Buquê de Girassóis (Bouquet of Sunflowers) - Claude Monet
Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Nova York, Estados Unidos
OST - 101x81 - 1881
While living with his family at Vétheuil, a small suburb on the Seine northwest of Paris, Claude Monet took up floral painting both outdoors in the garden and indoors with cut flowers. From 1878 until 1883, he completed twenty floral still lifes, including this painting of sunflowers in a vase signed and dated by the artist in 1881. Bouquet of Sunflowers was shown at the seventh Impressionist exhibition of 1882, where critic Paul de Charry noted Monet’s "great talent" at painting still lifes (quoted in Isaacson 1986). The same year, he painted The Met’s Chrysanthemums, which has a nearly identical provenance. Monet exhibited both pictures in 1883 at the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery, in 1886 with Les XX in Brussels, and in 1886 in New York at the National Academy of Design, making them among the first Impressionist paintings on view in the United States.
A rainy day was often the pretext for a floral still life for a painter as devoted to his garden as Monet became, first at Vétheuil and later at Giverny. These particular flowers are probably the same as the sunflowers that grew to either side of the steps leading to his garden at Vétheuil (Moffett 1985); in the same year, Monet painted four views of the steps flanked by sunflowers, among them Garden at Vétheuil. Able to sit and capture with exacting detail the state of the particular sunflowers he had chosen, Monet presented not only the "blazing" sunflowers described by his critic-friend Gustave Geffroy (1883) but also their simultaneously wilting leaves. Purposely placed a bit off-center, as has been noted (Richard Mühlberger, What Makes A Monet A Monet, New York, 1993, p. 29), the vase of flowers overspilled its assigned canvas space, so the artist truncated the blooms at right. The resultant cropped image seems to continue beyond the space of the canvas. Cropping in this fashion may well be a result of Monet’s relatively early exposure to Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, in which such cropping is typical.
The still life is a pretext, too, for a study in complementary colors. Green leaves contrast with the red tablecloth, as blues peek through from the background to heighten the oranges in the flower petals, and pinks placed over these background blues create a violet effect in contrast to the yellow sunflowers. The artist would return to these same pinks and blues of the background in his Waterlilies series from the 1890s on.
While in Vétheuil, Monet painted three other paintings of flowers in this same vase: Dahlias (private collection), Asters (private collection, U.S.A.), and Jerusalem Artichoke Flowers. Each image of the vase is from a slightly different angle, some highlighting the delicate blue painting on the porcelain more than others. The question of whether this vase is Chinese or Japanese is, according to The Met’s Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art Denise Patry Leidy (via email with the author, June 10, 2016), not possible to determine, as both cultures have employed this shape of vase and the same blue pigment.
However, the inclusion of an Asian vase in The Met’s picture is another indication of Monet’s continued interest in all things Asian. The painter subtly transmutes the sheen of glaze on the porcelain into an irregular patchwork of brushstrokes that come together at a distance to convey the reflective surface of the vase.
The particular sunflowers depicted are a smaller variety known as "soleils" in France and by their botanical name, Helianthus chrysanthemum, in England. This is a different variety from the larger sunflowers more typically found in the United States and also from those preferred by Vincent van Gogh, known in France as "tournesols".
While the image of a vase of sunflowers was more famously and less naturalistically explored by Van Gogh a bit later in the 1880s, Monet’s depiction of the subject had an impact on both the Dutch painter and his friend Paul Gauguin. Gauguin had an opportunity to see this picture in Paris sometime before its departure for Brussels in February 1886, most likely at the Impressionist exhibition of 1882. In a letter to his brother Theo on November 19, 1888, Van Gogh reported, "Gauguin was telling me the other day—that he’d seen a painting by Claude Monet of sunflowers in a large Japanese vase, very fine. But—he likes mine better. I’m not of that opinion . . . ."
