Galocha Cultural

domingo, 14 de janeiro de 2018

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
Musée d'Art Moderne André Malraux, Le Havre, França
OST - 89x92 - 1904

In the spring of 1883, after having wandered along the banks of the Seine from Le Havre to Paris for 20 years, Claude Monet (1840–1926) settled in Giverny. The painter participated in the collective adventure of Impressionism and displayed works at the group's four first exhibitions from 1874 to 1879. Crowned with success, he withdrew and purchased the house known as Le Pressoir in 1890. His painting soon took a new direction. While continuing to exalt colour, he delved increasingly deeper into the study of the pictorial space. In 1893, Claude Monet requested permission to divert water from the Ru river to create a "water garden". He made a pond spanned by a footbridge, a reference to his love of Japanese art.
In 1899, through his work on the Waterlilies series, Monet embarked on unprecedented research as he focused almost exclusively on a motif that would become like a signature. Once he had finished the Japanese bridge series in 1900, the artist concentrated on the blooming waterlily pond. First intermittently, when he was not working on the Waterloo Bridge series, and then on an ongoing basis when he began a large suite in 1904. From spring to fall, the artist set up easels around the pond so he could capture sensations on several canvases at once and rework them later in his workshop. The Waterlilies at MuMa, painted in 1904, are part of a suite of forty-eight canvases known as "Waterlilies, a Series of Waterscapes" shown at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in 1909.
This square painting emphasizes the decorative potential of colour. The framing eliminates almost all topographical reference to convey the infinite in perpetual motion. Once he had shaped nature and created a space especially for his painting, Monet would tirelessly explore this dominant subject for twenty-seven years. The Giverny garden became a laboratory that led to a genuine transformation of the landscape, in which colour prevails over form. His undertaking thus signalled the abstraction that would be developed by the artists of the New York School in the wake of World War II.

In 1899, through his work on the Waterlilies series, Monet embarked on unprecedented research as he focused almost exclusively on a motif that would become like a signature. Once he had finished the Japanese bridge series in 1900, the artist concentrated on the blooming waterlily pond. First intermittently, when he was not working on the Waterloo Bridge series, and then on an ongoing basis when he began a large suite in 1904. From spring to fall, the artist set up easels around the pond so he could capture sensations on several canvases at once and rework them later in his workshop. The Waterlilies at MuMa, painted in 1904, are part of a suite of forty-eight canvases known as "Waterlilies, a Series of Waterscapes" shown at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris in 1909.
This square painting emphasizes the decorative potential of colour. The framing eliminates almost all topographical reference to convey the infinite in perpetual motion. Once he had shaped nature and created a space especially for his painting, Monet would tirelessly explore this dominant subject for twenty-seven years. The Giverny garden became a laboratory that led to a genuine transformation of the landscape, in which colour prevails over form. His undertaking thus signalled the abstraction that would be developed by the artists of the New York School in the wake of World War II.

A Ponte Japonesa / O Lago com Ninféias (The Water Lily Pond) - Claude Monet

A Ponte Japonesa / O Lago com Ninféias (The Water Lily Pond) - Claude Monet
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Estados Unidos
OST - 90x92 - 1900

In 1883, Monet settled in the village of Giverny, about forty miles from Paris, and purchased a house there in 1890. Shortly thereafter, he acquired an additional plot of land, where he constructed a picturesque water garden. A Japanese bridge spanned the pond at its narrowest point. This is among the first of Monet's paintings to emphasize the reflections of the bank and the sky on the flat surface of the water.

A Ponte Japonesa (Japanese Footbridge, Giverny) - Claude Monet

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Filadélfia, Estados Unidos
OST - 78x97 - 1895

Cadillac 1907, Estados Unidos

Cadillac 1907, Estados Unidos
Propaganda

Volkswagen Fusca Série Especial 1984, Brasil

Volkswagen Fusca Série Especial 1984, Brasil
Propaganda

Cadillac 1941, Estados Unidos

Cadillac 1941, Estados Unidos
Propaganda

O Lago com Ninféias (The Water Lily Pond) - Claude Monet

O Lago com Ninféias (The Water Lily Pond) - Claude Monet
National Gallery, Londres, Inglaterra
OST - 88x93 - 1899

In 1893 Monet bought a plot of land next to his house in Giverny. He had already planted a colourful flower garden, but now he wanted to create a water garden ‘both for the pleasure of the eye and for the purpose of having subjects to paint'. He enlarged the existing pond, filling it with exotic new hybrid water lilies, and built a humpback bridge at one end, inspired by examples seen in Japanese prints. The water garden became the main obsession of Monet’s later career, and the subject of some 250 paintings.

Here, the bridge spans the width of the canvas but is cut off at the edges so that it seems to float unanchored above the water, its shape reflected in a dark arc at the bottom of the picture. The perspective seems to shift; it is as though we are looking up at the bridge but down on the water lilies which float towards the distance. The vertical reflections of the trees provide a counterpoint to the horizontal clumps of the lily pads.

