«Or light, that no other light sees: light that no other light sees; light, which obscures all light; and light, which blinds every extraneous light: light, from which every light descends: light, from which every light descends: light, in front of which every light is darkness, all light is darkness: light, for which all darkness is light , all darkness is light; supreme light, which blindness does not cloud, which haze does not obscure, which darkness does not stop, which no screen stops, which never separates shadow; light that illuminates all things together once and always, swallow me in the abyss of clarity… »(St. Augustine).
It is very unlikely that Claude Monet knew these beautiful words of St. Augustine, yet, as few - from a not necessarily religious perspective - describe his inexhaustible thirst for light. A joyful, lyrical, unforgettable light, which in recent months we can see again in the beautiful exhibition that the Fondation Beyeler in Basel is dedicating to him. When we compare his very bright paintings with the important contemporary paintings by German or Italian authors, we are surprised by a big difference: the European painters contemporary with Impressionism - although technically often impeccable - almost always have dark, amber, crepuscular tones; only with Monet and the other great Frenchmen of the late nineteenth century, we witness the revelation of light. In 1854, by painting a famous picture: The meeting or bonjour monsieur Courbet, the great painter from Ornans had laid the foundations of the entire Impressionism: an outdoor scene, where three ordinary men - neither noble nor particularly important - meet and greet each other; a scene dominated by very light tones: blue, indigo, turquoise, a blue green, a blue gray, a luminous earth soaked in yellow: a path that miraculously reflects the vast tone of a crystal sky. Courbet meets his friend Alfred Bruyas, the important collector to whom we owe the central nucleus of the paintings of the Fabre museum in Montpellier, is with his servant and the dog; Courbet carries his backpack on his shoulders, the tools necessary for his atelier in the midst of nature, in the open countryside, in the open light. The brushstroke is free, schematic, essential; even the shadows have an unprecedented, unique lightness - those wonderful colored shadows that Renoir will talk about. The dog is defined with a calm nervousness that is a prelude to Cézanne - his eyes are a very quick blot - yet, what form, what grace, what breath! The poppies in the foreground, the swarm of grass, the horizon of the meadows, the infinite freshness of the sky, three men as three chromatic columns: presences and symbols of the temple of freedom.
In addition to Courbet, Monet was immediately fascinated by the vast landscapes of the Barbizon painters: Daubigny and Troyon, Corot and Rousseau. In 1857, a few months after his mother's death, he was struck by a beautiful landscape of Daubigny, which he saw in the studio of his aunt, an amateur painter. Shortly before, in Le Havre, the small city on the sleeve northwest of Paris, where he had moved with his parents since childhood, he met Eugène Boudin. 'But the day came, the fateful day, when chance put me, in spite of myself, in the presence of Boudin. He was at the back of the shop, I didn't notice his presence, I went inside. The framer seizes the opportunity and introduces me, without consulting me: "Here, Monsieur Boudin this is the young man who has so much talent for caricature!". Boudin immediately joined me, and complimenting me kindly with his sweet voice said to me: “I always look at your sketches with pleasure; they are fun, casual, brilliant. She is gifted, you can see it immediately. But I hope it won't stop there. It's a great start, but it won't take long to get enough of caricatures. You study, learn to see and paint, draw, create landscapes. Everything is so beautiful, the sea, the sky, the animals, the people, the trees as nature made them, with their character, their authentic way of being, in the light, in the air, as they are " . 'And Boudin, with inexhaustible goodness, undertook my education. My eyes finally opened: I truly understood nature and at the same time I learned to love it. With the pencil I analyzed it in its forms, I studied it in its colors. Six months later, despite the exhortations of my mother, who was seriously beginning to worry about my acquaintances and who saw me lost in the company of a man so ill-regarded as Boudin, I resolutely declared to my father that I wanted to become a painter, that I would move to Paris, to learn ».
