Monet: The Early Years
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Monet: The Early Years Details
Book Description The first comprehensive examination of the painter’s formative years, this gorgeous catalogue traces the evolution of his style and the development of personal ambitions that drove his artistic career. Read more About the Author George T. M. Shackelford is deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum. Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Richard Thomson is Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh. Anthea Callen is professor emeritus of the Australian National University and professor emeritus of visual culture, University of Nottingham. Mary Dailey Desmarais is associate curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal. Read more
Reviews
This is the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of the same name at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, from October, 2016 until January, 2017 and at the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco from February to May, 2017. George T. M. Shackelford, the Kimbell’s deputy director, who curated the show and edited the catalogue, tells us that when he was showing some of the intended items to other scholars and curators, he was sometimes met with amazement and the astonished comment, “I’ve never seen that before!” (11) That was my reaction, too; I had never seen many of these pictures before, possibly the majority, although I have been looking at Monet for many decades and have well over a couple of dozen collections of his work. But the fact is that his amazing productivity, which led to the painting of over 2000 extant canvases during the course of his long creative career, was characteristic of his work right from the beginning. This exhibition, which is the first monographic presentation to focus exclusively on Monet’s earliest work, presents paintings from the years 1863 to 1872, i.e. two years before even the “official” beginning of “Impressionism.” (The single exception is his first exhibited painting, a lovely landscape entitled “View Near Rouelles,” from 1858.) There are fifty-six exhibition items out of an estimated 250 or so canvases that he may have painted in those years; 1870 alone saw almost sixty works—more than one a week. All this means that even the most experienced cognoscenti of Monet’s work will probably discover paintings here that they have not encountered before, especially as this collection was put together from the contributions of over forty lenders world-wide. (And more good news is that the same team is planning to produce a chronological counterpart, “Monet: The Late Years” in two years’ time, in the same venues.) The catalog reproductions are arranged chronologically and are grouped thematically for the purpose of discussion together, e.g., the paintings the artist did on the beach at Trouville in the summer of 1870, including the portraits of his wife (Cats. 34-37 and figs. 113-115) are on pp. 150-157 and include curatorial commentary. All the exhibition plates are printed full-page, and the supporting illustrations (which total 122 for the volume) are aptly and usefully chosen, frequently presenting paintings of the same motif done by other artists, either when they were painting side-by-side with Monet (Boudin, Renoir, Sisley) or at other times. (Unfortunately, dimensions of the illustrated works are not provided.) The commentaries, which were written by Dr. Shackelford, include brief biographical references and artistic analysis, with a special emphasis on the signs of Monet’s changing style and techniques, and are informative, clearly written, and very helpful. I have not seen the exhibition and, as mentioned, have not seen many of these paintings, but my recollection of those that I have seen is that Monet’s colors are more intense and vivid than in some of the reproductions, which seem to me often lacking in contrast and somewhat washed-out and lighter than they should be. This is an impression generally confirmed by comparison with reproductions in some other volumes—for whatever that is worth.The catalogue is preceded by several essays. Dr. Shackelford’s introduction, “Inventing Monet,” surveys the early development of the artist’s career and the establishment of his reputation, tracing his identification first as a successor to the Barbizon School and then as one of the Impressionists, to recognition as an independent voice, cemented conclusively by the 1889 retrospective exhibition of 150 of his paintings from the years 1864-72, which the artist himself had identified as the “early Monet.” Mary Dailey Desmarais, a curator of modern art at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, offers a close reading of the truncated “Luncheon on the Grass” of 1865, tracing its antecedents beyond the obvious and avowed indebtedness to Manet’s scandalous canvas from two years earlier. She finds much influence of the various “fêtes galantes” of Watteau et. al.; of the “jardin d’amour” tableaux, a pervasive Rococo favorite; and of the “repas de chasse” scenes from the hunting paintings beloved of the French kings. We are reminded that the forest of Fontainebleau, the site of the picture and of much Barbizon painting, was for centuries a royal hunting ground, and this background also necessarily conjures up Courbet, especially his “The Huntsman’s Picnic” (1858), as another influence. Richard Thomson, the Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh, takes a look at Monet’s relationship to “naturalism," the much-debated “-ism” of the mid-sixties—just when he was reaching his artistic maturity--and finds several ways in which he apparently absorbed the methods of that tendency. For just one example, he was a devoted adherent of plein-air painting and prided himself on being able to paint in all sorts of inclement conditions, bundling up in layers of clothing to create some of his snowscapes, possibly to his disadvantage—the magnificent “Magpie” of 1869 was rejected by the salon, perhaps, as Prof. Thomson suggests, because of “its insistent whiteness, true to wintry nature but at odds with the norms of landscape painting” (37). But “truth to nature” was the whole point of the new realism or, as Zola preferred, “naturalism,” and it was he who defended this defiant aspect of such paintings as the similarly rejected “The Jetty at Le Havre in Rough Weather” (1867), “which must have horrified the jury accustomed to shiny babbling little waves in sugar-candy seascapes” (quoted 43). Anthea Callen, professor emerita at the universities at Canberra and Nottingham, examines Monet’s techniques of composition, especially with respect to his formatting requirements and the prepared canvas supports becoming more generally available at the time. The dimensions and shapes of these commercially available supports were determined not by any theories of ideally harmonious proportions resulting from the cumulative experience of skilled masters (as much of the public and even many artists believed), but by the most economical way of cutting the widths of canvas that came from the manufacturers’ looms. However, Monet was largely indifferent to the conventional use of standard formats (like “Marine No. 25,” etc.), and was never averse even to using a canvas intended for a horizontal scene as a support for his vertical idea. Altogether, Dr. Callen concludes that much of his “mise-en-page” went against all the received rules of pictorial illusion and was recognized as quite radical in its originality. Finally, Richard Shiff, the Effie Marie Cain Regents Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses Monet as a “Paraph Painter”—a “paraph” usually being a special, individualizing flourish at the end of one’s signature. The writer uses it here as an analogy to the painter’s mark, which he associates with the characteristic enlarged “t” at the end of Monet’s name, a paraph the artist started to use at a very early age when signing his paintings. Prof. Shiff points to the signature on “Boulevard des Capucines” (1873-74): the elongated vertical stroke of the “t” is technically indistinguishable from the marks indicating the pedestrians, but it is not a cipher, for it adds no coded meaning; the “t” is a “pictorial paraph,” an aesthetic sign lacking reference. The writer has a great deal more to say about Monet’s various marks; his comments are largely against the background of Heinrich Wölfflin’s famous formulation, in “Principles of Art History,” concerning the “alienation of the sign from the thing” as a major characteristic of modern art, for which he used Monet as a brief but principal example. These essays are all quite interesting and informative; I would say they are above the average that one is accustomed to finding in exhibition catalogues. Both the essays and the catalogue commentary are well annotated, and the apparatus consists of a ten-page chronology of Monet’s life until 1874, a selected bibliography, and an exhibition checklist with the usual curatorial data, except lacking provenance information. And unfortunately there is no index. There is such a proliferation of Monet books that this is a volume I would recommend only to those who are real devotees of the artist and want to have as complete a collection of his works as possible. It is a fine volume in the selection of the works and its admirable essays, but I rate it at only four stars because of the less than excellent quality of the reproductions and the absence of an index. A caveat for prospective buyers: Amazon's product description has it at 320 pages, but it is actually 206 pages in length.[ISBN 978-0-300221-85-5]