Monet Remade

For those who may not have noticed, 2024 marks the 150th anniversary of the 1874 Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc. exhibition. Accordingly, French impressionism has been reassessed (and fêted) in a series of exhibitions, conferences, and publications. Keeping this present moment foremost in mind, this review looks at two recent books on Claude Monet. André Dombrowski’s Monet’s Minutes scrutinises select paintings in the artist’s œuvre before and after 1874 in order to explore how his extended meditations on and alternative approaches to painting the instant coincided with scientific and technological innovations in calculating and calibrating time. Against the often-assumed quick flick of Monet’s brush – impressionism as a fast modern art for fast-paced modern times – Dombrowski argues that Monet in reality painted deliberately, concealing the actual ‘time of representation’ (p. 5). Harmon Siegel’s Painting with Monet takes a different approach to the artist and his reality, focusing on the two decades leading up to 1874 during which the artist arrived at his individual and original perspective in art as in life. Painting in community alongside a multigenerational social network of artist-compatriots proved critical to Monet. Both books offer new perspectives on the well-studied impressionist père but find themselves published in a moment when as discussed at the end of this review, impressionism studies (once more) reverberates with questions about its future direction(s). Even how we define ‘impressionism’ has (once more) come under debate. We can read both Dombrowski’s contextual study and Siegel’s microhistoire as interrogating various structures internalised in writing histories of impressionism and so demonstrating the potential to remake our vision of Monet.

Though not the first time that Dombrowski has discussed Monet and time – both his earlier article on Monet, the Gare St-Lazare paintings, and ‘Paris time’ and his previous essay on Monet and film have been revised for the present publication – his recounting of these and more time-related topics still stimulates. Matching Monet’s own inventiveness, Dombrowski explains his intervention as ‘the first [monograph] to frame Monet’s haunting embrace of the fleeting in art as a profound reaction’ to the experience of a regimented temporal precision (p. 2). Further, his is ‘the first large-scale assessment of the intricate accord between an art form celebrating the moment, the instant, and the now, and the time frames and technologies by which such temporal entities could be visually and rhetorically assessed’ (p. 5). However, as Dombrowski acknowledges, time is not a new topic to impressionism studies. Indeed, time would seem to be an area of research to which the specialism may be destined to forever return. Not intending to ‘turn back the clock on … [earlier] important studies’, Monet’s Minutes does bear the distinct imprint of earlier research by Robert Herbert, John House, and James Rubin (among many others) into the relationship between impressionism and temporality (p. 52).¹ Yet Dombrowski builds on this foundation, considering late nineteenth-century scientific and socioeconomic developments in tandem with contemporary philosophies of the eternal. Across its six chapters and coda, Monet’s Minutes sustains its argument: the artist never painted a canvas in an instant or even all that quickly. Instead, Monet exerted considerable, methodical effort to achieve the look of temporal quickness, thus making his artistic language the ‘language of time’ (p. 176).

In his opening chapters, Dombrowski probes the science behind the quantitative delineation of units of time and embodied experiences of those units: the minute, the moment, and the instant. His first chapter overviews new tools such as kymographs and myographs used to measure and monitor psychophysiological reaction times to stimuli. By tracking muscular contractions, blood circulation, and nerve transmission, these devices made apparent the spasms and flickers otherwise invisible to the human eye. These scientific discoveries were paralleled in Monet’s paintings from the 1860s and 1870s. Turning to Déjeuner sur l’herbe in his first chapter and then returning to this same painting in his second chapter – a repetition recalling the discovered latencies in physical and psychological reaction times – Dombrowski proceeds to dissect conceptions of the immediate and the simultaneous. Determined to measure human consciousness of the moment, mid-nineteenth-century experiments ultimately proved ‘the mind’s and the senses’ non-instantaneity’ (p. 35). Thus, Monet’s impressionism could never be simultaneous with what it recorded: his hand and brush lagged some odd moments behind what he saw and experienced.