For Monet, gardens offered a refuge from the modern urban and industrial world, although he and his fellow garden enthusiasts benefited from modern advances in botanical science that were creating new hybrid flowers in a wide choice of shapes and colours that could be produced on an almost industrial scale. He made modest gardens in the homes he rented in Argenteuil and Vetheuil in the 1870s, but from 1883, when he moved to a rented house in Giverny, about 50 miles to the west of Paris, he had more scope to indulge his passion for plants. He became a dedicated gardener with an extensive botanical knowledge, and sought the opinions of leading horticulturalists. As Monet’s career flourished his increasing wealth enabled him to fund what became a grand horticultural enterprise: by the 1890s he was employing as many as eight gardeners.

Monet began by refashioning the garden in front of the house, the so-called ‘Clos Normand’, replacing the existing kitchen garden and orchard with densely planted colourful flower beds that were filled with blooms throughout the seasons. He was able to buy the house in 1890, and three years later he purchased an adjacent plot of land next to the river Epte beyond the railway line at the edge of his property. The plot had a small pond with arrowhead and wild water lilies, which he wanted to turn into a water garden with a larger lily pond ‘both for the pleasure of the eye and for the purpose of having subjects to paint’.

The idea may have occurred to him after he had seen the water garden at the 1899 Exposition Universelle in Paris created by the grower Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, who bred the first colourful hardy waterlilies. Monet began by requesting permission from the Prefect of the Eure to dig irrigation channels from the Ru – a branch of the Epte – to feed his pond, but the Giverny villagers objected, fearing it would contaminate the water and that the foreign plants would poison their cattle. Monet was furious, but three months later permission came through and he began to enlarge the existing pond, replacing the wild water lilies with Latour-Marliac hybrids available in yellows, pinks, whites and violets.

The pond was enlarged on further occasions – in 1901 and 1904 – tripling the size of the water garden. Together with the flower garden on the other side of the railway track it became the principal preoccupation of the last 26 years of Monet’s life. While the Clos Normand garden was laid out along fairly traditional lines, harking back to the formal French gardens of seventeenth-century Europe, with a central alleyway and geometrically arranged beds, the water garden was more Eastern in inspiration. Its less regimented, more natural design and more muted colours created a quieter, meditative atmosphere. Monet erected a Japanese bridge over the western end of the pond that took its inspiration from the bridges in ukiyo-e Japanese prints. He was a keen collector of these prints and he owned a copy of Hiroshige’s Wisteria at Kameido Tenjin Shrine (1856), one of the many prints that features a curved bridge. In a more general sense, the water garden reflected Monet’s admiration for the Japanese appreciation of nature.

Monet had to wait for his water garden to mature before he could begin to paint it in earnest. As he later recalled: ‘It took me some time to understand my water-lilies. It takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then all at once, I had the revelation – how wonderful my pond was – and reached for my palette. I’ve hardly had any other subject since that moment.’ In total, Monet painted 250 canvases of his water garden. Around 200 of these represent water lilies floating on the surface of the water, while the remainder also show the Japanese bridge, the weeping willow trees and wisteria and the irises, agapanthus and day lilies on its banks. In all these pictures Monet was painting a subject that was already ‘pictorial’ – a landscape that had been carefully composed according to his personal aesthetic. The National Gallery has three further paintings of the water garden:Water-lilies, setting sun; Irises; and Water-lilies.

Monet painted three views of the Japanese bridge in 1895, not long after it had been constructed, but then took a break from the subject, only returning to it in 1899. By now the pool was overhung by vegetation and surrounded by plants, but to judge from contemporary photographs it was never as enclosed as Monet painted it, and he exaggerated the feeling of claustrophobia. In December 1900 he exhibited 12 paintings at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris, all of which showed more or less symmetrical views of the Japanese bridge.

In this painting, as in the others in the series, we are looking down onto the surface of the water, where the lily pads float into the distance, meeting the dense foliage on the far bank. Weeping willows are reflected in the pond and clumps of iris border its banks. The perspective seems to shift so that it is hard to find a single focal point; it is as though we are looking up at the bridge but down on the waterlilies. The picture, like the water itself, seems to oscillate between surface and depth. The mainly vertical reflections provide a counterpoint to the horizontal clumps of the lily pads. Different colours, applied with thick brushstrokes, are placed next to each other. This way of painting has more in common with Monet’s early Impressionist works than his more recent paintings of mornings on the Seine, where he had used softer, more blended strokes to convey hazy atmospheric effects.
The Japanese bridge series marked a turning point in Monet’s art. From now on his subjects were painted from an increasingly confined viewpoint, conveying the sense of an enclosed world. In later paintings of the pond, he would dispense with the banks and bridge altogether to focus solely on the water, the reflections and the water lilies. The culmination of Monet’s water lily paintings were the Grandes Dėcorations, 22 enormous canvases each over two metres high and totalling more than 90 metres in length, which he completed months before his death and donated to the French state. These are now on permanent display in two oval rooms in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.