Monet: Prophet of Impressionism

...For, with amazing finality and taste, he, with David, was able to summarize all the tradition that French art had developed, to indicate the dangerous limitations her conventions were making, and to state, however im- plicitly, that there was some new interest to be found...

...To recall now the historical storm-gathering pro- voked in 1867 when, writing a catalogue to accom-pany a current exhibition of his paintings, Edouard Manet first used the word "impressionism," is to evoke the spectacle--in no sense dramatic and yet how mo- mentous!--of the great progress modern art has known...

...neither did the ingenious appeals made by the mechani- cal specialists who came after 19oo...

...It is hardly necessary to refer to the characteristic aphorism of the 'nineties to admit that this art came to make nature agree with her, to make people observe and note and respond as the artist's intention would ideally have them observe, note, and respond...

...Never carrying this to the most exaggerated sort of "pointillisme" (as in Carron and Seurat) he still achieved a light balance which will probably live as classical of its sort...

...Born in 184o, his experience was first-hand from the start, and of his close com-panions he was the only one to live so far on into the new century as to see his own part triumph and the new experimentalists almost succeed in equaling, in popular eyes at least, his own advances and success...

...Acknowledging, with a reference which may still be seen even casually in the canvases of the school, the various forerunners of their attitude, they concentrated their attention on the production, not of "pictures" in the thoroughgoing and meaningless sense of the term, but of the faith- ful, vital, illuminating record, the purest product of selective art...

...To them turned, with now more abundant means and stronger impulse, the painters we have come to reverence...

...their value and importance will probably remain rather rela- tive and of the group...

...Monet first exhibited in the Salon in 1865 and so, for twenty-five years, he was in the thick of the fray which continued with vigor and might until 1890 when, with the acceptance and triumph of Whistler in England and Manet in France, impressionism may be said to have been triumphant...

...Breton and Dupr...

...selection and interpretation ceased to exist as terms relative only to conventional standards which had taken the essential sap out of the growth in art...

...Charles Daubigny, master of the severe perspec- tive and the beautiful shadow...

...The age took care that he was to become the prophet...

...Monet's particular rble in the movement was from the first a prominent one...

...Though doubt- less interested in the apparent sincerity which his later days saw in such performances as those of Les Six, the Vorticists, and the pioneering Cubists, he would most likely have scorned their approach and their appeal...

...Here the classical ideal was motivated by a per- ception and an appeal even now with us: the obvious similarity between his odalisques and Manet's Olym-pia, now preserved in the Louvre with honors, is not, even superficially, the only relationship that so original an observer holds in respect to later growths...

...His analysis of light, now detailed to the student and constantly given out in anecdotal form, became his artist's religion...

...Greater friends came: Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Renoir, and their company which, in Berthe Morisot and subsequently in Mary Cassatt, the American, came to include several illustrious women, and, in the discontented and constantly searching Cezanne, to embrace the figure who, of all of them, was to furnish most readily the note whereon the daring and audacious post-impressionists were to play with such variety, interest, and apparent facility...

...It was with another means, however, that the im- pressionists themselves approached their task...

...Moreau for the finical tastes of gallery-mongers...

...January 26, I9z 7 THE COMMONWEAL 323 MONET...

...the contemporary art student has learned to attach his understanding of values and relations to them...

...And on the other: Millet and his sympathetic judgment and candor...

...In the sheer technical mastery of Ingres, so com-plete a genius in drawing and so much the index of our modern critical canons, that new spirit became forth- right...

...In France, the nineteenth century was to be fortu- nate: the earliest indications of a new awakening, the unmistakable consciousness of an imminent rtew growth, came during the Directorate, and then the artistic genius fostered by those kings whose names we give to periodic developments extending through two centuries of complete organic.richness and authen- tic aesthetic luxury, seemed now prepared for the util- izing of a new spirit...

...It ranges itself about the walls of the gallery, now obvious in beauty, it is true, but a consistent and continuous achievement, where no note jars and where no grievous error in judgment and in method may be found...

...With the soundest employment of the imagination, 324 T H E C O M M O N W E AL January 26, 1927 the true thought value was added to reality...

...Then its masters had de-veloped to the extent of downing emphatically the first great weapon of the antagonists: that impression in art meant the neglect, even the absence, of technical control...

...In 1876, when his first exhibi- tion appeared in the famous rooms at D~rand-Ruel's, he supplied with some of the same pictures now so enormously valued, the foil for the attack...

...The famous lights in Monet's haystacks, in Manet's birds and planes and fabrics, in Besnard's figures, and in Renoir's still lifes catch and attract us...

...Corot with his contagious enthusiasm and lyrical inclination...

