Monets Life and Works - Essay Example

Claude Monet: The Impressionist painter 2008 Thesis ment: Monet's life and works make him the most important painter in the Impressionist movement. Introduction Claude Monet, also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet, was born on November 14, 1840 in Paris, France. Monet was the leader of a French art movement group (whose philosophy was to express one's sensitive observation before nature) called the "Impressionists". The term Impressionism was founded on the title of Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise. Celebrated painters like Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro belonged to the school of Impressionism. Monet was judged by his colleagues as the leader not because he was the most cerebral or conjectural or because he could answer questions that they were unable to but because he appeared to be more aware to the promise latent in the Impressionism, which he developed in his work in a more thorough way the others. Bearing in mind how all these painters elaborated their strongly personal manners relating to the new imaginative ideas, one notices that the new aspects appeared most frequently in the work of Monet to be captured by the other Impressionists including them as ideas or as explicit methods and applying them in their own ways (Monet biography, repropaint.com, Monet, artchive.com) Early life Monet's father wanted him to go into the family business of trading in grocery supplies but Monet (the second son of Claude-Adolphe and Louise-Justine Aubre Monet) wanted to become an artist and was admitted in the Le Havre secondary school of the arts in 1851 after his family shifted at that region. He was not a typical, good student in school. He had said, "School seemed like a prison and I could never bear to stay there, especially when the sunshine beckoned and the sea was smooth." He always drew funny caricatures of his teachers. He always got in trouble for his drawings, but he became very good at them (thinkquest.org). It was Eugene Boudin Boudin, his early mentor, who used to draw his sketches outdoors that pushed Monet to do the same. "Suddenly the veil was torn away.... My destiny as a painter opened out to me," he later said. For the next 60 years Monet delved into the effects of light on open-air scenes (plein-air landscape painting). He was the first artist to let his first impressions remain as finished works, rather than as "notes" for doing work inside the studio. (House, 1998, Monet bio, repropaint.com). After his mother died when he was only 16 years (in 1857) he left school, went to live with his childless aunt. His family was not very happy about his occupation as a painter. In 1860 he was conscripted and had to go to Northern Africa for two years. After his return he took a trip to Paris to visit the Louvre Museum copying old masters and took painting lessons at Gleyre's studio in Paris wher he got to know Auguste Renoir, Sisley, Bazille, Pissarro ,Edouard Manet.and others. The basis of the future Impressionist movement was built. Monet liked to paint water, the way colors reflected in the water and boats, seas, and lakes were some of his pet subjects, so much so that after he married in 1870 (he married his favorite model Camille, whom he painted in Women in the Garden), and settled in Argenteuil, he fixed a boat with an easel and painted his way wavering down the Seine River, seizing his impressions of the relationship of light, water and surroundings. The boat served him as his floating studio where he kept paints, brushes, canvas, and drawing materials (thinkquest.org, repropaint.com). Colors in plein air Soon, Monet averted from the conventional style of painting inside a studio and with his new friends went outside in the Fontainebleau forest to paint in the open air. Albeit Monet painted outside, he never found it to be easy. Every time, more or less, he painted outside, a bit got glued to the wet paint. If he was in the wilderness, sand and rock would get attached to his paintings. In the forest, leaves and other things would fix to his canvas (thinkquest.org). But critics mocked at these new paintings that appeared so different from any conservative art style. In a cartoon published in a newspaper, they were laughed at with the suggestion of driving out the Prussian enemy (The Franco-Prussian war broke out just then) by showing them Impressionist paintings! After the outbreak of the war (July 19, 1870), Monet took shenter in England in September 1870(Web Museun, Monet) where he studied the works of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose landscapes enthused Monet to look for new and original ways in his experiments with color. In the Spring of 1871, Monet's works were turned down to be included in the Royal Academy exhibition (Stuckey, "Monet, a Retrospective"). In 1872 (or 1873), he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression: soleil levant) portraying a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 (and is now displayed in the Muse Marmottan-Monet, Paris). From the painting's name, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism",using it in an insulting sense which was however taken up by the Impressionists for themselves.In spite of the monetary failure of this first show , the Impressionist kept on exhibiting together until 1886 (Monet biography, repropaint.com). After 1880, the public gradually started to appreciate the worth of impressionism. Claude and his friends could at last get some sound income from the sales of their paintings. In 1879 Camille died of tuberculosis. Monet remarried to