Author: Богдан Федун
26 Nov. 2021

Сlaude Monet. About great search for light

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“Everyone talks about my works as if they are connoisseurs of art. As if they need to be understood…Indeed, they just need to be loved” - Claude Monet

How can you understand love or sadness? How your mind does understand feelings and emotions? Most likely, nowise. But a talented artist can convey his emotions on canvas. And great artist’s hands can make you feel the same as he does when looking at his picture. Claude Monet, a French impressionist, was the one.

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Paris owes its glory to the city of art and Bohemia to such people as Oscar Claude Monet. It was in the city that you need to “see and die” the future founding father of Impressionism was born. In 2018 his Water Lilies in Blossom masterpiece (1917) was sold for an insane $ 84.69 million at Christie’s auction. But Claude began his career as an artist on a not so big scale. When he was 14, he began to draw cartoons of his acquaintances and just the residents of Le Havre, where he moved with his parents from Paris. Monet sold these works for 15-20 francs and they were quite popular in the city I should admit. This way the teenager was earning his pocket money since his parents did not spoil him too much.

We could never know about Monet the artist, and the funny cartoons of Monet the cartoonist would have soon be forgotten. But fate brought Claude with his future teacher Eugene Boudin - then already a very well-known artist. By coincidence, his paintings were sold in the same shop as Monet's caricatures. Boudin’s proposal to paint in the open air changed the cartoonist. He went back to Paris to become a true artist.

Monet and the rise of Impressionism

The second half of the nineteenth century became a kind of starter for a mad flywheel of changes in the science, social and cultural life of mankind. Art was cramped in the obsolete framework of the past. And one of the first “breaks” of this framework was Impressionism. Previously, the niche of “modern high art” belonged exclusively to the Realism. This concerned both literature and art.

At first, “non-academic” Monet’s works caused confusion among most critics. Instead of a “photographic” transfer of a picture, he conveyed his emotions. Not frozen objects, full of descriptive details, but the moment snatched from what he saw, from the general picture of the landscape, raindrops, gusts of wind and sunlight. It is the transfer of sunlight that has become the Monet’s hallmark. It is known that when asked about the plot of one of his paintings, he replied: “The plot of this picture, my dear friend, is light.” Moreover, Claude painted only in the light of the day and went to bed at sunset. “When the light goes away, it seems to me that I am dying,” he said.

There are three main words characterizing Monet’s works i.e. “light”, “impression” and “freedom.” And just like all those who are free from creative prejudice, Claude Monet has faced the public’s rejection.

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“The Impression. Sunrise” (1874) was the name of the painting that became the “mother” of Impressionism. One critic, whose name is remembered by experts only, wrote a humorous and mocking article in which he used the phrase: “Wallpapers would have looked more complete than this “Impression”!”. He called the article “The Exhibition of Impressionists”. The neologism he, thus, invented became the name for a new style of art.

Monet's expressive and seemingly careless brush strokes were alien to critics and more numbed colleagues. But there were those who shared his approach to art. Informally, Monet became the leader of Impressionists’ movement the great Pierre-Auguste Renoir was amongst.

In bright flecks of emotions…

It is clear that “Sunrise” was not the first significant work of the master. It was “Camilla or The Woman in Green Dress” drawn in 1866. He captured his beloved on this picture, who became his wife four years later. She died of tuberculosis in 9 years after. Five days before her death, the couple got married. Monet, who devoted many works to his wife, was very sad about the loss. He also survived his second wife, Alice Oshade, with whom he was married from 1892 to 1911. Claude Monet also survived his eldest son Jean, who died in 1914.

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Despite so many sad pages in the biography, it is worth noting that Monet, especially in the first half of his life, was a very cheerful person. Perhaps, even too much. He loved fun, good fun and luxury, wherefore he happened to cop it with creditors many times. Often they took his paintings and sold them at a bargain price as compensation. Once the artist even cut about two hundred of his works, so that they could not take them from him. These works were restored and sold by auction. Expensive clothes for himself and his wife, nurse for children, lashings of expensive wines and liquors - the impressionist knew a lot about waste. His friend the artist with a similar last name, Manet gave him a nickname “Water Raphael” since Claude made his works on his own boat equipped for a studio. It is noteworthy that two years before that, in 1872, he asked the same Mane to borrow him money, referring to the illness of his wife (made up at that moment). Or he simply asked for money, since “neither bakeries nor butcher’s shops sold him on credit anymore.”

The ups and downs, prosperity and poverty, joyful feelings and despair - all this brings vivid emotions. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Monet's paintings are so sensual and so in demand to these days. But besides art and craving for a beautiful life, the great artist had another passion - gardening. “My garden is my best creation,” he said.

In the pictures of the master, there are also lots of flowers and all kinds of vegetation. Most often Monet was associated with the image of nature. He really was a master of landscape scenery. But in fact, Monet was not limited to this. During his life in London, where he fled from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, Monet painted a lot of urban landscapes. The misty capital of the British Empire with its gloomy, but colorful landscapes did not leave him indifferent. In addition, later, in France, Monet became fascinated by the depiction of railway stations and trains - he was attracted by everything new. “Every day I discover more and more beautiful things,” he said. He even managed to negotiate with the station manager so that trains stopped at his request. So it was easier to “catch” the exact moment that the artist wanted to convey on his canvas.

A lively character and love to change scenes did not prevent Monet from being laborious and diligent in work. He worked a lot and was very “prolific” artist. The exact number of his works is unknown, but there are thousands of them!

Besides innovation in the approach to the image and technology, Claude Monet invented another creative technique. He worked on the same object with different lighting and in different weather. A “Haystack” (1890), one of the first paintings, written in this way, was sold at Christie’s in 2016 for $ 81.45 million. In total, Monet’s paintings can make for almost a billion!

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Monet's paintings were bequeathed to the gallery of French Academy of Fine Arts. After all, the impressionist had no heirs. And Claude Monet's garden in Normandy became a place of impressions for thousands of tourists. There are still thousands of flowers and plants aromatizing like in the artist’s times, that he loved so much. In particular lilies in the pond. Monet drew them thousands of times. These pictures combine everything that he loved so much i.e. calm water, a glare of light and flowers. He described all this as emotionally as he painted: “Imagine pure water and grass swaying in the middle of it. It’s amazing to look at that, and trying to draw it, is enough to drive you crazy ...”

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