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
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
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
In honor of Paul Signac, my profile photo is now changed to Woman at her toilette wearing a purple corset, painted in 1893.
Apart from being a painter, Signac was also an art theorist that left several quite important works behind, among them D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism), published in 1899. Hard to come by now, do grab it if you get the chance :)
Signac loved to sail and went on a number of cruises, which took him as far as Constantinople. After he had moved to St Tropez in 1892, he started sailing in a small boat to many ports of France, Italy and Netherlands, and then through the Mediterranean to Constantinople. During his sales he did many watercolors of landscapes, which he sketched in haste, as they went along; these were later turned into paintings. Last year I shared an album of his landscape paintings, some that were the ones depicting his travels; this year I am sharing I few of his works on paper of similar subject, all from The Louvre. Enjoy.
The Louvre, Fonds des dessins et miniatures
© Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques
http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr
Happy Birthday to Paul Signac, born on this day in 1863, with the appropriate Sunday, painted in 1888-1890 :)
Signac was trained as an architect but having seen Claude Monet’s works at the offices of La Vie moderne in 1880, he decided to become an artist :) First under the influence of the Impressionists, after meeting Georges Seurat at Salon des Indépendants of 1884, he slowly turned to Divisionism. He met Vincent van Gogh in 1886 and the two became friends; he even visited him in 1889, in Arles. Among his best friends was Camille Pissaro, who also succumbed to Divisionist color theory under his influence.
From 1908 on Signac president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants; he used this position to help and encourage younger artists : it is known that it was him who was the first to buy a painting by young Henri Matisse :)
See also last year’s posts on Signac, with 3 albums of his paintings :
http://goo.gl/x8UvJ
http://goo.gl/oaHGP
http://goo.gl/NCFEp
http://goo.gl/wE5Yw
The Medieval Gallery at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs - Edouard Vuillard - 1922
(via wim-visscher)
The Book of Peace
Edgar Maxence (1871 - 1954
(by artinconnu)