a woman named Alice. Quite a few years later, Alice and his son Jean died too. In 1883 Monet leased a house in Giverny about 50 kilometers beyond Paris. Later, in 1890, he bought the house and stayed there till he died in 1926. When he was about70, he started to go blind, yet didn't discontinue painting. Because of his loss of sight, his paintings were very hazy. He carried on painting until he died when he was 86 (thinkquest.org) Type and style of painting. Monet habitually painted many canvases on the same theme as he wanted to know how something would appear in the various times of the day or various seasons of the year. He tried to paint with colors, giving the effect of lights and shadows as close to reality as possible. The exhilarating brush strokes and colors in his paintings give the touch of being present there right when he was painting. He spent the last decade of his life painting his water garden ,some of which are over forty feet broad -- the most gorgeous and well-known of his painting, like Water Lilies, Panel of Water Lily Decorations, Snow at Argenteuil, and Venice the Grand Canal ( thinkquest.org). There is another reason for Monet's exceptional status as an Impressionist. Comparing his paintings with the paintings of the others, we discover that as others painted within a limited choice of ideas and even of outlook, like Renoir of the period 1873-76 typified by the pleasure of living in a shared world of leisure, Monet, with his strong, ever watchful eye, was able to paint shining as well somewhat hoary canvasses in dispassionate tones. He was more responsive, had more of what psychologists of that period called "Impressionability," implying open to more mixed spurs from the ordinary world. He could change in his paintings at any particular moment, making many amazing explanations of the familiar thing, changing his method according to his sense of the characteristic of the subject, whether cheerful or grave, that he wanted to build according to the way the object spurred him while in the act of painting. In the same way, his art, over years, went through an amazing change on the whole. The early work of Monet looks as being exactly seen objects distinguished by great movement and diversity. His art is a world of streets and ports, beaches, roads, and resorts, filled with people or showing plays and other human actions that we miss in his later works where there are no figure paintings (after the middle 1880s) and a little between 1879 and 1885. From that period, we can consider all his body paintings on one hand. He also quitted still life and painted no type groups, limiting himself to an ever more quiet and private world. His sense of perspectives also had a penchant for changes. While touring around Venice and London, he painted those great cities from a distance, in fog or sunlight, with either no obvious presence of human beings or no hints to their movement through that space. He moreover, drifted from the painting of large to small fields. Earlier on, his canvasses big fields were painted on little canvases, later he painted a small field - water in a pond close by or some flowers in his garden - life-size and outwardly larger than life, as if to give a utmost solidity and the most cherished presence to a small area that, was for him a whole world. He shifted in his art from a world with profound, flat planes in long sides - the carriage ways - to a world in which the level of the water or the ground seen from nearby has been leant in the air and has become upright. The changes Monet, likeTitian, Rembrandt, Tintoretto went though amazing changes in his old age, living apparently more within themselves than in the "world," and from this propensity of aged artists appears to spring certain character of their art. This is a theory that depends on a random selection of old artists. However, and one can name Ingres, whose last paintings , such as The Turkish Bath, painted in his Eighteen eighties, are of an strong sensuality and at times astoundingly youthful and physical in forms. Pissarro, the fellow painter of Monet is another example. He began with tranquil rustic subjects and in old age painted streets and crowds, steamboats, factories, and people, the opposite of the what we have seen in Monet. The same happened to Renoir also, he being one, who in addition to his nudes, started by painting the warmth of his private world, of his artist friends and the delights of Paris. But with age, he gradually withdrew from this public world. Even though he still painted human figures, all the more ardently than before, but they were totally household figures - a child, the nurse, the mistress, the wife, in an close relation to the viewer or the painter. Monet never painted a nude, and one may doubt that nature and especially water substituted his male fantasy for women (Schapiro, Impressionism). The Tine frame: Impressionism During the late19th and early 20th centuries Impressionism (French Impressionnisme), a very important movement, first in painting and later in music, developed mainly in France to which Monet's name is taken as the precursor. Impressionist painting includes the work made between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists sharing a series of associated outlook and techniques. The most noticeable character trait of Impressionism was an effort to exactly and dispassionately depict visual reality with respect to changing effects of light and colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frdric Bazille, who worked together, influencing each other, and exhibiting together separately.. Edgar Degas and Paul