Claude Monet: Genius of the Gardens

ah my name even in a country as lousy with artists as france he has secured himself a position as one of the grand masters of painting even if the fickle winds of public reward were inconsistent in his life you may know him as the dude who painted meadows and skylines in unexpected colors but to millions of adoring museum goers he is a bigger rock star now than at any point in his life and just like a rock star his name can be found on every piece of merchandise imaginable jewelry ties scarves aprons stuffed frogs finger puppets children's books prints pop-up garden models even the occasional hand-painted reproduction experts in the know agree monet is money 2019 saw a new all-time record for most expensive monet ever sold 110 million dollars for a version of haystacks which had been held in private ownership since its completion in the art collecting world pieces by monet are extremely popular because of their ever-appreciating value and the frequency with which they show up at auction he is reported to have painted over two thousand canvases in his life often working on multiple iterations of the same subject simultaneously to best capture specific moments of light and color because the work is so consistent it becomes easier for appraisers to value paintings by comparing them to the sale prices of works from the same set also monet's paintings are gorgeous now we say that about every artist we feature but monet more than most knew how to convey emotion through the raw medium of color how to play light against itself in a ballet of feeling monet is the strongest argument against photorealism art that can be made the idea that a painting can depict a subjective impression over a concrete reality was such a fundamental rejection of the artistic trends of the era that even the label impressionism was first intended as a critique the paintings were considered incomplete rudimentary sketches of scenes rather than the fully realized sumptuous visual feasts that they are beneath the gardens the pastoral picnic-ready meadows the cultivated capitalist exterior beat the heart of an unstoppable revolutionary monetary's contemporaries represented such a vast departure from the artistic establishment that when a temporary relocated to the netherlands the police secretly investigated him for political sedition the man painted landscapes did someone confuse them for maps credit goes to the indispensable book wizards at the university of massachusetts amherst libraries collection who succeeded in tracking down copies and translations of the actual surveillance nodes kept by the police today may well be the first time they're ever seen on youtube so believe me when i tell you that this is a bit of a special episode everyone is born a genius it's what we do with the intervening years that decides if we get to keep the title monet's genius first blessed paris on the 14th of november 1840 son of a merchant and singer it was assumed young oscar would follow his father into the family's ship channeling business fortunately for us art intervened quick primer and obscure naval trivialities a chandler is basically a petrol station but for sailboats fewer gummy worms and dodgy meat pies more whale grease and hook hands it's far from glamorous work most of your clients being cutless wielding weevil eating privateers but it'll buy enough needlessly long bread to feed a family anyone born into that kind of guaranteed comfort could count themselves pretty lucky in the 1800s so of course monet pursued art with his mind body and soul at the age of 11 he had already established himself as a caricature artist after his family moved to normandy he would sit in the town square with a stack of papers and some charcoal and sell sketches for 10 to 20 francs a pop at the age of again 11. his mother believed in her son unconditionally as mothers are want to do but she died when he was barely 16. rather than bacheloring it up with his blubber monger of a father he went to live with his childless widowed art it would be easy to make jokes about her as a veil clad mourner swanning through a dusty grey garden style estate or a whale bone corseted dickensian governess but in all seriousness monet may owe his life to marie jean le cardra [Music] in march of 1861 monet was drafted into service with chasseur de afrique a cavalry group comprised of equal parts french youth and locally recruited north african soldiers fun fact six years before his drafting they were involved in the famously failed charge of the light brigade which we'll probably talk about in a future video let's pretend you're a wealthy learned elder of the chandlering community the sweat of your brow has purchased your family a comfortable life in an up-and-coming city your only son is looking at a seven-year stint of getting shot at in a desert that hates him so naturally you'll use some of your hard-earned money to buy his freedom right while congratulations you're a better father than monet had papa claude refused to spare his son from military service because his son would not renounce art in favor of ship chandray so very petty imagine seeing your child pursue art almost exclusively for the entirety of their lives then refusing to spare them from an almost decade-long sentence even in the extremely crowded field of terrible fathers of influential artists claude adolf monet manages to stand out thankfully genius is never quieted during the occupation his skills did not go unnoticed after sketching some desert landscapes in a bustling marketplace tableau he was approached to do portraits of officers sadly none of these works survived to the modern age but it's evident how much of an impact traveling to algeria had on his appreciation for striking visuals here is a buyer unlike anything france could ever produce sprawling deserts and glittering oases with bazaars full of people and totally new styles and colors of dress the food the elaborate north african mosaic tilework he himself even admitted that all of this contained the gem of my future researchers in color and form however after two years in cramped garrison monet got down with that notorious sickness typhoid fever for those of you who've never read dickens typhoid can only be spread by consuming the feces or blood of a gross monster who didn't wash their hands good thing nothing like that happens in modern times monet always died because someone didn't wash their hands at some point between using the bathroom and cooking dinner remember that kids don't be the person who almost killed monet wash your filthy hands thankfully rather than let him slowly die on a cot his aunt marie jean-luc gardra petitioned the government to release him early in exchange for attending art lessons art school law military service is a question so obvious and straightforward not even a parliamentarian could weasel their way out of a direct answer so he graciously accepted [Music] try not to let this shock you but on occasion artists and their models have affairs camille diocio got to live out that ultimate romance novel fantasy mew's wife to a misunderstood genius who perishes at a tragically beautiful age she was the model for many of his early works including women in a green dress one of the first pieces to hang in the famous salon de paris in the japanese she's portrayed as a blonde in a