MONET IN THE 90s
Hanging at right angles to each other in a corner are two paintings of Norway’s Mount Kolsaas, one of which is unfinished. A comparison of the two, which are quite similar compositionally, gives a good indication of where these paintings’ magic dwells. While the unfinished picture is immediately pleasing, one needs to turn to the finished image to find a surface swarming with tiny details, each possessed of an ineffable delicacy, and each related to the others in a kind of organic interdependence that calls to mind the completeness of a living being.
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When one sees ten or more pictures of the same grain stacks or cathedral exhibited side by side in the same room, one obviously notices the central subject. But because the subject is repeated it tends to recede, allowing the viewer to concentrate on what differs from picture to picture; it is in this way that light assumes its place as Monet’s transcendent subject.
In one particularly beautiful series, “Mornings on the Seine,” we see the transition from dawn to daylight in mostly identical compositions. In the dawn pictures, Monet’s surfaces, while still richly detailed, are less mottled with different colors, as he creates in each area of color the unearthly, tenuous, shadowy unreality of things seen long before sunrise. As the light grows brighter, the colors grow more solidly sensual–yet they never take on the flatness of colors used only for their own sensuality, which so often characterizes bad painting. In the extremes of this series one can find a less obvious duality. Each area of color is painted with a richness that seems to radiate light out from the canvas, as if the work had light sources within it. At the same time each color has a delicacy so fine that one often has the feeling of looking through it, or even of passing through the surface and into the color as easily as one can pass through the air.
The paradox that interests me most, and that seems most particular to Monet, is the oscillation between luminosity and transparency. In many of the sunset scenes the red light of evening seems to glow from deep within the image, yet if one changes one’s perceptual perspective only slightly–steps back from or closer to the surface–this light can also appear to be no more solid than the invitingly placid surface of the water in the Seine paintings. The light, suddenly and inexplicably emptied of its physicality, becomes a window on some mystical, spiritual realm that lies beyond all possible imagery.
We live in a culture cluttered with objects, with a surfeit of media noise and a glut of images that encourage only the most superficial visual impressions. If seen with care, Monet’s work can help inspire a renewed vision. Rather than offering us wall decorations whose effects never change, he offers us pictures that have some of the completeness, complexity, and changeability of a living being. In fact, each canvas presents an integrated vision of naturally interdependent parts–trees, water, air, and sky; or sky, river, and the cliffs the river helped shape–painted with a pattern of tiny brush strokes that strike the eye as themselves complexly interdependent. To a species whose perception of all else on our planet is nothing if not hierarchical he offers images that envision all parts of the world, from trees to rocks to the polluted smoke over London, as equally alive. To a civilization whose hypertrophied industrialization is steadily breaking down all the life-producing interconnections nature built up over millions of years he offers an image of birds, boats, cliffs, sky, air, and light as all part of the same ecosystem. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that these works offer a genuinely ecological vision. Connections are made between cause and effect, nurturer and nurtured–Tucker points out, for example, that the houses in back of the grain stacks were occupied by the farmers who grew and stacked the grain we see. But each painting also offers us a more complete experience of our own selves, as one feels one’s perceptions of it shift between possibilities. And relationships between pictures in the same series heighten our awareness of the changing effects of light and air, of the natural cycles of the times of day, or the four seasons. Finally, this work is ecological not only in its vision of a unified natural world but also in its form–and in the kind of thinking that form encourages. The viewer is constantly led to widen his frame of reference: from objects in a picture to the relation between objects; from objects to their relation to light and air; from one half of a paradox to its antithesis; from a single picture’s instant of time to the times that came before and after, which are suggested both within each painting in the way light effects are rendered and by the paintings of the same view hanging on either side.