Gauguin, himself, painted a Basket of Flowers (ca. 1884, Mr. and Mrs. William Coxe Wright collection, Philadelphia) that has been compared to The Met’s picture in its similarly textured background and sinuous rhythms (Roskill 1970). Van Gogh’s sunflowers have been seen as more individualized than the collective whole presented by Monet (Rosenblum 1975). His earthenware pots, too, are more self-consciously "of the people" than Monet’s Chinese or Japanese vase, then more of a Parisian luxury item than Van Gogh’s provincial pot (Cox 2011).
Still, the impetus to locate expressivity in the sunflower began with Monet’s canvas and continued in Van Gogh’s several versions of the flower. For, as noted by Gordon and Forge (1983), "It is particularly in Monet’s still lifes that we recognize what it was that Van Gogh learned from him: not simply the powerful and expressive palette but also a quality of impassioned drawing that is much more apparent in the flower paintings—forms painted at the range of stereoscopic vision, therefore more tactile—than in most of his landscapes. In these sumptuous flower paintings done only when the weather prevented outdoor work, the drawing and color are carried along together with tremendous impetus. His love for flowers is unmistakable. The character, the quality of growth, the specific rhythm of each bouquet is given its due." When both Chrysanthemums and Bouquet of Sunflowers arrived at The Met with the Havemeyer bequest in 1929, the reviewer Frank Jewett Mather Jr. (1930) gushed, "The representation is so complete, joyous and instructive that it becomes really a matter of indifference to the Metropolitan Museum whether it acquires further Monets or not."
The particular sunflowers depicted are a smaller variety known as "soleils" in France and by their botanical name, Helianthus chrysanthemum, in England. This is a different variety from the larger sunflowers more typically found in the United States and also from those preferred by Vincent van Gogh, known in France as "tournesols".
While the image of a vase of sunflowers was more famously and less naturalistically explored by Van Gogh a bit later in the 1880s, Monet’s depiction of the subject had an impact on both the Dutch painter and his friend Paul Gauguin. Gauguin had an opportunity to see this picture in Paris sometime before its departure for Brussels in February 1886, most likely at the Impressionist exhibition of 1882. In a letter to his brother Theo on November 19, 1888, Van Gogh reported, "Gauguin was telling me the other day—that he’d seen a painting by Claude Monet of sunflowers in a large Japanese vase, very fine. But—he likes mine better. I’m not of that opinion . . . ."
Gauguin, himself, painted a Basket of Flowers (ca. 1884, Mr. and Mrs. William Coxe Wright collection, Philadelphia) that has been compared to The Met’s picture in its similarly textured background and sinuous rhythms (Roskill 1970). Van Gogh’s sunflowers have been seen as more individualized than the collective whole presented by Monet (Rosenblum 1975). His earthenware pots, too, are more self-consciously "of the people" than Monet’s Chinese or Japanese vase, then more of a Parisian luxury item than Van Gogh’s provincial pot (Cox 2011).
Still, the impetus to locate expressivity in the sunflower began with Monet’s canvas and continued in Van Gogh’s several versions of the flower. For, as noted by Gordon and Forge (1983), "It is particularly in Monet’s still lifes that we recognize what it was that Van Gogh learned from him: not simply the powerful and expressive palette but also a quality of impassioned drawing that is much more apparent in the flower paintings—forms painted at the range of stereoscopic vision, therefore more tactile—than in most of his landscapes. In these sumptuous flower paintings done only when the weather prevented outdoor work, the drawing and color are carried along together with tremendous impetus. His love for flowers is unmistakable. The character, the quality of growth, the specific rhythm of each bouquet is given its due." When both Chrysanthemums and Bouquet of Sunflowers arrived at The Met with the Havemeyer bequest in 1929, the reviewer Frank Jewett Mather Jr. (1930) gushed, "The representation is so complete, joyous and instructive that it becomes really a matter of indifference to the Metropolitan Museum whether it acquires further Monets or not."
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