Claude Monet—

Does Art Answer the Questions of Our Lives?

By Marcia Rackow

     What makes Claude Monet’s work so beautiful and why it has affected people all these years is explained by this principle, stated by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

In a landmark radio interview, Mr. Siegel described the great, new thing Monet accomplished, when he said:

Monet made the vague, the uncertain, the trembling triumphant. We have a tendency to give edges and tidiness to reality when, it could be felt, reality says: “I am not that tidy, and I don’t have those glaring edges.” So Monet wanted to see what happened at noon, and what happened at twilight; he wanted to see even stone as trembling, and a cathedral dancing delicately, and light persisting even as it changed.

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      These opposites of the vague and definite, the uncertain and tidy, the persistent and changing are a tremendous matter in every person’s life, and they certainly have been in mine. While I could be stubborn and fixed in my ideas, I was also very changeable and tentative, adapting myself, like a chameleon, to every situation.

     Early in my study of Aesthetic Realism my consultants observed: “You have a tendency to slip from one mood to another, somewhat like the fog. Do you think it’s important for you to be definite?” I had liked being elusive because I felt it made me free, more of an individual, and that I could hide in vagueness. This was not what I felt when I was painting--concentrating on an object and trying to get it down on a canvas. Then, I felt alive, and things looked vivid to me. Once, when I was doing a cityscape from my apartment window, I remember asking myself, “Why can’t I feel like this all the time?”

     Through Aesthetic Realism I learned that I had two different purposes that fought in me—as artist I was trying to respect the world, see how it was made. But in my everyday life I wanted to show I was superior to people, made of finer stuff—and this contemptuous way of seeing made the opposites in me painfully awry. It also interfered with my work as a painter. For example, in my drawings I had a very facile line; a friend once called it a “nervous” line. I had an ability to capture an image quickly, but it didn’t show the depth or weight of the object. My consultants explained:

Clarity offends you; your style is vaporous. In your drawings you try to combat the vaporousness by the use of your clear line. But do you feel that your work might lack something because you prefer to hide?

     MR:  Yes, I’m beginning to see that!

And they asked:

Are you hoping very much to put together the vague and the crisp, the elusive and the definite, the wispy and the sharp in a way of which you can be proud?

When I saw that in my drawings and paintings I was trying to answer one of my biggest questions, I felt such wonder and relief!

     The work of Claude Monet affects me—as it does people everywhere--because of the magnificent way he deals with these very same opposites that were warring in me. Monet didn’t use the vague to hide, but to show the beauty of reality.

Impression: Sunrise, 1872 
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     For instance, in this painting, “Impression: Sunrise,” of 1872, which gave Impressionism its name, “Monet,” as Mr. Siegel said, “made…the uncertain, the trembling triumphant.” In this early morning scene of Le Havre, pale blues, pinks, lavenders, and oranges sweep across the canvas as we see that definite orange sun rising out of a purplish mist, illuminating the breadth of the sky with its pale orange light.

     Monet not only captured the rippling surface of the water but also its luminous depths. Massive industrial smokestacks and rigging in pale blues and lavenders, take on the lightness, the fluidity of water and smoke. In the foreground, he has placed the intense dark silhouettes of two boat with men in them---dramatically countering the intensity of the sun, but not overpowering its loveliness. Instead they give weight, fixity to the picture.

     Within all this mist, vagueness, uncertainty, there is a subtle geometric structure underlying the composition. The broad horizontal band of blues across the center of the painting anchors it and gives it a firm base. Then there are the vertical reflections of the sun, smokestacks, and masts going across the canvas, punctuating this misty scene and forming a delicate structure within the water and softly clouded sky. Monet made the “trembling triumphant,” yet we feel we haven’t lost our footing because of the way the definite and vague are beautifully made one.

I.  A NEW VISION IN ART

Self-Portrait in his Studio

     Claude Monet’s courage, his determination, his passion to see the world newly, honestly, was revolutionary—as he lead the Impressionist movement.  In 1895, his friend and biographer, the statesman, George Clemenceau wrote:

Monet’s prophetic eye scans the future and guides our visual evolution, rendering our perceptions of the universe more penetrating and subtle than before.

     Monet himself said his ambition was to paint “directly from nature, seeking to convey my impressions of her most elusive effects.” And he worked in all seasons— in the sun, rain, snow, mist—changing canvases according to the changing effects of the light.

