XXX
CLAUDE MONET
(Pronounced Claude Mo-nay)
Impressionist School of France
1840--
Another--Manet--was the founder of this school among modern painters, but Monet is always considered his most conspicuous follower.
Monet's remarkable method of putting his colours upon canvas does not mean impressionism. He is an impressionist but also Monet--an artist with a method entirely different from that of any other. He belongs to what in France is called the pointillistes. The word means nothing more nor less than an effort to accomplish the impossible. If you stand a little way from a very hot stove you may be able to see a kind of movement in the air, a quivering of particles or molecular motion, and this is what the pointillistes try to show in their paintings--Monet most of all.
The theory is that by putting little dabs of primitive colours, close together upon canvas, without mixing them, just separate dabs of red, yellow, blue, etc., the effect of movement is produced. Needless to say, none of them ever have produced such an effect, but they have made such grotesque, ugly pictures that they have attracted attention even as a humpbacked person does.
The first who painted thus was a Frenchman named Seurat, who tried it after closely studying experiments made in light and colour by Professor Rood, of Columbia University. After him came Pissarro, and then Monet. America also has such a painter, Childe Hassam, but nobody is so grotesque as Monet.
He was born in Paris but spent most of his youth in Havre, where he met a painter of harbours and shipping scenes called Boudin. Through his influence Monet studied out-of-door effects, and was beginning to do fairly good work, when he was drawn as a conscript and sent to Algeria. It is written that Monet discovered that "green, seen under strong sunshine is not green, but yellow; that the shadows cast by sunlight upon snow or upon brightly lighted surfaces are not black, but blue; and that a white dress, seen under the shade of trees on a bright day, has violet or lilac tones." This only means that these things have been scientifically determined, not that the naked eye ever perceives them, and it is for the natural, unscientific eye that art exists. None of us see the separate colours of the spectrum, as we look about in every-day fashion upon every-day objects.
Professor Rood managed to produce an intelligent effect by putting separate colours on discs and whirling these round so that the colours mingled. Monet tried to do the same by dotting his original colours close together, and leaving the picture to its own destruction. It ought to revolve, if the scientific idea is to be carried out.
Nothing desirable can be made out of his pictures even when viewed from far off, while at close range they are simply grotesque, and photographs of them give the impression that the entire landscape is wabbling to the ground.