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Intriduction

Biography

1.1. The childhood and youth of Claude Monet

Claude Oscar Monet was born on November 14, 1840 in Paris. When the boy was five years old, the family moved to Normandy, to Le Havre. Father wanted Claude to become a grocer and join the family business, but his son was fond of fine art from childhood, in particular, he painted caricatures with pleasure.

At school, Monet did very mediocre in all subjects, with the exception of one - drawing, where Claude showed the artist's innate talent, and primarily as a cartoonist. At age 15, he was already selling his cartoons and even gained some fame locally. Claude’s father did not approve of his son’s hobby, hoping to see him as a successor and heir to his business and knowing well how unreliable the artist’s career was. However, Monet found an ally in the person of his aunt, Marie Jeanne Lekadr, an amateur artist who took over most of Claude’s future after the death of his mother in 1857.

Around the same time (the exact date is not known), Monet met the artist Eugene Boudin, who convinced Claude to work out on landscapes, and the young Monet, who was then about sixteen, discovered that this was his calling. Boudin (which was not typical for that time) loved to write in nature, because he believed that only in this way can you capture what the artist saw in all its purity and freshness. Monet was carried away by this idea, and subsequently it

became one of the cornerstones for the work of the artist himself and for impressionism as a whole.

His student life, like the first years of his career as an artist, was often overshadowed by financial difficulties, as Claude remained completely dependent on his father. However, in 1861-1862, significant changes took place in the artist's life. He goes to military service in Algeria. As an artist, Monet was fascinated by the landscapes of North Africa, but soon became ill with anemia and was demobilized. Back on the mend in Le Havre, Monet met there with the Dutch landscape painter Johan Barthold Jonkind. Like Boudin, Jonkind managed to inspire Monet and rendered him invaluable help, giving mastery lessons.

1.2. Recent years

In the 1920s the artist progresses to cataracts; he undergoes two operations. Despite his impaired vision, Monet continued to work until the very last days of his life. When he died in Giverny on December 6, 1926 at the age of 86, he was the recognized and revered patriarch of French painting. He was buried in a local church cemetery. His house and gardens were opened for visitors in 1981, and since then the flow of tourists has not dried up …

GREATION

2.1. First work

The first significant work summarizing the creative searches of this period was for K. Monet "Breakfast on the Grass" (1865-1866), written by him after the eponymous program work by E. Manet. The work itself did not reach us: the artist left it to pay for housing in the village of Shayi, in the vicinity of which he worked. But its reduced copy has been preserved, allowing you to make a general idea of ​​the picture. The plot of the picture is simple: at the edge of the forest there are several men and elegantly dressed women. Juicy dark green gamma interspersed with brown and black resembles the traditions of the artists of the Barbizon school, but unlike their thickening dusk and the movements of the "moist" picturesque atmosphere that arise from the nuances of tonal writing, the canvas is filled with transparent, delightful air in its everyday life and reality.

"Forgetting" such fundamental principles of academic painting as drawing and a gradual transition from light to shadow, K. Monet makes up both figures and landscape from generalized light spots, the shades and color of which depend only on lighting, there are no clear contours of objects: they lubricated by a slight movement of air. The sensation of air movement is enhanced by the texture of the picture itself: it ceases to be smooth, and consists of separate smears.

Having finished "Breakfast on the Grass," C. Monet continues to perfect his method in numerous sketches that he writes in "The Frog" - a favorite vacation spot for Parisians. He goes there with O. Renoir, leaving the Fontainebleau forest, which served as a kind for artists of the Barbizon school. Here, in “The Frog”, K. Monet strove to show his life in all its diversity: the play of sun glare on the swaying surface of the water, the crowded motley crowd of vacationers, which dissolves in the landscape and forms a single whole with it (“The Frog”, 1869, National Gallery, London).

Picture «Breakfast on the grass»

Picture «The Frog»

2.2. Exhibitions, paintings and techniques by Claude Monet

In April-May 1874, the first exhibition of the “Anonymous Society of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc.” took place, at which Claude Monet presented nine works. One of them is Capuchin Boulevard. Small strokes of dark paint are easily marked figures of people, as if swarming below.

Louis Leroy in the scandalous feuilleton “Exhibition of the Impressionists” sneered at Monet’s picture: “Well, isn’t that a brilliant thing! This is really an impression, or I don’t understand what it is. Just, kindly explain to me what these countless mean black strokes at the bottom of the picture, as if someone had licked it with your tongue? "" Well, then, these are passers-by, "I answered." So, do I look like this when I walk along Kapucinok Boulevard? Thunder and lightning! Are you finally, are you kidding me? ”- I assure you, Mr. Vincent ... ” But these figures are made ans according to the way marble is mimicked. A brushstroke there, a brushstroke here, blabbering, which way you want ... "

The opinion of journalist Ernest Chenot regarding the same picture was of a slightly different nature: “There has never been a liveliness on the street, this anthill of people on asphalt, carriages on the road, the rustle of trees full of dust and light; the elusiveness, fleetingness, and instantaneous movement have never been so faithfully conveyed as in the extraordinary painting “Kapucinok Boulevard”.

In the 1890s Monet begins to write using a new method that brought him worldwide fame and success. Its essence is this: the artist began to write one look at a time on several canvases, and on each he tried to convey the state of nature in a strictly defined, rather short period of time, working on one canvas sometimes for no more than half an hour. In the following days, he continued to methodically write in the same sequence until all the canvases were finished.

The first series of Monet, written in full accordance with his new method, was a series of paintings “Ricks” (“Rickstacks at Sunset”), on which the artist began to work in 1888. “I work hard on a series of haystacks in different lighting,” writes he is from Giverny Gustave Geoffroy. - but at this time of the year the sun sets so quickly that I can’t keep up with it ... How much work I need to convey what I want to catch: “instantness” and, most importantly, the atmosphere and light spilled in it ”.

In 1891, Monet exhibited a series of fifteen paintings depicting stacks at different times of the day in the Duran Ruel Gallery. According to the artist himself, at first he believed that only two states are enough to transmit an object in different lighting conditions - in the light of the sun and in cloudy weather. However, working from nature and closely observing changes in lighting, Monet changed his mind. Separate series of his paintings include up to two dozen paintings and more.

In 1892–93 Monet worked on a large series of paintings dedicated to the Rouen Cathedral ("Rouen Cathedral. Symphony in Gray and Red"). The artist wrote the same motive, being in a house located opposite the famous cathedral. This ensured the unity of the point of view that was necessary to solve the problem: to show the same view at different times of the day, to try to catch the slightest nuances in the change of light and color. In those years, Monet was literally obsessed with this idea - the Rouen Cathedral in various conditions was captured by the artist fifty times. Twenty paintings of the series were shown at the exhibition of Monet's works in the gallery of Duran-Ruel in 1895.

The dominant principle of Monet's painting in this series of paintings is the molding of form with color. Built of gray stone, the Rouen Cathedral with the power of the artist’s talent blooms before our eyes with all the colors of the rainbow, like a fairy-tale firework. And, most surprisingly, we do not see any contradiction in this. Through his canvases, the artist, as it were, gives us the ability to see the world through his eyes, gives us a chance to experience the same feelings. In one of his letters from Rouen addressed to Geoffrey, Monet wrote: “I have been here for a long time, but this does not mean that I will soon finish my “cathedrals ”. Alas! I can only say again that the farther, the more difficult it becomes for me to transmit what I feel. And I tell myself: only a very self-confident person can claim to have completed his picture’’.