Monet’s Minutes then addresses the practical and politicised application of theories on time, its measurement, its management, and the way it was experienced by the working classes. Via The Coalmen or Men Unloading Coal and its representation of lean, labouring bodies trudging up and down wooden planks connecting boats and the dock, Dombrowski’s third chapter illuminates the plight of such workers under modern capitalism. Wages were increasingly set to hours worked rather than to tasks completed. Considering what led Monet to loan The Coalmen for the 1879 Impressionist exhibition – it had previously been sold to a collector, Charles Hayem, whose brother, Julien, wrote about the need for weekly rest from work – Dombrowski contends that in the context of the Third Republic and its gradual reinstatement of labour regulations eroded under the Second Empire, the artist included it to counter criticisms of impressionism as an art merely of visual and sensual pleasure. The fourth chapter moves from workers to the introduction of train timetables and the advent of ‘Paris time’ expediting the flow of commerce and capital. ‘Paris time’ would replace temps moyens locals, or the local times across France (each aligned with the solar noon in a specific locale). Dombrowski here connects the precise administration of rail lines to the corporeal experiences of train travellers aboard the clanking locomotives to the embodied experiences of viewers standing before Monet’s paintings of the Gare St-Lazare.

In his fifth chapter, Dombrowski explicates the implementation of universal time and its intersection with Monet’s seriality. Opening his discussion with the Morning on the Seine series and proceeding to the Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, and Houses of Parliament series, Dombrowski shows that for the artist, nature could be at once reliable and regular but also observed and painted according to the precision of the modern pocket watch. On their debut in the 1890s, critics evaluated the artist’s series as variations on or repetitions of a theme related to time and effect. Critics further discussed each canvas as separated by an hour, alluding to the division of the world into international and longitudinal hour-long zones. Dombrowski shows that the critical terms in which the series were analysed would not have been possible until time had been ‘flattened and standardized’ via this new regime of universal time (p. 176). Nonetheless, the abstract, relational, and artificial grid of time zones was not introduced everywhere all at once. France, despite instituting a legal national time in 1891, abstained from universal time until 1911. Since 1898, debates around the implementation of universal time had seized the Chambre des députes and Sénat. France was not alone in this resistance. European colonies also contested the imposition of zones; and, as Dombrowski observes, the orientalising names of certain time zones like ‘Elephanta’ in the Middle East unquestionably mark the ‘geopolitical and colonial nature’ of modern time (p. 165). Presented as evidence of a ‘pact between time management and time poetics’, Monet’s series are thus here convincingly tied to ‘broad forces of globalisation then in process’, including attempts to naturalise universal time (p. 152). Where prior studies have tended to discuss the poetic effects of the series, Dombrowski presses that their production was not an organic but a highly regimented creative process. With the Morning on the Seine series, Monet timestamped and numbered each of his canvases, storing them in labelled metal slots to allow for their accurate and expedited retrieval when he returned to painting them.

Breaking with the book’s overall chronological scheme, Dombrowski’s sixth chapter addresses more abstract conceptions of the eternal via Monet’s 1880s proto-serial paintings of ancient rocks at Belle-Île. With the instant now understood as at once part of serial and total time, Dombrowski amusingly notes that in Monet’s paintings of the salt- and seawater-encrusted rocks of Belle-Île, ‘instantaneity never looked less like an instant’ (p. 190). Between 1881 and 1888, concurrent with the advent of universal time, Frederick Nietzsche theorised his notion of the eternal return or recurrence. Nietzsche contended that all instants, and therefore all that had once appeared in the universe, would continue to reappear ad infinitum. Nevertheless, the idea of the eternal return was not new with Nietzsche: its origins date to Stoic philosophies and ancient Indian and Egyptian thought.

