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OST - 130x88 - 1897
The four canvases depicting chrysanthemums that Monet painted in 1897 are exceptionally important works, both in their treatment of what might be considered a still-life subject and in the way they anticipate the artist’s celebrated Nymphéas series. Combining impressive scale with brilliant colour and an innovative formal approach, these paintings exemplify Monet’s immense contribution to Modern art.
Massif de Chrysanthèmes is one of two from the series conceived in a larger, vertical format. The towering composition of flowers shifts from pale pink through to orange, red, purple and yellow; the tones are exact, indeed they show a gardener’s eye for colour. Monet began cultivating his celebrated garden at Giverny when he first settled there in 1883. Initially creating an orchard and a flower garden, in 1893 he acquired another piece of land and started work digging a pond and building the water garden. Arsène Alexandre visiting the garden in 1901 wrote: ‘what is most remarkable about Monet’s garden is not the plan but the planting, a play on words that nevertheless describes the principle behind these floral fireworks […]. It is this profusion, this teeming aspect that gives the garden its special quality. The flowers are not overgrown. They do not choke each other, as people ignorant about gardening, like ourselves, might expect, even if they are crowded as heads of grain in a field […]. Monet wants as many flowers in his garden as a space can hold. He also wants, perhaps above all, his flower palette before him to look at all year round, always present, but always changing’.
He goes on to discuss Monet’s creation of these flower beds as the work of a ‘great colourist’, conflating the mixing of pigments on a canvas with the parallel process in planting out a garden. The connection is certainly captured in the present work, where pigment and petal are indistinguishable.
Monet had painted floral still-lifes earlier in his career, often using flowers from his own garden. As Debra N. Mancoff notes in a discussion of the works of the early 1880s: ‘He had painted bouquets of flowers on occasion throughout his career and […] in a time of financial crisis, his own garden offered an alternative to expensive travel searching for subjects to paint’.
Yet, the present work bears very little similarity to those earlier works which, though glorious in their abundance and rich detail, are significantly more conventional. In writing about the 1897 Chrysanthèmes, John House declares them, ‘some of the most lavish still-lifes produced by the Impressionist group and some of the most radical challenges to a long-standing still-life tradition’.
However, upon closer consideration, it becomes apparent that this is not a still life in any sense. There is no element of staging to this composition and clearly the blooms are not arranged in a vase; instead it seems as those Monet may have painted them en plein air sitting directly in front of the flowers as they grew. They are not a still-life, but a close up.
This is important for understanding how influential they may have been within Monet’s own œuvre. John House describes how the ‘flowers fill the canvas, with no explicit spatial context. The blooms are arranged in clusters of varied color and texture, placed against more shadowy foliage, which allows their forms to float across the whole picture surface. This format gave Monet the chance to arrange the whole picture as a colour harmony in a way he never had before; the surface is filled with subtle harmonies and contrasts, and animated by the ebullient brushwork which suggests the patterns of the petals. Monet was to explore again the spatial implications of these Chrysanthemum pictures in the later Water Lilies canvases, which are filled by the lily-covered surface of the pond’. There is a profound connection with the waterlily paintings which Monet began around the same time. The first examples of Nymphéas which are dated to 1897-98 show the artist tentatively exploring the subject; a few flowers and lilypads dot the surface of the water, and the overall spatial treatment, including the close up focus on the subject are clearly a continuation of the same idea.
This treatment of space, which is both unexpected and expressive, may in part have been inspired by the Japanese prints that were popular in Paris, and of which Monet was an avid collector. The artist owned a number of prints of flowers, including one of chrysanthemums by the Japanese master Hokusai. As he wrote to dealer Maurice Joyant in 1896, ‘Thank you for having thought of me for the Hokusai flowers, […]. You don’t mention the poppies and that is the important one for I already have the iris, the chrysanthemums, the peonies and the convolvulus’. Monet was in line with his contemporaries in these tastes; japonisme had become increasingly popular since the reopening of trade with Japan in 1858 and he was one of a number of Western artists attracted to the style.
The impact of Japanese art, and particular the ukiyo-e woodblock prints, was noted early. Writing in 1898, Monet’s contemporary Louis Gonse described this influence, explaining that it had given the Impressionists ‘the practice of clear colours, the taste for simplification, the boldness of certain ways of cutting the motif that is absolutely unprecedented in the composition of paintings. A few years ago one would not have dared cut certain subjects as is done today’. This aspect is particularly visible in the work of artists like Van Gogh, but for other artists – Monet included – it was less a direct borrowing and more an opening up of possibilities for looking at representation in new ways.
Responding to the first of the waterlily paintings in 1909 the critic Roger Marc observed that Monet was now, ‘pursuing the renewal of his art according to his own vision and his own means […]. Mo more earth, no more sky, no limits now’. This is true, too, of Massif de chrysanthèmes and as such it marks the beginning of Monet’s real experiments with form and his movement towards abstraction in the last, great phase of his career.
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