Czanne also painted in an Impressionist style for some time in the early 1870s. The celebrated painter douard Manet, whose work in the 1860s largely affected Monet and others of the group, himself became an Impressionist in and around 1873. Impressionism was a movemnet that had more to do with breaking way from the official theory of art and stressed that the color should be plunged pure on the canvas rather than getting mixed on the palette. Many of these Impressionists disregarded the older conventions of art. The expressions independants'' or open air painters'' may be more just than impressionists'' to define those artists suataining a tradition inherited from Eugne Delacroix, who did not separate drawing from colors, and English landscape painters, Constable, Bonington and especially William Turner, whose thumb rule was to observe nature. Eugne Boudin, Stanislas Lpine and the Dutch Jongkind were among the precursors of the movement. These were people who felt disgusted by the indoor/studio based painting, prevalent in those days. At the same time, other artists wanted to surmount the restrictions of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and were working quai des Orfvres in the Swiss Academy; the eldest, from the Danish West Indies, was Camille Pissarro; the other two were Paul Czanne and Armand Guillaumin. These people had profound admiration for the works of Edouard Manet, and became furious after learning l that he was refused for the 1863 Salon. The insult felt was so intense that Napoleon III permitted the opening of a Salon des Refuss'', where Manet, Pissarro, Jongkind, Cals, Chintreuil, Fantin-Latour, etc. exhibited their works. Le Djeuner sur l'herbe ( The Picnic) stirred the young painters a lot, who sodentified their artistic fancy in Manet's painting. The 1866 Salon accepted the works of some of them, Manet, Czanne, Renoir were refused, and Emile Zola in l'Evenement ( The Events, a journal) condemned such a decision which made him the defender of the new art movement. The 1870 war divided the newcomers. Frdric Bazille was killed in Beaune-la-Rolande; Renoir moved away; Degas volunteered; Czanne retired in Provence; Pissarro, Monet and Sisley moved to London, meeting Paul Durand-Ruel there. This stay in London is a significant move forward in the growth of Impressionism, both because these young artists met there their firstclient , and because they discovered Turner whose use of light influenced them a lot. Returning Paris, most of these painters went to work in Argenteuil (Monet, Renoir), Chatou (Renoir), Marly (Sisley), or on the banks of the river Oise (Pissarro, Guillaumin, Czanne). Edouard Manet painted the Seine with Claude Monet and, under his influence, assumed the open air technique. The opinion of the public As for selling their art, the public response was intially very low to tepid. Many of the Impressionists were. And the refusal of the Salons to exhibit their works also added grist to the mill.. Many artists became then aware of the public and critics lack of appreciation, but the unity didn't last long. Czanne didn't join in in the group second exhibit, , which hold 24 Degas and works from Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and Frdric Bazille. They met some upholders, but the desertion of Czanne, Renoir, Sisley, Berthe Morisot in the 1879 exhibit established that the group was falling apart. Renoir opted to send to the official Salon Mme Charpentier et ses enfants and the Portrait of Jeanne Samary; yet only some people liked his artworks. These artists' life were not smooth, if not wretched . Degas tried, with Pissarro, to retain the solidarity of the group, but his effort failed since Monet, Sisley and Renoir were not there for the fifth exhibit, opened in April 1880; however, artworks from Gauguin appeared there for the first time. In 1881, the some of the The seventh exhibition of independant artists'' was to become the Salon des indpendants'' two years later. Time changed the mindset of these artists. Only Monet and Sisley went delved more into into the analysis of changing light and their effects on objects. Degas, Renoir and Czanne moved towards opposite directions, whereas Pissarro was interested by the studies of Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac. If, at thispoint, Impressionists were started to being understood a little, their situation was still not very friendly, the Salon still refusing their paintings, and in 1894, 25 out of 65 artworks donated by Caillebotte to the Luxembourg museum were rebuffed. Yet, when Camille Pissarro, the Impressionist stalwart, died in 1903, everybody admitted that this movement was the main 19th century artistic revolution, and that all its members were among the greatest painters, Monet being at the top of them all(Web Museum, Impressionism). Works Cited Claude Monet biography, http://www.repropaint.com/Monet/monet.htm, Claude Monet, http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/monet.html House, John, et al: Monet in the 20th Century, page 2. Yale University Press, 1998 http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0215473/monet.htm Web Museun, Monet, Claude, retrieved from http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/monet/ Stuckey , Charles "Monet, a Retrospective", Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 195 Schapiro, Meyer, Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions, retrieved from http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/monet.html Web Museum, Impressionism, retrieved from http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/impressionism/ Read More