In honor of Monet, my profile picture now is Camille Monet in garden, 1873. Camille was Monet’s first wife, mother of his children and until her death in 1879 one of his most often painted models. 

For Monet’s birthday a special treat : the entire mini series The Impressionists made in 2006 :-) Do take a look, it’s excellent ;)

Three hour mini-series tells the intimate history of a most illustrious brotherhood of Impressionist artists - Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne and Manet. Entirely based on documentary evidence, special effects transport the viewer inside some of the world’s best-loved paintings, The Impressionists will recreate the illuminated landscapes, and haunting portraits of late 19th-century France.

Impressionists_1
Impressionists_2
Impressionists_3 (Final)

#ArtTVSeries  

Three days ago Remembrance Day was observed in memory of fallen soldiers during the World War I; since I haven’t shared anything on that day I thought that today, on Claude Monet’s birthday, I might share his Weeping Willows series, rather than some more famous ones - Monet started these during World War I, in which his younger son Michel participated. These weeping willows were a way Monet expressed personal homage to the fallen soldiers. Monet’s son returned safely. He was the one who upon Claude’s death in 1926 inherited Giverny, and then bequeathed it to the French Academy of Fine Arts.

I see less and less….I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up….I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf. ― Claude Monet in 1921

It is too beautiful to be painted! It is untranslatable!  ― Claude Monet 

This year in May we went to Venice for the first time, some 104 years after Monet and his wife Alice made the same trip. By then he was 68 years old and although he traveled to Italy before, this was his first time visiting La Serenísima, which left him spell bounded - I’m afraid I will only bring back beginnings that will be nothing else but souvenirs for me , he said, only trials and beginnings.  

On his birthday I have to share some of these, not only because we too fell under the spell of this truly incomparable city, but also because these days Venice is in grave peril, being 70 % under water, with tourists practically swimming on Piazza San Marco. How that looks you can see here http://goo.gl/5OsJx ; as for Monets - the whole trip was documented by Alice Monet who wrote extensive letters to her daughter about it, which were later published. As for these trials and beginningsas he called them, they were exhibited four years later - 100 years ago exactly - in Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, after he retouched them. Paul Signac praised these works, calling them the highest expression of his art.  As it is common with Monet and indeed with the Impressionists - these were done in series, with many motives repeating many times over. Enjoy :)

Happy birthday Claude Monet :)

See last year’s posts :

Monet family in Argentuil - by Manet, Renoir and Monet himself http://goo.gl/lG2tb
The Improvised Field Hospital , 1865 http://goo.gl/7zSEQ
Giverny http://goo.gl/eYK6T
Claude Monet par lui-même http://goo.gl/MYRpc
Claude Monet : two portraits by Renoir http://goo.gl/IBrSF

alabaster1:

Peacock and Japanese Lantern by Rose Driver, 1931.

(via catonhottinroof)

…They have even found a new movement, of which I was unaware: the jolts their body gives as it moves downward. And then their great strength lies in the fact that they keep their legs permanently bent, like a spring box, from which they can bounce or rise upwards as they wish, make themselves taller, at any given moment. It is a movement all of their own, unknown in the Antique and to us: when the arms are stretched out in the shape of a cross, they make a movement that snakes from one hand to the other, via the shoulder blades.This unknown,hitherto-unseen movement belongs to the Far East, i.e. when the movement of the left arm forms a concave curve, the other forms a convex curve, and they bring these arms into play, in a movement that darts past the shoulder blades.  ― Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin, Cambodian dancer, 1906

from http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/collections/drawings/cambodian-dancer-0

Auguste Rodin, Cambodian dancer, 1906, 
Graphite pencil, gouache

On 10 July 1906, Rodin, aged 66, attended a performance given in the Pré-Catelan, Paris, by a troupe of Cambodian dancers, who had accompanied King Sisowath of Cambodia on his official visit to France. Enthralled by the beauty of these dancers and the novelty of their movements, Rodin followed them to Marseilles to be able to make as many drawings of them as possible before they left the country on 20 July.
 
They made a deep impression on the artist, as he confided to Georges Bourdon, in an article for the newspaper Le Figaro on 1 August 1906: “There is an extraordinary beauty, a perfect beauty, about these slow, monotonous dances, which follow the pulsating rhythm of the music… [The Cambodians] have taught me movements I had never come across anywhere before…”
 
Rodin used gouache (ochre for the graceful arms and head, deep blue for the tunic draping the body), applied in broad brush strokes over and beyond the contour lines, to amend and rectify the initial pencil drawing of this crouching dancer’s hieratic pose. All the details are eliminated (garments, face, hairstyle…).All that remains is the concentrated energy of the graceful, eloquent, age-old gestures.
 
