In mid-April 1892, Monet took all the cathedrals back to his studio in Giverny. ![]() … It’s depressing.”Įxplore Sebastian Smee’s Great Works, In Focus series I don’t know how many sessions I have spent on these paintings, and do what I may, they don’t advance. “What drives me to persist in researches that are beyond my strength?” he wondered. “Things don’t advance sensibly,” he complained in a letter to Alice, “primarily because each day I discover something that I hadn’t seen before.” The whole project threatened to defeat him. Why do this? Why strive to convert what is happening in reality, minute-by-minute, into fixed images destined to remain unchanged for hundreds of years? ![]() The cathedral kept disappearing, and the image itself became ever more abstract, like an incantation you repeat aloud until it loses its sense. The paint on the scumbled surface kept getting thicker, more encrusted. The process was intuitive and ongoing, like dream-work, and less like a closed loop than a spiral, always corkscrewing ahead. But Monet was as much a poet as a literalist, and he was trying to get the two things, canvas and cathedral, to speak to one another in ways that felt true to him. It’s true that his instincts were empirical. If Monet were that kind of artist, he would never have settled on the astonishing color combinations he used for the cathedral, which go well beyond nature. ![]() Paul Cézanne’s famous critique of Monet was that he was “only an eye.” (“But my God!” he added, “what an eye!”) This has fed the idea that Monet was trying to attain a kind of machine-like objectivity, as if he were a dumb camera, faithfully depicting the motif precisely as he saw it.
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