Perspective on Monet

Attempting to read up on Agapanthus becomes an increasingly interesting adventure. I learn not much that is terribly surprising, but I am a bit stymied in my limited resources. Right now I have access to one book in front of me and a few that I’ve requested at the library. It is in that light that I must turn back to what is in front of me: the paintings and a handful of books and articles, and mine them instead of the shelves of possibilities that I know exist.

As a relative amateur when it comes to art criticism, and a virtual expert on talking about whatever comes to mind, this series of blogs has become something of a quest with me. There is only so much that can be seen when looking at 3 paintings, no matter how large. There is infinitely more that can be said about them, or learned about them, or discovered underneath them. But without ever seeing them, without ever looking at what is in front of your nose, none of the rest of it is more than mere decoration.

Simon Kelly, in the wording that accompanies exhibit, talks about the effect that the lack of horizon line has on the painting itself and on the viewer. It is true – these are works that exist almost entirely outside of the standard geography of living. There is no bridge, there are no reflections; you do not know what time of day it is; who is around, if anyone or if there are any deeper meanings to the shapes and shifting swaths of color in front of you. I hate to be too pithy, but all of this almost forces the viewer to be reflected in the paint: we see ourselves in the surface. At yet, the experience is not disorienting. It is stunning, or at least it can be, but not upsetting, not to us who are so accustomed to such vast expanses of undefined space.

In Monet at Normandy, the publication that accompanied an exhibit by that name in 2006 & 2007, it is possible to follow Monet’s use of perspective and point of view from the 1860’s through to the Cleveland panel of Agapanthus, and it is a remarkable development. Discussing the painting A Seascape, Shipping by Moonlight from 1866, the authors address his use of space. “Monet plays with the viewer’s sense of equilibrium by omitting the jetty itself from the field of vision; only the stabilizing line of the horizon as it intersects with the strictly vertical rigging of the boats on the left counters the rolling pitch of the boat in the foreground.(56)” He is not creating here a sense of floating in the absence of the horizon, he is deliberating unsettling his viewers with very little that is stable and much that rolls and is unstill.

In other places, the experiments with perspective seem to be excuses to provide space for the sea or an expanse of beach or sky instead. As can be seen in his paintings of commercial ships in the port at Le Havre or on the Seine at Rouen, he is not shy of detail or specificity. In fact there is the sense that he is communicating something extremely specific, even in the Wisteria diptych that is still incomprehensible to me. (I have to admit here that I’m falling hopelessly in love with his paintings of the Seine at Rouen – the ships are functional and ethereal at the same time, and the skies are filled with a sense of wind and rain and diffused or too bright sunshine. Exquisite!)

“While the viewer instinctively constructs spatial relationships based on scale, position, and color, the artists himself seems no longer bound by such conventions.(168)” And we do, don’t we? Without thinking about it, we decide that there is a top and a bottom that are usually related to the top and bottom of the canvas. We plot the position of shapes and colors not just on the canvas but in relation to each other in the three dimensional space behind the canvas or in front of the canvas. We address ourselves in relation to the paintings: where am I standing in this painting?

I wonder how many of us place ourselves where we have so often seen M. Monet placed: in the garden, under an umbrella, palate on arm, cigarette smoldering. Or in his studio with the gigantic canvases leaning against the walls, as much a part of that space as any other. Perhaps more so. With so many visitors and so much attention given to the work and the garden while he was still alive, it seems plausible that there is as much of the life of the artist’s studio in the layered and floating studies of water lilies and absent agapanthus in these paintings as any representation of nature’s variability.

As much of an intellectual exercise as these can be, there is something excitingly simple and human that can be experienced viewing the triptych. They were part of a larger work that was intended to honor the end of World War I and the veterans. In that light, the serenity of this series has more weight than any horizon line could ever hope convey.

I’ve been looking for pieces of contemporary criticism to give context outside of the artist and outside of the 20^th century. Of course, the source that I’d love to read is in the St. Louis Public Library catalog. And equally of course, it is a reference book (non-circulating) of the Central Library (which collection has been moved entirely to a storage facility while the building is closed for renovation until summer of next year). So, how does one get a look at such a thing? The adventure continues.

Lemonades, Heather, Lynn Federle Orr, David Steel. Monet in Normandy, Rizzoli, New York, 2006. 192 pp.