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VERNON GIVERNY ... PASSIONATELY
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Monet, the Seine and Normandy Monet a man
of Normandy, a man of the Seine ?
At the age of 16, Monet made Eugène Boudin's acquaintance , a painter from Honfleur. This is also where he met Jongkind and these two artists introduced the teenager to open-air painting. Also in Honfleur, Saint Siméon farm was the place where, a few years later, Monet and other enfants terribles of impressionist painting used to meet.
Monet is indeed an open-air painter , but he goes much beyond mere observation and he never stops asking questions about his art. What is the essence of landscape painting? How can this be achieved ? How to create a painting both descriptive and expressive? The answers to these questions came during his 1880 holiday on the Norman coast: the coastline and the cliffs were the impetus for his work for the next four years and, in front of these cliffs, he re-invented his art with more freedom of creation.
His stays at Pourville (near Dieppe), in particular, provided him with the range of subjects he needed: cliffs, fishing nets, a church and first of all the sea. This is where he began painting the series that were to make him so famous, by painting the same subject at various hours, days, and in changing weather conditions. Here are a few canvasses,
part of a series that was painted later (1896): the cliffs at Pourville.
When talking about Normandy, one often thinks about its capricious weather, mild but so humid, it is said, about its clouds and its fog. It is true that the sky in Normandy can change quickly: As they are being blown and dispersed away by North-western winds, clouds cast shadows on the river Seine. The sky also exhibits a very delicate range of shades from one day to the next or even from one hour to the next, pale, milky, dense, dark or fluffy. The sun may be shining and darting its beams and almost suddenly disappear hidden by mist or fog. And Monet tried to capture all these nuances.
All through Monet's work can one find the leitmotif of water and light seized in all their forms during the open-air sessions. Since the time when he used to paint riverscapes around Argenteuil, he has never stopped being fascinated by the water on which light plays with coloured and iridescent shades, reflects, streaks, glitters and shimmers. Monet has splendidly recorded all this in all his works.
Shapes and space have disappeared after Monet has finally wrought a complete transmutation of colours and elements so that the sky, the earth, water and plants intermingle in paintings very near abstraction. During the 1899 exhibition in Boston and London, the organisers saw him as the one who "shattered shapes" , transforming a visual impression into an abstract perception; thus making Monet , together with Cézanne, one of the founders of modern painting and of the poetics of our time.
Bibliography and webography * Sur les pas des Impressionistes, Sophie Monneret, (éditions de la Martinière, 1997) * Monet / Nymphéas, Christian Geelhaar (éditions Seghers, 1988) * Claude Monet
: « Vous me bombardez d’un monstrueux caillou de lumière... », Marie-Annick
Sékaly * Monet's Long,
Luminous Journey to the Edge of Abstraction,
by Souren Melikian - International Herald Tribune * Exploitation
en interdisciplinarité de l’oeuvre de Monet, à Giverny par Marie-Rose
Faure, DEFPAR / Institut de France
* Welcome
to Giverny : a practical guide for the visit of the garden More 'exotic'
and unexpected
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