Monet Drawings and Caricatures E-Book

Narim Bender

• Herausgeber: Narim Bender
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Although throughout his life Monet tries to create and spread the myth that he did not draw preliminary sketches for his paintings, nearly 500 of more than 2,500 his works are sketchbooks, drawings and pastels. This book is focused on Monet's drawings, and sketchbooks, offering a new aspect of the artist's work. Now we know that Monet relied extensively upon drafting in the development of his paintings in addition to painting his subjects directly. Monet has long been seen as an mediocre draftsman, having denied the role of drawing in his working technique in an effort to advance his public image as an Impressionist. He is among the world's most celebrated painters, yet he is almost unknown as a draftsman. This book explores Monet's works on paper, from caricatures he made as a boy to sketchbook studies for his late water-lily canvases. Monet also produced highly finished black-chalk drawings.

Leseprobe

MonetDrawingsandCaricatures

ByNarim Bender

Foreword and AnnotationsbyNarim Bender

First Edition

Copyright © 2015 byNarim Bender

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Monet Drawings and Caricatures

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Foreword

Claude Monetis one of the best-known and most beloved painters in the history of art, master of landscape scenes, rapidly executed in front of the motif, in vibrant oil paint directly onto a canvas. And yet there remains a previously undiscovered aspect of his career: his surprisingly significant role as a draftsman.

This book is focused on Monet's drawings, and sketchbooks, offering a new aspect of the artist's work. Drawing upon recently discovered documents and a body of graphic work largely unknown to the public and scholars alike, reveals that Monet relied extensively upon drafting in the development of his paintings in addition to painting his subjects directly. Monet has long been seen as an anti-draftsman, having denied the role of drawing in his working method in an effort to advance his public image as an Impressionist. He is among the world's most celebrated painters, yet he is almost unknown as a draftsman. Thisbookexplores Monet's works on paper, from caricatures he made as a boy to sketchbook studies for his late water-lily canvases. Monet also produced highly finished black-chalk drawings.

Monet's earliest known works of art are drawings dating from his teenage years in the bustling coastal community of Le Havre, where his father established a business supplying provisions to ships and set up a comfortable middle-class home. The boy's talent for drawing was nurtured by a culturally informed circle that included his mother, his aunt, and several acquaintances that gathered regularly for informal recitals in the family's parlor.

The young Monet took part in drawing classes as part of his primary education, but he also developed a passion for going out on his own and sketching the landscape, filling albums with views of his hometown and its environs. At the same time, inspired by illustrations in Parisian newspapers, he took up the genre of caricature. It was as a caricaturist that Monet earned his first modest commissions that would establish his reputation as an up-and-coming artist.

He was accomplished at drawing people and managed to turn over brisk sales of his work. Caricature relies on an ability to exaggerate and abbreviate simultaneously, while at the same time capturing a good likeness. Monet’s caricatures were drawn with an economy of line that vividly suggested his subjects’ personalities. These processes of exaggeration and abbreviation later resurfaced in his Impressionist paintings as a sort of shorthand, witnessed, for example, in his treatment of the figure and eventually in his rendering of almost abstracted water lilies. Drawing and selling his cartoon portraits – which he signed O. Monet – first enabled Monet to become a professional artist, rather than just a talented young amateur.

In Monet’s own words: "At fifteen I was known all over Le Havre as a caricaturist. My reputation was so well established that from all sides people came to me and pestered me for caricatures. I had so many requests, and the pocket money my mother could spare me was so meager, that I was led to take a bold step, one which needless to say shocked my parents: I started selling my portraits. Sizing up my customer, I charged ten or twenty francs a caricature, and it worked like a charm. Within a month my clientele had doubled. Had I gone on like that I'd be a millionaire today. Soon I was looked up to in the town, I was 'somebody'. In the shop-window of the one and only frame maker who could eke out a livelihood in Le Havre, my caricatures were impudently displayed, five or six abreast, in beaded frames or behind glass like very fine works of art, and when I saw troops of bystanders gazing at them in admiration, pointing at them and crying 'Why, that's so-and-so!', I was just bursting with pride."

When Boudin saw Monet's caricatures, he realized that the youngster had genuine talent. He made inquiries about him in the shop and the frame-maker tried to arrange a meeting between them. But Monet showed no interest and even went out of his way to avoid Boudin until one day by chance the shopkeeper seized the opportunity and introduced them.

"Boudin came over at once and started talking to me in his soft voice, saying nice things about my work:

"I like your sketches; they're very amusing, very neatly done. You're gifted, anybody can see that. But you're not going to stop there, I hope. This is all right for a start, but you'll soon have had your fill of caricature. You want to buckle down and study hard, learn to see and paint, go out and sketch, do some landscapes. What beauty there is in the sea and sky, in animals, people and trees, just as nature made them, just as they are, with a character of their own, with a life of their own in the light and air of nature! "

But Boudin's advice was lost on me. As for the man himself, I couldn't help liking him. He meant what he said, he was sincere all right, I felt that. But I couldn't stomach his painting, and whenever he offered to take me out sketching with him in the open country, I always had some pretext or other for a polite refusal. Summer came, my time was more or less my own, I could hardly put him off any longer. So to get it over with I gave in and Boudin, with unfailing kindness, took me in hand. In the end my eyes were opened and I gained a real understanding of nature and a real love of her as well."

In the early 1860s Monet experimented with many different drawing techniques. Now based in Paris, he briefly submitted to life as an art student but rebelled against the teaching of drawing from the human figure. Monet was already determined to become a landscape painter and often escaped to the countryside or the coast to make rapid studies from nature. As his ambitions grew, he worked on large paintings for public exhibitions, sometimes planning them in pencil, chalk, or pastel drawings. His fresh, confident draftsmanship is also apparent in a group of black-chalk studies of Normandy, perhaps made for sale or as designs for prints. Monet's lack of conventional training led to some practical problems, but it also liberated him to work directly on canvas.

Monet made use of sketchbooks from his early years in Le Havre through his final period of activity at Giverny. The pages of these small albums offered him private spaces in which to jot down visual ideas as he contemplated subjects to paint. With few exceptions, Monet's sketchbook drawings relate to the earliest rather than the latest stages of his creative process. The artist evidently considered these studies to be of strictly utilitarian significance, neither exhibiting nor selling them during his lifetime.

The primary evidence for this aspect of Monet's working method consists of eight bound sketchbooks (some three hundred drawings) that were left to his son, Michel, who in turn bequeathed them to the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris in 1966.

The role of drawing in Monet's art changed yet again in his later career. The series pictures - such as his paintings of grainstacks, poplars, and the facade of Rouen Cathedral - were partly conceived in sketchbooks, but he did not repeat the use of such drawings for two decades. On a visit to London in 1901, he produced his last and most sustained group of pastels, all based on the Thames bridges at Charing Cross and Waterloo. Increasingly, line and color merged in Monet's works on canvas, most thrillingly in the paintings made at Giverny. Even at their grandest and most vaporous, some of the large water-lily pictures appear to have begun life as simple pencil or crayon studies.

He drew throughout his seven-decade career, filling pocket-size sketchbooks when he was a truculent teenager and executing pastel drawings of seascapes when he was in his 20s. He drew in different ways using different materials, and in his final years made abstract crayon and pencil drawings as studies for his water-lily paintings.

Although Monet helped perpetrate the myth that he did not, and maybe even could not, draw, nearly 500 of more than 2,500 his works are sketchbooks, drawings and pastels.