If not from Nietzsche, Monet might have encountered the idea of eternal recurrence from his first biographer: Gustave Geffroy had studied the notion of eternal recurrence while researching the socialist political philosopher Louis Auguste Blanqui. About three decades before this fateful meeting between Geffroy and Monet, Blanqui had been imprisoned at Belle-Île. (Blanqui had plotted his escape through the same Port-Goulphar rocks that Monet painted.) Honing his interest in astronomy whilst incarcerated there, Blanqui’s Éternité par les astres (1872) proposed a ‘materialist exemplification’ of the eternal return out of the belief that there were a finite number of elements in the universe to be repeated – an idea congruent with Monet’s serialism and its continual repetition of themes (p. 188). Combining these finite elements produced ur-forms that then became originals (‘prototypes’) and copies whose respective positions changed with time. So it was that in Blanqui’s defiance of progressive histories, what were once copies could become originals; what were once originals could become copies; and so on. ‘There’s no real advancement’, muses a contemplative Dombrowski, ‘there is also no origin point of space and time, and no first or last account of the world’ (p. 196).

Monet’s Minutes is a smart book that provides a sophisticated account of multiple overlapping and competing conceptions of time in art, science, and political and philosophical thought. In some instances, Dombrowski’s contextualised interpretations of Monet come with arresting implications for impressionism studies in relation to art-historical time. Those who take the time to process the complexity of Monet’s Minutes will appreciate how, coincident with its explicit return to the artist’s incremental rethinking of instantaneity and periodic reworking of painting the instant, Dombrowski’s line of inquiry suggests the possibility of revising conceptions of order (temporal and otherwise) common to histories of impressionism. As much as the discourse around impressionism has tended to privilege newness and invention, Dombrowski evokes sameness, recurrence, and variation as temporal registers worth equal attention. Whereas impressionism studies has heretofore tended to discuss Monet and his compatriots as fulfilling the Baudelairean appeal for a modern art attending to the ephemeral and the fugitive, in excavating again and again what it meant to paint the ostensible instant, Dombrowski underlines that Monet further satisfied the second part of Baudelaire’s often rehearsed appeal: he painted the eternal and the immutable.²

However much all these coincidences between science, technology, politics, and philosophy may make for compelling contexts for Monet’s impressionism, coincidence is not the same as causation or consequence. As Dombrowski notes at different points, the archives do not always allow us to know what or when Monet came to know (or not) about particular scientific advances and experimental studies. Due to these lacunae, Dombrowski has presented Monet as often relying on his circle of friends – many of them sympathetic art critics – to relay the latest developments in science and technology. Thinking about these circuits of knowledge, one wonders about both their accuracy and their speed in transmitting all these innovations. In alternating ‘between the period’s ideas about time and the temporal forms Monet’s art took in response’, Monet’s Minutes sometimes defaults to a presumed quickness in transmission between all these fascinating ideas dans l’air and the artist’s paintings en plein air (p. 1). Further detailing when or at what pace knowledge of experiments (some of them conducted outside France) passed from scientific papers to popular publications to the artist’s intimate circle, as well as the development of individual critics’ particular areas of interest in other fields, would make Monet’s Minutes even more persuasive. If these ideas were not exceptional to the art of Monet – perhaps, as part of these same circuits of knowledge, he passed these ideas to still more friends – then one should anticipate fascinating future studies on fellow artists who shared his interest in temporal technologies and developments.

Monet’s Minutes concludes with Sacha Guitry’s 1915 film Ceux de chez nous, which, over slightly more than two minutes, captured the septuagenarian impressionist in the process of painting. Cut and rereleased in radio and television, the film and its eventual intermedial versions acquainted decades of audiences with the artist and his practices. Where Ceux de chez nous, with its close shots capturing the amicable relations between the artist and the filmmaker, permitted viewers to see themselves as intimates of the reclusive artist, Monet, it has to be remembered, was ultimately performing making a Monet. Nonetheless, even as Ceux de chez nous captured the tension between ‘a semiprivate, intimate encounter and a more fully public’ Monet, it rendered impressionism timeless (p. 215).

