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Image: Haystacks at Giverny, Monet, 1891 |
| Painting of Time
Monet wanted somehow to go further. By the 1880's, so far as he was concerned, Impressionism was finished. His friends suspected that he began now to record light and atmosphere for their own sakes, indifferent to what it was that he happened to paint. Anything, in fact, seemed to serve him as a subject. The simpler (a haystack) or the more intractable (the Gothic facade of Rouen cathedral) it was, the better he liked it. Further, what really mattered to him now was the artists' own experience of changing light conditions: Monet appears to be painting not so much what he sees, as how he sees. Time became a factor of major importance. In his desire to seize upon the exact moment of vision, Monet found himself at work on a dozen or more canvases of the same subject, each recording a particular moment in the day. The artificiality of such a procedure led him to reflect upon the nature of time; so that in his last works, the paintings of the now famous lilies floating on water, one seems to have gone beyond everyday reality into some strange world behind appearances, where cosmic, elemental forces are in play. These lily pond pictures slowly grew in size and took on unparalleled dimensions; composition as Monet understood it disappeared and all the forms dissolved in light. |