“In short,” concluded Rodin, “if they are beautiful, it is because they have a natural way of producing the right movements…”.

from http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/collections/drawings/cambodian-dancer

Still more marvelous is that other kiss “L’Éternelle Idole”. The material texture of this creation encloses a living impulse as a wall encloses a garden. One of the copies of this marble is in the possession of Eugène Carrière, and in the silent twilight of his house this stone pulsates like a spring in which there is an eternal motion, a rising and falling, a mysterious stir of an elemental force. A girl kneels, her beautiful body is softly bent backward, her right arm is stretched behind her. Her hand has gropingly found her foot. In these three lines which shut her in from the outer world her life lies enclosed with its secret. The stone beneath her lifts her up as she kneels there. And suddenly, in the attitude into which the young girl has fallen from idleness, or reverie, or solitude, one recognizes an ancient, sacred symbol, a posture like that into which the goddess of distant cruel cults had sunk. The head of this woman bends somewhat forward; with an expression of indulgence, majesty and forbearance, she looks down as from the height of a still night upon the man who sinks his face into her bosom as though into many blossoms. He, too, kneels, but deeper, deep in the stone. His hands lie behind him like worthless and empty things. The right hand is open; one sees into it. From this group radiates a mysterious greatness. One does not dare to give it one meaning, it has thousands. Thoughts glide over it like shadows, new meanings arise like riddles and unfold into clear significance. Something of the mood of a Purgatorio lives within this work. A heaven is near that has not yet been reached, a hell is near that has not yet been forgotten. Here, too, all splendor flashes from the contact of the two bodies and from the contact of the woman with herself. ― Rainer maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin, L’Éternelle Idole, 1890-1893

There are among the works of Rodin hands, single, small hands which, without belonging to a body, are alive. Hands that rise, irritated and in wrath; hands whose five bristling fingers seem to bark like the five jaws of a dog of Hell. Hands that walk, sleeping hands, and hands that are awakening; criminal hands, tainted with hereditary disease; and hands that are tired and will do no more, and have lain down in some corner like sick animals that know no one can help them. But hands are a complicated organism, a delta into which many divergent streams of life rush together in order to pour themselves into the great storm of action. There is a history of hands; they have their own culture, their particular beauty; one concedes to them the right of their own development, their own needs, feelings, caprices and tendernesses. Rodin, knowing through the education which he has given himself that the entire body consists of scenes of life, of a life that may become in every detail individual and great, has the power to give to any part of his vibrating surface the independence of a whole. As the human body is to Rodin an entirety only as long as a common action stirs all of its parts and forces, so on the other hand portions of different bodies that cling to one another from an inner necessity merge into one organism. A hand laid on another’s shoulder or thigh does not any more belong to the body from which it came — from this body and from the object which it touches or seizes something new originates, a new thing that has no name and belongs to no one.  ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin

Hamelin plays Ravel - Concerto for the left hand

Auguste Rodin, Large Left Hand of a Pianist

… Yesterday, Monday afternoon at three o’clock, I was at Rodin’s for the first time. Atelier 182 rue de l’Universite. I went down the Seine. He had a model, a girl. Had a little plaster object in his hand on which he was scraping about. He simply quit work, offered me a chair, and we talked. He was kind and gentle. And it seemed to me that I had always known him. That I was only seeing him again; I found him smaller, and yet more powerful, more kindly, and more noble. That forehead, the relationship it bears to his nose which rides out of it like a ship out of harbor … that is very remarkable. Character of stone is in that forehead and that nose. And his mouth has a speech whose ring is good, intimate, and full of youth. So also is his laugh, that embarrassed and at the same time joyful laugh of a child that has been given lovely presents. He is very dear to me. That I knew at once. We spoke of many things (as far as my queer language and his time permitted). Then he went on working and begged me to inspect everything that is in the studio. That is not a little. The “hand” is there. C’est une main comme-ça (he said and made with his own so powerful a gesture of holding and shaping that one seemed to see things growing out of it). ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to his wife Clara, on September 2, 1902

Rodin and statue of The Hand of God - Edward Steichen, 1907

The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.  ― Auguste Rodin

Joyeux anniversaire, Auguste :)

Rodin walking with his dogs in Meudon, Val-Fleuri

Versailles and Antiquity, prologue of the exhibition. Opening on Tuesday 13 November 2012!

In honor of Paul Signac, my profile photo is now changed to Woman at her toilette wearing a purple corset, painted in 1893.