monet’s cathedrals--12/6

06 Dec 2024

monet’s cathedrals--12/6

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Today's selection--from Monet by Jackie Wullschläger. For Claude Monet, painting his famed series of the Rouen Cathedral was “long, hard work”:

“‘To think that I abandon everything, you, my garden, to work eleven hours a day, it's killing,’ Monet wrote to Alice from Rouen. But not to paint was worse. Before and after the wedding, Monet's refrain was, ‘I think only about my cathedrals.’ In early 1893 he was back in the city, in new premises at Monsieur Mauquit's novelty store. When the British painter Wynford Dewhurst asked for an account of the Rouen pictures, Monet replied, ‘I painted them, in great discomfort, looking out of a shop window opposite the cathedral. So there is nothing interesting to tell you except the immense difficulty of the task, which took me three years to accomplish.’

“As the Haystacks and Poplars had come easily, so the Rouen Cathedrals series was long, hard work. It engrossed and disturbed Monet awake and asleep: ‘I had a night full of nightmares: the cathedral fell on top of me, it seemed blue or pink or yellow.’ The haystacks which lasted a season, the poplars about to be chopped down, invited transient effects, for the motifs themselves implied nature's progression. But to dramatize how a static, solid, permanent edifice, 800 years old, similarly changed hour by hour, endlessly differing from itself according to the atmosphere and light around it, according to the artist's shifting experience of it, was to deny fixed reality.

“To Robinson, he explained that ‘I have wanted to do architecture without doing its features, without the lines.’ Line and colour are balanced in the Cathedrals. Drawing anchors the Gothic facade, paint drenches and penetrates it, air, sun, rain, fog, piercing and vaporizing the stone. The cathedral, white and sun-bleached, or red and gold, seems always in movement, animated by the fluidity of trails of paint forming webs across its surface. ‘It's a stubborn crust of colours, that's all,’ Monet feared, ‘but it isn't painting.’ The triumph, though, was the mix of crustiness, the rough handling which imitates the stonework, achieved by adding scumbles, glazes, whites to the pigments—complex paintings which at once materialize the ephemeral and dematerialize the cathedral.

Rouen Cathedral, Full Sunlight

“He painted The Portal and the Tour Saint-Romain in morning mist, the facade in shadow, the tower emerging in the sun, with crows scattering through the sky. At midday the warmed stone is luminous; at sunset a golden light clings to the cornices and gargoyles, then the building sinks into darkness, heavy and silent. The cathedral clock, varyingly white or lemon or mauve, is often at the centre, but always a blur—time cannot be caught. Monet was playing with ideas of human and divine time that the cathedral represents, transforming a historical monument into the fleeting, present tense. The effect of the paintings together is that the facade flickers in and out of visibility like patterns on a screen, shifting as in a film. The Cathedrals happened to coincide with this new medium: the Lumiere brothers showed their first film in March 1895 in Paris.

“‘Everything changes, even stone,’ Monet complained to Alice. Yet stone does not change colour as, for example, the sea does, and a phantasmagorical element entered these paintings. Sixteen-year-old Julie Manet was the first of many viewers both to admire them— ‘they're magnificent, some all violet, others white, yellow with a blue sky, pink with a greenish sky; then one in the fog, two or three in shadow at the bottom and lit with rays of sunshine’—and to admit that they ‘made me think a bit of strawberry ice cream.’ The critic Camille Mauclair wrote that, ‘Colour wanders with some insolence around these Middle Ages disturbed by a disorderly genius.’ Monet acknowledged an internal problem in the extreme subjectivity: ‘The weather has stayed the same, but alas it's me and my nerves that are changing,’ he wrote to Alice. ‘Happy are the young, those who believe it is easy. I was like that; it's finished now, yet tomorrow morning at 7.00 I'll be there.’

“Eventually he concluded that ‘the motif is something secondary for me: what I want to render is what there is between the motif and myself.’ The subject of the Cathedrals became his own mental and perceptual processes. The series pushed to a conceptual limit what was implied in the Haystacks and Poplars, but it was much bolder to dismiss a Gothic cathedral, with all its historical associations, as ‘secondary.’ That was the challenge: this motif offered Monet the resistance he needed after having conquered seriality in the representations of nature, yet he found blending the cathedral and the ‘envelope’ intensely troubling.

“The pictures went home from Rouen incomplete.”