Almost beginning where Dombrowski ends, Siegel Painting with Monet argues for the possibility of overcoming the breach between ‘being-in-the-same place as someone else and actually being with them’ (p. 6). Written with real warmth, Siegel invites his readers to mindfully reflect on their own experiences with and ideas about impressionism, thus welcoming them into thoughtful conversation with him and so with Monet. Painting with Monet is a beautiful book.

Culminating in the 1874 exhibition, Siegel dedicates each of his seven chapters to Monet painting beside friends, mentors, or small groups of compatriots starting in the 1850s: Eugène Boudin, Johan Jongkind, Frédéric Bazille, Alfred Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Édouard Manet. (Siegel has also included Blanche Hoschedé Monet and Berthe Morisot, though Monet’s closest compatriots were men.) Painting with others proved a special moment not to be repeated in Monet’s later œuvre. In exploring these personal and professional relations, each chapter pairs paintings of the same site or similar motif, including better known examples such as Monet’s and Renoir’s renditions of bathers at La Grenouillère, Manet’s and Renoir’s paintings of the Monet famille at their Argenteuil home, and lesser known instances such as Monet and Boudin at Rouelles or Monet and Jongkind in Normandy. With their easels placed in proximate but unknowable distance, Siegel explores the possibilities that Monet and his compatriots traded more than tubes of oil paint or technical tips but exchanged ideas about ‘perspective’ in its shifting connotations from something one made as in linear perspective to something one possessed as in a worldview (p. 86). Hence, when it came to perspective, this cohort of artists was interested in formal questions but also social and even philosophical questions as individual members of société. Though Monet still occupies the foremost place – it is Painting with Monet and not Painting with Jongkind, after all – Siegel presents him as part of a community in which he occupied a shifting set of social positions and roles: student, competitor, and collaborator. Monet would not be Monet without ses amis. He needed them and their société as much as ses amis needed him. For his own part, Siegel similarly cites the community of scholars whose work has inspired his thinking: Richard Shiff, Susan Sidaulakas, and indeed Dombrowski.

In what could be read as a dialogue with Dombrowski’s first and second chapters, Siegel’s introduction and opening chapter discuss Monet and his fellow artists wrestling with questions of painting objective versus subjective realities. Even as new machines like the kymographs described by Dombrowski attempted to measure reaction times, sensations were individual and subjective. Summarising the book’s arc, Siegel ponders: ‘If two painters paint the same thing, how similar should their paintings be? For the impressionists, this question had outsized stakes. If their works were too similar, they risked effacing their artistic personalities. But if they were too different, they risked losing touch with reality’ (p. 5). These artists – most of whom participated in the 1874 exhibition – perceived the modern exterior world to be a point of mediation for their individual perspectives at a time when the ‘disintegrating, anonymizing, atomizing pressure of capitalism, urbanism, and liberalism’ imperilled opportunities to know and be known (p. 12). Like our own moment of profound political fragmentation and social isolation – despite technologies simulating and platforms promising togetherness – being in community meant defining one’s self in relation to other selves. The artists looked to their colleagues to corroborate their views of the world as a small act of solidarity to not feel themselves (so) alone. Being and seeing with others also offered the potential that Monet or a fellow artist could shift their perspective to see the world anew – not that seeing the world anew was the equivalent of seeing the world better (however conceptualised).

Siegel’s second to fourth chapters address how Monet honed his individual and original perspective in relation to lessons learned from his established mentors and teachers as well as peers. Monet formed his initial ideas of painting with and against the mentorship of Boudin and Jongkind who were themselves friends of an older generation. Looking at Monet and Boudin’s works from Rouelles in 1858, Siegel glimpses their fraught mentor–mentee relations in a discussion as applicable to past artistic as present academic circles. The Norman villages where Monet and his mentors painted were places then attempting to preserve their regional identities against the encroachment of Paris time, making them fitting locations in which to become one’s own painter and person. Mentees like Monet looked to more established artists like Boudin for professional direction as well as social introductions and connections; and mentors like Boudin looked to students to apply lessons learned in an affirmation of their own continued importance in the field. But, as being original and individual started to be more valued, Monet had to separate himself from the influence of Boudin and Jongkind.

