Stumbling into Beauty
(the gentle headiness of Monet's art)
I still remember the sunbeam on the sunset.
I was in the Art section of the old British Council library on Theatre Road in Calcutta (I’ve never called it anything else!). It was 1974 and I was in my school uniform. The art books were stacked in a shelf over an entire wall. And I’d loved the cover of this. It was a magical sunset, a melting alchemy of colours conjoined in seamless small strokes. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. The title merely said - Monet.
And I didn’t know at that time but my life wasn’t ever going to be the same.
For that day I fell in love with art. I started to haunt galleries, and stood in front of paintings for long minutes. I hadn’t lived life long enough to know the meaning of everything, but I could already see the subliminal connection between the power of paint with what I was seeking with my ink. And I realised I didn’t want to understand. I just wanted to luxuriate in the explosion of colours and the tactility of the emotions they somehow always managed to elicit.
I loved art openings, with the artist ready to mingle and answer questions. And I was often the only guest in a school uniform!
Monet, to this day, is my favourite Impressionist painter. He was an iconoclast of his times, rebelling against the classical modes of painting, using the effect of light and an impression of things - rather than their reality - onto his canvases. He was almost a philosopher of paint. Disarmingly accessible and beautiful as his art was, Monet still managed to convey the philosophy of stumbling into beauty as a way of life.
He seemed to say through his work that reality is what we make of it, and perception is finally reality.
Monet excelled in plein air (outdoor) landscape painting. And some of his most sublime work is done outside. He believed that his only "merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects." And it shows in the entirety of his works.
They are like caresses of paint, the way the colour meshes into each other's subtleties, almost as if each is emanating from the other's hues, and have lives which cannot be possible without the other.
In his last years, Monet shifted to Giverny, a couple of hours away from Paris. He had land and a house there. And he created a heaven of his own making there. Monet wrote daily instructions to his gardener with precise designs and layouts for plantings. The area which he owned became bigger as he grew wealthier, and soon he had a water meadow, in which he cultivated water lilies brought from South America and Egypt, resulting in an explosion of colours ranging from blue to white to yellow, that turned pink with age. He had painting easels installed all around these ponds and grounds, so he could capture the play of light on the same view at different times of the day with immediacy and verisimilitude.
It was a special treat when I visited Paris in 2017, to encounter Monet in so many places. First in the gorgeous Musée de l'Orangerie, situated just across the Seine from the Orsay, where Monet's massive and fabulous series of water lily paintings, Les Nymphéas is displayed in magical ways. The room in which the entire series is displayed has skylights opening onto the room, in such a way that the paintings get the changing light of the day reflected on them, conveying the time they were painted! The entirety of the gallery was specially designed and approved by Monet himself, and gives an immersive experience of the water lilies of Giverny.
And then, of course, the special treat of going to Giverny itself!
Claude Monet noticed the village of Giverny while looking out of a train window. He made up his mind to move there and rented a house and the area surrounding it. In 1890 he had enough money to buy the house and land outright and set out to create the magnificent gardens he wanted to paint.
Some of his most famous paintings were of his garden in Giverny, with archways of climbing plants entwined around colored shrubs, and the water garden with the Japanese bridge, the pond with the water lilies, the wisterias and the azaleas.
It was an ethereal experience to stand on the same bridges, and view the water-lilies, whose paintings I had spent hours watching, from the time I realized the genius of Monet. The entire house, which now stands as a museum, with the minutiae of Monet's life on display, was a walk through art history - and my growth as a person.
For that is what good art does. It touches you in ways which cannot leave you unmoved. If only we spend more time unravelling the meaning of these masterpieces, as they relate to us, we would all be different - softer, better, believers of all that is good, believers of magic.
What a wonderful story. So full of personal insights and information about Monet. Thank you for sharing.
It is indeed intersting how some art can grab you and change you forever.