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He also traveled extensively to find new motifs, new effects of light and color. “I am obsessed with color,” he said. “It is my pleasure and my torment from morning till night.” Critic George Hamilton wrote:

It is color released from its source in the object, color dissolved in the atmosphere…Monet painted the impalpable atmosphere rather than the substantial objects within it.

This liberation of color led to abstract art in the 20th century.

     Born in Paris in 1840, Claude Monet grew up in the seaport of Le Havre. He loved drawing and was so accomplished at caricatures that by the time he was 16 he was selling them at a local frame shop.  

August Vacquerie, c. 1854

There he met the esteemed landscape painter Eugene Boudin, who invited him to go out painting with him.

“It was as if a veil had been torn aside,” wrote Monet, “I grasped what painting could be. Boudin, with untiring kindness, set about educating me. Eventually my eyes were opened. That is how I came to understand nature and learned to love her passionately.

     He then went to Paris to study art where he became part of the group of avant-garde painters and writers of the day—Courbet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Pissarro, Zola, among others.

      At the Salon of 1866 this painting of his future wife, Camille, or Woman in a Green Dress, received much acclaim.  

Camille or Woman in a Green Dress, 1866

But by 1870, when his paintings became brighter and freer, his work and that of his colleagues was vehemently rejected by the Salon. According to their stultifying rules, painting should be of lofty subjects, emphasizing form, line, clarity. Their rejection left the young painters with no way of exhibiting their work, which eventually led to the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874.

Boulevard de Capucines, 1873

      What they showed on canvas went along with new thought in science, philosophy, literature, and music. But the critics were outraged and brutal in their attacks. The head of the Academy called them “a gang of lunatics.” Meanwhile, Renoir said passionately, “Without him, without my dear Monet, who gave us all courage, we would have capitulated.”

      For the next 10 years Monet had to depend mainly on his friends and art dealer to support his wife and two young sons. Yet, in spite of this, he was driven to pursue his art with astounding energy and enthusiasm. He painted “modern life” in Paris, life in the country, and traveled for months at a time to capture the unique light and atmospheric effects he found in the villages along the Seine.  (This is Edouard Manet’s picture of Monet on his painting boat).  He traveled to the Normandy and Brittany coasts. He also loved the London fog, and the Mediterranean sun.

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“I have seen him,” said the writer Guy de Maupassant “capture a glistening shaft of light on a white cliff, and fix it in a rush of yellow tone which made the effect of its elusive dazzlement strangely blinding and unsettling. 
    

The Church at Varengeville, Morning Effect, 1882

II. DISORDER AND FIXITY

      “Disorder and fixity are present in Monet,” said Mr. Siegel, “present in all his painting.” These opposites took on a new and exciting form as Monet began to work in series, concentrating on a single subject—doing many paintings of it at all times of day and in all seasons. In each of these the motif is a fixed object--but Monet shows it’s not just fixed— the forms of the Haystacks glow in the summer and winter light, the Poplars are aquiver along the Seine, Rouen Cathedral dances in sunlight and mist. He worked over two years on his series of the cathedral, producing over 30 pictures.

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"Monet,” Mr. Siegel said, “would tend to have the fixity of a cathedral change into tremblingness, shimmeringness….He was looking to have the stately tremble in luminousness. He was looking to have edges less tidy. This is a noble desire;...to have [reality] tremble even as it persists. The Impressionists were awfully ethical.”

Here, Eli Siegel, in one of the great sentences of art criticism, shows the profundity of the Impressionists. They were ethical because they wanted to see something new about the nature of reality. Said Monet: “I have done nothing but look at what the universe has shown me, so as to bear witness to it with my brush.”

      In this radiant picture, “Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight),” 1894, in the Metropolitan Museum, the massive façade fills the picture yet almost seems to be dissolving before our eyes as it dazzles with light.

Rouen Cathedral, The Portal (Sunlight), 1894      

The gray stone of the building has become a meshwork of whites, reds, pinks, lavenders, mauves, blues and yellows with bluish-purple shadows. Even as we sense the intricacy of the Gothic architecture, nowhere is there a defining line.   The arches and columns are all indicated by delicate blue, lavender, red, yellow and pink stippled shadows, adding to that beautiful tremblingness.

Detail of Portal

     The way Monet painted this cathedral is amazing.

