I cannot account for this, other than to imagine that his eye could shift in a flash from one viewpoint to the other. Monet’s genius as an observer is that from less than one meter away from his own work, a mass of different colors and mingled tones, juxtaposing, superimposing, all in an expanse of hopeless complication, he could see and represent his subject as if he were much farther away. So what is the problem here? It is simply the fact that no two people see the world in exactly the same way, and that all we can ask of an artist worthy of the name is an interpretation of the world accessible to human eyes with an average sort of training. The rest comes entirely from Monet’s palette, and if Monsieur Gillet doesn’t believe me, I encourage him to go and look for himself. I have looked as closely at the Nymphéas panels as anyone else I have often observed in them strokes of almost pure color, applied here and there for vivid effect, passionately at times, yet never profligate. Though the point might seem trivial, I am stressing it here because Monet’s deconstruction of sunlight is by no means obtained as Monsieur Gillet would have us think, by mélange optique, juxtaposed dabs of color. This is what makes them individual talents, and when we look to their interpretation of nature, let’s not get off on the wrong foot by interpreting them with formulations they themselves wouldn’t have believed. To put it bluntly: it seems to me that this is the secret of all great painters. That was his one rule, and I don’t think anyone ever knew him to have any other. Monet would never have accepted that any doctrine should make a difference in how he looked at the world and how he worked. Nothing less nothing more that was enough. What was revealed to his sight he took for truth, and he dedicated himself tirelessly to painting what he saw.
First, anyone who knew Monet can attest that as an artist he never harbored a poétique or any other kind of theory that might dictate or constrict his style. I hope Monsieur Gillet will allow me to play heretic here and look at things a bit more simply. No painter has ever worked harder to deny the material world.” Isn’t that a lot to read into the strokes of an artist’s brush? The reality we know seems to deliquesce, a dance of atoms” weaving “fabrics of illusion in the void. Everything transforms into dazzle and glow. Shapes grow indistinct boundaries seem to waver in a pale and glimmering aura. He holds that it opened for Monet a unique “ poétique” that led him into “the deconstruction of light and color, to transform even shadows into colored locales, to see everything as suffused, as afloat on floods of air, showing us the world as a kind of dream play. Having covered that, our writer freely acknowledges that this ostensible secret is now in the ABC’s of every colorist, though he concedes that Monet deserves the credit for having brought it into practice. Instead place dabs of pure red and pure blue beside one another, allowing the mixture to be perceived as violet by the retina. Therefore, because violet is a combination of red and blue, do not mix the components on the palette or the canvas if you want the color to be strong with no loss of radiance. “Simple colors are more intense than compound colors. The proposition that modern painting’s special interest in light begins with Corot, I will happily concede to Monsieur Louis Gillet, whose lovely short book Trois Variations sur Claude Monet praises his eye as “the finest with regard to nuance,” and lauds him for his “prodigious skill as a colorist.” Fair enough: so where do we go from there?įirst, Monsieur Gillet takes us back to fundamentals about Monet’s technique, reviewing the well-known “theory of color classification:” Before I finish, allow me to bring into this conversation a famous professional art critic, an admirer of Monet but also a rigorous metaphysician, who insists that in the Nymphéas the artist leads us down primrose paths into an abyss of Nothing.