the dampness of the mist of muted water surfaces.
In photography light makes things visible, in Monet’s painting it makes them come alive. His famous first impressionist painting “Impression. Sunrise” from 1872 combines light with the aspect of its duration and thus emphasises the momentary nature of seeing. The fleeting nature of the moment drove the painter to speed and serial work. But his language of light became colour, and colour the triumph over photography.
MONET’S MAGIC PAINTBRUSH
Art is intellect and craftsmanship at the same time. Claude Monet’s oeuvre comprises 2000 paintings, 110 drawings, 108 pastels and 11 sketchbooks, none of which would have been created if the painter had not taken up pencil, chalk or brush. They are the extension that created a visible line, a chalk trace or brush stroke out of the gestural movement of the hand. Materials determine technique, and the materials an artist chooses to express his or her ideas are not a matter of chance, but of mastery of the creative means.
Brushes made of pig bristles are used for oil painting, hair brushes for drawings, the variety of which requires a precise knowledge of the tools of the painter’s trade. Only in this way, Monet can replace the academically traditional fine painting with the impressionist stroke. Flat brushes produce square or rectangular strokes, a preference of the Impressionists. Round brushes are suitable for stippling or for drawing long strokes. Monet used both techniques with virtuosity.
In the beginning, he preferred a hard brushstroke with strong contrasts, reminiscent of Edouard Manet, but later he covered the entire surface of the painting with circular, almost abstract brushstrokes, which leave the depiction of nature behind and become a reflection of inner state of mind.
For Monet, Impressionism is not a painting of the moment, but a conscious and well-composed technique of uniting the seen with the felt in the picture. To do justice to the briskness of a fl eeting moment, he paints some of his pictures in wet-on-wet technique. The colours are applied next to and on top of each other while they are still wet, so that they mix and contours become blurred. He completes many of his paintings started in the open air in his studio, where he finetuned the effects of colour and light. He signs directly with black oil paint. Bright, barely mixed colour patches are built up into a colour mosaic. Seen from a distance the colours merge, creating an often glistening, light-fi lled image.
His late water lily paintings are painted with open brushstrokes. The view across the pond with the famous Japanese Bridge like a whirlpool of countless colourful strokes. The orgiastic use of paint and brush corresponds to the blossoming of nature.