Like Delacroix, like later Klee, Matisse, De Stael, it was in North Africa that Monet had the revelation of light. There are many variations of light: from semi dark to blinding glow. The light that shapes all things. The light that shapes the forms. The light that intoxicates us with its fundamental presence. This admirable force that vivifies and colors and warms. But until Monet it is very rare to see particularly bright paintings - even in the fundamental precedent of the Barbizon painters. With the exception of a certain brilliant chromatism - the rare fragments of Minoan painting, the Roman and early Christian mosaics, the Gothic stained glass windows, the heraldic miniatures by the Limbourg brothers, some famous frescoes and paintings by Beato Angelico and Piero della Francesca - the history of art is characterized by a rather dark or amber pictorial tone - widespread variations of black and gold velvets, blacks and copper, grays and brass - dense subdued chromatic counterpoints, far removed from fully illuminated and brilliant visions. Even the phosphorescent cloths of the Mannerist authors and sometimes their enameled flesh, are always set in twilight places or backgrounds. The partial and soft light of a room, of a study, and the absolute light of the outside world, of the open space.
We have no details of his long stay in Algeria: but the yellow and orange of the sand, the silver of the domes, the molten lapis lazuli of the sea, the dazzling blue of the sky - on a new, very high tuning fork - made him understand the infinite power of light. Returning from Algeria, it will be another painter, Johan Barthold Jongkind - a refined landscape painter of Dutch origin - who, together with his previous experience with Boudin, convinced him of his definitive destiny in en plein air painting. “It was dangerous news. No one had practiced it up to that moment, not even Manet, who would try it only later », after him. One of his first masterpieces dates from these years, the view of Pointe de la Hève in Sainte-Adresse, from 1864. The three great presences of the world: the earth, the water, the sky, are intertwined in a dense dialogue, where the distant green of the meadows on the cliffs cuts into the richly cloudy sky; where the gray-white of the beach plunges into the breakers of the wave, and a small boat with three men measures the suspension of the water. The browns and greens of the hill seem painted by a particularly inspired Courbet; but in the revelation of the icy gleams in the background, in the violet swarming of the stones on the beach, in the sovereign elegance of the rendering of the sea: an equoreal silk of whites and blues, blues and pinks, Monet is already the richest and most luminous of all his contemporaries . On the one hand, here we find all the freshness of the great teachings of Boudin and Jongkind: the air, the breath, the distant transparency of the horizon, but declined in a greater solidity, a richer structure: where the robust hand of Courbet lights up in a particularly bright view.
In this admirable synthesis, in a new mixture of light, between the freshness of Boudin and Jongkind and the solidity of Courbet, his manner was revealed. And in those years, in Paris, he began to associate with other great painters: Manet, who at first had not appreciated him, and Sisley, Pissarro, Bazille, Renoir. «It was only in 1869 that I saw him again (Manet), but then I immediately entered into intimacy with him. From the first meeting he invited me to join him every evening in a café in Batignolles, where he and his friends gathered outside the ateliers to discuss with each other. There I met Fantin-Latour and Cézanne, Degas who had just arrived from Italy, the art critic Duranty, Émile Zola ». Then, in 1870, war broke out; to avoid enlistment, Monet took refuge in England. 'I found Bonvin and Pissarro in London. I also knew misery there. England did not want our paintings. It was tough. Chance brought me to meet Daubigny, who had long ago shown me some interest. At the time he was doing views of the Thames which the British liked very much. My situation moved him. “I understand what you need. I will get you a merchant ”. The next day I made the acquaintance of Durand-Ruel ».
One of Monet's most famous and beautiful paintings, Impression, soleil levant, from 1872 - the painting which, as you know, gave the whole group its name - is clearly inspired by a beautiful watercolor by Turner: The scarlet sunset, the scarlet sunset, circa 1830. Red and yellow still dominate in Turner; blue and gray in Monet. A fiery sunset and a clear yellow sun; a sharp dawn with crystalline ashy vibrations and an orange sun. But the same transparency, the same passionate lightness: in the zigzag reflection of the sun on the water, in the city and in the chimneys at a distance, in the prodigy of a watercolor (Turner) and an oil (Monet) diluted in a homogeneous density now of fire, crystal hour.
