Came across an excellent book by art historian Meyer Schapiro. (By the way, his NY Times obit is worth reading.) Does it matter that his take on Cézanne was published more than 40 years ago? I don't think so:

"The objective world isn't just represented - it is recreated through strokes of color. The world he creates is colorful, varied and harmonious. . . it is a creation of the mind of the painter who is making us aware of a decision of the mind and operation of the hand. In this complex process. . . like the effort of a philosopher to grasp both the external and the subjective in our experience of things, the self is always present, poised between sensing and knowing, or between its perceptions and a practical ordering activity, mastering its inner world by mastering something beyond itself. (Cézanne, Meyer Schapiro, Abrams, 1965)

Okay, this is starting to explain things for me. This "practical ordering activity" of Cézanne's has him deciding to tilt tabletops and fragmented solid forms. Schapiro explains further:

To accomplish this fusion of nature and self, Cézanne had to create a new method of painting. . . He loosened the perspective system of traditional art and gave to the space of the image the aspect of a world created free-hand and put together piecemeal from successive perceptions, rather than offered complete to the eye in one coordinating glance as in the ready-made geometrical perspective of Renaissance art. The tilting of vertical objects, the discontinuities . . .contribute to the effect of a perpetual searching and balancing of forms. (p. 10)

Reading Schapiro, it's clear that Cézanne did not sit in his studio and cook up a new approach to painting and then set out to make masterpieces in this style. He searched, and experimented, and looked to try different ways of composing what was in front of him, different ways of ordering the world, "an order arising from mastery over chaotic impulses. . . "

It gets easier to see what Schapiro was talking about once he compares Cézanne's work to Monet's.

In Monet's The Beach at Sainte-Adress, the painting is divided into large areas of land and sea, and the colors in Monet's share a similar value and intensity. There is an airy feeling about Monet's and a gray tone unites it.

Below is Cézanne's Bay from L'Estaque. Schapiro points out that the division between the land and sea receives greater emphasis, the contrasts are heightened through the use of such strong colors, and the treatment of shapes is different.

The triangles of sea and land are more strongly connected as shapes that interlock. There is a weight to the sea. Monet's inclusion of small things which attract the eye and interrupt the large forms give the sense of a passing moment, where Cézanne's approach is to emphasize "the grandeur of the scene."


Seeing these side by side, what Schapiro is saying makes sense to me: there is drama, solidity, and weight in Cézanne. Not what Monet was after at all. What do you think? Does this make sense?

Lots of people will protest that it's quite unreal and that I'm out of my mind, but that's just too bad... Claude Monet

This photo of Monet in his third studio at Giverny was taken in the 20's - check out the size of that palette.

Among the frustrations that plagued him as he sought to finish his water lilies panels were some problems with his eyesight. He suffered from cataract problems and a rare condition called xanthopsia:

"Monet is most upset by the colors; he sees everything yellow," noted opthomologist, Dr. Coutela, in 1923. By the next year, he'd had several operations and the xanthopsia no longer plagued him. He continued work on the water lilies and received ongoing communication and encouragement from Prime Minister Clemenceau. Problems with his eyes continued to drive him to distraction. "It's disgusting, now I see everything in blue!" he explained to visiting Professor Jacques Mawas in 1924. "How do you know you are painting in blue?" the professor asked. "By the tubes of paint I choose."

Special glasses were made for him that helped a good deal, and once more he dove into his work. Apparently he was somewhat mercurial, working feverishly and then stopping for days and not painting at all. He had plans to bequeath to his country the best of the water lilies (what he called the Decorations, designed to adorn the walls of a large room). I guess frustration with government was common in his era too. In 1920 he sniped, "I will bequeath the four best series to France, which will do nothing with them."

Here's The House from the Garden, painted in 1922, the year before he died at age 86. Apparently, during the latter years, he could no longer back up 15 feet or so and still see the work well. You have to wonder how much of the increasingly abstract nature of his work was due to eyesight and how much was artistic vision and intention.

"Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment." Claude Monet

Thinking about water lately, as I've logged a lot of time watching moving water at swim meets. (Dali's melting clocks come to mind, too.) Been thinking about Monet's lifelong fascination with water and persistence in looking endlessly at nature as it changed around him.

At a remove of a century, I think it's common to look back and assume that an artist would recognize a subject where and as he/she found it, and just set up to capture the scene. I was interested to learn that there was a fair amount of stage managing that Monet undertook to get his subjects the way he wanted them. And he faced his share of frustrations along the way.

When he first moved to Giverny in 1883 he encountered a few problems. He had brought 4 boats with him from Paris, but because of the tides and the narrowness of the channel, he could not bring the barge he used as a studio close to the house at night (he wanted to paint from the boat instead of the riverbank.) "I'm afraid I've made a mistake by settling so far away. It all seems quite hopeless" he wrote to gallery owner Georges Durand-Ruel. He started to feel better about things once he found a place to leave the boat, settled in, and started "to get to know a new landscape." (p. 19, Monet's Years at Giverny, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

He discovered a row of poplars less than two miles away in a marsh in Limetz. He was so entranced by them that he paid a lumber dealer not to cut them down immediately after they had been sold.

He also had to make some arrangements to make sure he could work on his largest series, the water lilies. He had to get permission from the city council to decree that he could divert a branch of the Epte River which crossed his land. The council made the diversion conditional - he was not allowed to impede the flow of the water with sluices; it needed to flow freely to ensure there was no health hazard to those living along the river.

What makes them so mesmerizing? No reproduction does them justice. Have you seen them? This description offered by Maurice Guillemot seems to get at the shimmering, changing quality of the painting:

On the glassy surface of the water float lilies, those extraordinary aquatic plants whose large leaves spread wide and whose large exotic blossoms are curiously unsettling. . . .The colors are fluid, with marvelous nuances, ephemeral as a dream.