From these rural outposts, Siegel’s fourth chapter situates Monet and his contemporaries in the atelier of Charles Gleyre and then the studio of Bazille. Uniting a quartet of paintings produced soon after withdrawing from the former’s atelier – Bazille’s Still Life with Heron (1867), Sisley’s The Heron with Spread Wings (1867), Renoir’s Frédéric Bazille Painting the Heron (1867), and Monet’s Road to the Farm Saint-Siméon, Honfleur (1867) – Siegel compellingly argues that these works reveal debates internal to the group about the extent to which to continue their academic education as individuals in possession of themselves. While Bazille and Sisley’s paintings document them as seated at different angles in relation to their avian still life, Renoir renders Bazille in the process of painting that still life. Intriguingly, Renoir’s corner of Road to the Farm Saint-Siméon, Honfleur may be a potential addition by Monet. With these paintings as evidence of collaborative and individual work, Siegel discusses these artists as shifting their thinking about what it meant to be original while reflecting on what their academic education had taught them about copies versus imitations. Within an academic context, being original occurred within an institution and its proscribed traditions. But in Bazille’s shared studio space, being an individual was ‘socially constituted’ (p. 145). Connecting the aforementioned canvases across their edges, Siegel raises a series of thoughtful questions: when Renoir painted Bazille painting, did the former’s brushstrokes copy or imitate the latter’s brushstrokes? Who was individual? Who was not? Who was original? Who was not?

In Chapters 5 and 6, Siegel moves between relationships critical to the formation of impressionism in which Monet more or less saw ‘société’ through the same lens as peers. As per Emile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française which both reviewed books consult to recover the historical significance of particular terms under study, ‘société’ meant mundane interactions and rapport as well as collective life. For Enlightenment philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘société’ sprang forth from a state of nature. As ‘social relations become societies when individuals form cohesive collectives to be fully natural’, Siegel asks what natural ‘société’ looked like to and for Monet and friends (p. 150). At La Grenouillère, Renoir completed his most Monet-like paintings; Siegel, though, takes care to avoid discussing these as Monet’s most Renoir-like paintings. With reason. The two did not view ‘société’ through the same perspective. To Siegel, Renoir’s La Grenouillère paintings illustrate his sexualised perspective of natural ‘société’. Even as he later remembered La Grenouillère ‘for its display[s] of homosexual attraction’, Renoir insisted on natural ‘société’ as founded on heterosexual relations; queer sex and homosexuality were considered unnatural. As Siegel emphasises, seeing with someone is not the same as seeing as that person. Monet could paint physically close to Renoir whilst maintaining an ideological distance from his reprehensible (antisemitic, misogynist, and homophobic) view of the world. Whilst in the company of the more amicable Sisley, Monet ‘radicalised’ perspective. It is perspective – that most academic of conventions – that Siegel eyes as the locus for avant-garde experimentation. Using the examples of their respective paintings of the Rue de la Chausée and the Boulevard Héloïse in Argenteuil, Siegel presents the two artists’ paintings as replicating the effects of binocular stereoscopic vision. Together, the paintings present the world in all its complexities; apart, the world remains flat.

After all these sessions working with their easels side by side, how did Monet’s artist-friends see his painting? Siegel’s seventh chapter turns to Manet, Renoir, and Monet at the Argenteuil home the latter rented. There, Manet and Renoir painted Camille Monet seated and son Jean splayed in the grass with a rooster and chickens beside them. In Manet’s painting, Monet stoops to handle a red bloom while puttering around the garden. Thinking about these artists in relation to the formation of the Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc., Siegel persuasively argues that Manet decided against participating therein due to concerns that Monet’s impressionism failed to acknowledge the humanity of others. As critics inveighed against impressionism as an ocular and mechanical art, Manet maintained his distance from the group. Manet, therefore, meant The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (1874) to defend his impressionist friend’s humanness and natural ‘société’ (with none of the ideological ugliness attributed to Renoir’s version).