Detail, close-up of Portal

There are layers and layers of paint strokes, “encrustations” as he called them, creating a thick, rough surface which gives the painting substance, yet it is the very thing that makes this pinkish structure so luminous and delicate.

Rouen Cathedral, The Portal (Sunlight), 1894

     Still, the opposites of fixity and tremblingness, the tidy and disorderly in himself puzzled and pained Monet.

“I was naturally undisciplined,” he said. “Even in my childhood, I could never be gotten to obey rules….I preferred being outdoors] “when the sun was inviting, the sea beautiful, and it felt good running along the cliff tops in the open air, or splashing about in the water.”

Surprisingly, he later said of his strict military service, “It did me a great deal of good in every way. It made me less harem-scarum.” And as a painter Monet was terrifically self-disciplined. He set up rigorous work schedules for himself, getting up at 4 am, painting from morning til night. And he was strict with his family, too. They had to keep to his schedule.

     But Monet was troubled by the way he could shuttle back and forth between being strict and “undisciplined.” He once wrote to his second wife, Alice,

“This morning, I felt all out of sorts, my things were all over the place in utter disorder.” And he also felt it about his work, “my paintings looked atrocious in the altered light…it’s a stubborn encrustation of colors…but it’s not painting.”

     In a class Eli Siegel spoke to me about these opposites in a way I think Monet would have loved. He said: "There are two opposites picturesquely described as swirl and tidiness. Do you believe so far you’ve trusted yourself more with swirl than tidiness?” “Yes,” I said. “The big problem of everyone,” Mr. Siegel continued, “is being tidy and wandering. Every painting, every dance, every photograph, every film has this deep question of self, ‘Should the self stay put or be everywhere?’”

     Art, I learned, is both. But the way I used being tidy and wandering was not beautiful. I had traveled a lot, here and abroad, moving from one place to another. And as a free-lance picture researcher I liked the feeling there were no regular office hours for me! My roommates at the time called me the “Phantom” because nobody ever knew where I was. I came to see that what I thought was clever and charming was deeply mean; I was subjecting the world and people to my selfish moods and whims—and this was utterly opposed to what I was hoping for as a self and an artist.

     Aesthetic Realism enabled me to change—to see people as worth knowing, not just make them vague or given them neat edges and then dismiss them, but as having depths like my own. For instance, I had seen my father, Leo Rackow, as existing to make a fuss over me. Meanwhile, he had traveled to Africa and Europe as a young man, had pioneered with others in modern graphic design, and had intense feelings about World War II and used his art to further the war effort. As I came to see he had unbounded relations, a whole new world opened up for me--I became more unbounded myself and also much more exact. I also changed how I saw love. I had never thought a man could really add to me—make my outline shimmer or my depths glow. A man existed, I felt, to adore me while I remained coolly intact and hidden. Today in my marriage to Ken Kimmelman, filmmaker and Aesthetic Realism consultant, I am more myself. Ken has usefully, often humorously and kindly shattered those falsely neat edges of mine and enabled me to feel more happily solid.

Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, ca. 1920

      In this painting “Reflections of Clouds on the Water Lily Pond,” 1920, which I’ve loved from the time I first saw it when my parents took me to the Museum of Modern Art, Monet answers resplendently the question—“Should the self stay put or be everywhere?” It does both!

Photograph of Monet in front of Water Lily Paintings

Monet said that his aim in his water-lily paintings, to which he devoted the last 20 years of his life, was to “supply the illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon or banks….[where one beheld] the instability of the universe transforming itself under our eyes.”

Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, ca. 1920

Central Panel

      In this magnificent triptych Monet has captured the fleeting effects of sunlight on clouds reflected on the shimmering surface of the water dotted with water-lilies. The motion of the pink brushstrokes creates clusters of swirling clouds that seem to dance on the surface and in the depths of the luminous blue-green water.

Close-up of pink flowers

     Looking closely at the surface, we see swirl and tidiness as one thing

Close-up of paint swirl

as Monet builds layer upon layer of curving strokes of paint.

Close-up of blue water

But we don’t feel we’re just swirling because the motion arises from a substantial base. “I want to get down on canvas,”

Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond, ca. 1920

 Monet wrote, “’the instant’, and above all, the surrounding light, the same light spread everywhere around.”

     Monet shows “the self wants to be everywhere,” that is, related to more and more things, as a means of being truly itself. And this is what the study of Aesthetic Realism can make grandly possible in every person’s life.