...Cazin, so de-pendent on the classical suavity and selection of Pous- sin...

...If the realism which the literature and politics of the age were taking so much into their scope was to become a vital realism, it would be obliged to develop within itself a means of expression not identical with the objective attitude and in no direct sense depending upon the nature of its material...

...The apologists for and, latterly, the historians of that endeavor are now almost legion...

...The fellowship device in literature and art formed again a scheme whereby the point of ~ departure was to be reached...

...The forest at Barbizon, the coast- lands of Brittany, and in a new way the varying aspects of French society, peasant and patrician, soon found themselves objects of a new observation...

...In none of his pictures do we look for the con-sciously heroic or the deliberately personal elements which we find in the simplified grandeur of Puvis de Chavannes or in the remarkable personalities which Manet was able to see and paint...

...The conversion, though painfully gradual, was complete, and now we find ourselves dealing with new problems and acceptances superimposed upon the impressionists' contribution of which we have grown so fond...

...Patience of the most exquisite variety became his motto...

...Of this group, the Anglo-French Alfred Sisley was the first to associate himself with the young Monet and their names are still linked as readily as their canvases are hung adjacently in the gallery...

...But Gleyre had probably given him technique, if nothing else, and no one would now question for a moment the purity of his motives in working in the newer manner...

...His earliest tuition under Boudin and, beginning in 1863, his eventful and not altogether successful sitting under Gleyre, preceded, with his military experiences in Africa, the ripening of his significant friendships...

...PROPHET OF IMPRESSIONISM By MORTON ZABEL M ONET lived, not to outgrow the craft of his prime or to see disregarded and disgraced the ideals for which he so passionately stood through his eventful and courageous middle years, but to see the whole modern world acclaiming the move-ment in which he was a central figure and modern art growing out and away from his contemporaries' achievements...

...The "Master" he must have been to Bracque, Picasso, Derain, and the others now in their ascendant...

...Now we see Bouguereau, with his unimaginative facility, ranged alongside his generally contemptible "waxworks" on the one hand...

...The brilliant r61es Frenchmen have played in the history of painting--r61es which seem so striking and prominent to us now--were really given substance and incentive power in that gesture of Manet's...

...In Jovian triumph he lived to include in his life the rich and complete developments which make his country so eminent today in the field of painting...

...For the classical grandeur of Claude le Lorrain and Poussin had not been, in any noteworthy manner, carried on in the country whose later contribution was made by the hands of Fragonard, Watteau, Greuze, and the felici- tous Nattier, artists of great skill and specialized ex- cellence, but in no sense equal, in their achievement, to the task of making French art take its way through history with the magnificent progress accorded to the great schools of Flanders and Holland, Renaissance Italy, and Spain with the never-forgotten robustness and might that Velasquez found and gave...

...Not content with discovery and closer observation, they became impatient with the means whereby the new subject matter was to be opened up...

...For he there carried on on an immense scale, what he had been content to do elsewhere in ordinary terms...

...Forain's dramatic incisiveness did not bother Monet...

...He died at Giverny on December 5, I926, and brings back to us, by his death, as colorful a chapter as the ultimate art historian is likely to record...

...This technical scholarship was from the first at the base of Monet's art...

...With the exception of Millet and, in another sense, of Corot, none of these painters will finally stand among the greatest...

...La Touche and Carri~re remained painters for society...

...But of their combined and collective importance, the final word will not soon be said...

...Sisley, without attaining to eminence in the group, still worked faithfully and with distinction in it, and his landscapes, while lacking something of the underlying strength of the others, are pure in values and lastingly straightforward in intention...

...In the great panels depicting water, lilies, and wonderful reflections which his last few years saw him undertaking, the climax of his life may be found...

...Without men's finding it, he readily implied that he was ultimately to stand, not as a prophet, looking forward, but a patriarch, bringing to a head, in what he did, all the eighteenth century had arrived at...

...For by slow stages, between 1867 and the end of the century, there grew an accord and an acceptance at once engaging and colorful...

...It is in France that we are able to trace that progress, and in France almost alone--even granting the importance of international developments...

...That budding and now feebly-cherished Bohemianism which Paris supplied for the later rec-ords of a Mfirger, took care, in its decorative way, of the second-raters, the Salon personalities, and the pic- turesque dabblers...

...Sup-ported by new motives in realism and a newly evalu- ated attitude toward nature, the immediate and worthy predecessors of the impressionists worked their unpre- tending magic...

...the tradition of Carolus Duran supplied the wealthy with portraits...

...These alike are to be found nowhere in his art...

...To the doors of an inhospitable Salon they brought work which dis- carded, with heroic deliberateness, the limiting stric- tures of conventional method...