‘It’s hard to imagine anyone saying anything new about impressionism’. So wrote Michael Fried in a book blurb before complimenting Painting with Monet. However much the extensive literature on impressionism seems exhaustive, the present two books demonstrate that the field of impressionism studies is not exhausted. Much remains to be written, and said. In spring 2024, the conference ‘L’Impressionnisme à travers champs’ was convened in connection with the Musée d’Orsay-National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. exhibition entitled ‘The Invention of Impressionism’ (in France) and ‘Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment’ (in the U.S.). In passing moments between conference panels, attendees raised the question about whether what has been the standard definition of ‘impressionism’ still works – that is, new directions in impressionism studies do not always align with what have been the accepted parameters of the specialism.³

For almost as long as there have been published histories of impressionism, ‘what is impressionism?’ – or some version of this semantic and ultimately epistemic question has been posed at critical moments when the specialism has been restructured.⁴ To provide but one example in the historiographic record: in the aftermath of World War II, impressionism studies shifted in response to the Modernist formalism propounded by Alfred H. Barr, Jr and Clement Greenberg. When it came to placing impressionism in their progressive course of formal experimentation, Barr, Greenberg, and fellow advocates of Modernism debated what to include. Barr sought to expunge artists who, after the 1870s and 1880s, he perceived as transforming impressionism into an ‘academic’ formula. Nonetheless, chronology alone could not effectively separate ‘true’ from ‘false’ impressionists. As the post-impressionist avant-garde (Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh) progressed the course of Modernism, Monet (and other long-lived impressionists) continued on with their work, overlapping with what Barr saw as more academicised interpretations of impressionism. How to position Monet’s later work in the Modernist timeline became a real question.

For his part, Greenberg lamented that the artist had followed ‘the impressionist logic in too straight a line’. Not all agreed that adhering to this logic or line amounted to failure. Some contemporaneous museum curators and directors praised Monet’s pursuit of the ‘logical development’ of impressionism that made him the ‘arch’ impressionist. For them, and, with time, for Greenberg, Monet’s Water Lilies, with their shallow spatial recession and blurred boundaries between water and air, reflected a deepened engagement with time. Monet’s late paintings were thus seen not as the stagnation but as the persistence and indeed the renewal of impressionism. In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, William C. Seitz, curator of the Museum of Modern Art, promoted Monet’s series and late paintings, citing the impressionist’s interests in process and perception as important for postwar art as late as Op art. Seitz further permitted for the potential separation of impressionism from France as informal advisor to the 1973–4 American Impressionism exhibition. By that date, with the centennial celebrations of the 1874 Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc, the methods and approaches applied to impressionism had been revised.⁵

In 2024, impressionism studies seems once more poised for its own renewal. How vigorous that renewal promises to be depends, I think, on our collective response to that recurrent question: ‘what is impressionism?’ That this question returns now, I would humbly submit, may be attributed, at least in part, to the global or transnational turn that has reminded the specialism that ‘impressionism’ once included, and should once more include, a more expansive set of artists from around the world: impressionism not without, but beyond, Monet. Global approaches prompt the specialism to see impressionism (near and far from France) from a multitude of perspectives, especially those considered peripheral. In tandem, this cartographic reorganisation of the specialism poses a challenge to art-historical hierarchies and hegemonies, including timelines that persist in privileging moments of invention over all else. In returning impressionism studies once more to the topic of temporality, Monet’s Minutes is particularly well timed. As Dombrowski reveals, repetition, recurrence, and variation might constitute modes of resistance to progressivist capitalist constructions of impressionism and its histories. If our conceptions of centres and peripheries and, indeed, time are to be amended or even abolished, then impressionism studies promises to push our perspectives on this art and visions for our specialism to ever more vibrant terrain: geographic, temporal, and intellectual.

Endnotes