brilliant red kimono holding a fan this was a satire on a then contemporary obsession with japanese art in what will surely come as a surprise camille's parents did not approve of the courtroom marriage between the 25 year old penniless artist and their 18 year old daughter when they had their first child her parents disowned her though monet had a few gallery showings money was hard to come by he once destroyed a canvas rather than let it be seized by creditors in 1870 warren france drove money to england where he exhibited his work a few times to modest commercial success with these funds he was able to relocate his family to zandam holland in early 1871 the same year that the radical socialist experiment of the paris commune was crushed by french government forces monet wrote in letters that he was fleeing france out of belief that one of his best friends a witness at his wedding had been shot without trial in reality the man was tried and sentenced to six months in prison but either way any french national traveling abroad was considered a potential political refugee seen here are vote copies of the actual telegramed reports the police sent to the dutch government they're fairly brief because it turns out that monet wasn't a secret radical socialist sent to undermine dutch society he was a painter and he spent most of his time painting one of the reasons dutch authorities knew to expect him coming was due to the media reputation monet had thus far cultivated he would be interviewed while painting storms or standing on the edge of perilous cliffs this would pay off years later in 1874 when monet and renoir and the other impressionists held an unjudged gallery exhibition in protest of the stuffy salon de paris anyone could come off the street and check out the new style including the infamous impression sunrise the work whose disparagement inspired the name impressionism in the first place but we're getting ahead of ourselves returning to paris in 1872 poverty compelled them to move frequently and they would come to share a house with his former patrons alice and ernest hoshide also broke ernest stayed close to the city for work while alice lived with the monet there were eight children in that house even with two women doing all the housework the economics were grim the situation went from bad to worse once camille's health started to fail in 1876 afflicted with both tuberculosis and uterine cancer she died slowly over a period of years in her final moments monet painted one of his most controversial works camille monet upon her deathbed the work itself is certainly a fitting tribute to the woman who had given monet so much only her face is visible over the bedsheets but her whole figure seems to be enveloped in this gentle gradient like a veil the arch of the bed over her recalls the image of an angel's wings the texture of the face draws the eye to the creases where her arms seemed to be folded over her chest almost like a mummy the priest who administered her last rites also sanctioned the marriage between them blessing what had started out as a simple civil ceremony those few years ago despite having just lost his wife monet did not stay single long he and alice grew closer there's rampant speculation that their affair started as soon as kemil fell ill and the press made sport of this even going so low as to mock the hard-working earnest who continued to hustle to support the household while staying in claude's old studio in paris imagine living that life imagine financially supporting an artist letting him raise your children while you try and restore your family's fortune and good name only for him to turn around and romance your wife while his own dies the months after camille's death would see monet hone his multiple canvas technique switching to a new one every seven minutes while waiting for the paint on one canvas to dry he would immediately start work on another often up to 10 or 20 at one time he is rumored to have once grown so overwhelmed by the scale he was working on that he pitched everything into a river only to fish it out moments later so let's talk about what made his work so different back then painting was a messy space and labor-intensive process artists would stretch their own canvases and make their own paints by grinding pigments into powders and mixing them with oils things that are much easier to do in a studio rather than on a hillside 10 miles away because they were painting models in a controlled environment a lot of art contemporary to monet feel staged and artificial baroque neoclassical works steeped in greco-roman mythology was what the art buying public wanted extremely nude gods wrapped in floating sheets that's what art was to the young monet naked babies flying around the louvre ceiling in case you thought i was kidding apollo slays python by eugene delacroix represents the absolute epitome of what critics expected of artists at the time technically precise photorealistic depictions of mythological struggles this particular work was commissioned by louis xiv and it depicts a scene from ovid's work metamorphosis where the god apollo wrestles some snaky finds the work is rich in metaphor as you can see everything on the bottom of the painting is dark and evil looking while everything at the top is shiny and bright very subtle the perfect subject to pontificate on while holding a snifter of brandy but why is it important putting aside the fact that it's a palace ceiling the months and years of constant perpetual toil what impression does this painting leave on you where does that feeling come from does it come from the high quality inks the hours the model spent posing for reference sketches all the assistants scurrying around de la croix who gets to decide that this matters stepping out of the studio realizing the inability of the imagination to grasp the intricacies of nature was made much easier by a number of technical developments including the collapsible easel and the shade box a portable container for both paints and small canvases suddenly anyone could step out into the light and dash off works of natural genius without needing a small retainer of handmaidens to tote your bags for you char de francoidabini invented a fully stocked floating studio so he could lazily drift down the scene and paint the shoreline effortlessly dashing off masterpiece after masterpiece because it was suddenly accessible and almost democratized to a point this led to an explosion in this style of art and it was this absolute fever of the natural world that monet stepped into as a young artist let's look at bar ala grenoulier from 1869 a scene based on a floating restaurant which fellow impressionist renoir also painted it depicts a group of bathers resting on a small island next to a restaurant everything surrounded by water rather than being just some placid mirror the river itself is an active participant in the scene instead of trying to recreate the exact images in the water monet intersperses the same color of the foliage above with the blue of the water to create the illusion of ripples here the bands denote both the surface and opacity of the water if you look close enough you can see the zigzags of color gradually breaking into circular tiger spots not exactly a recreation of the surface of the water but an approximation of what it feels like we are invited to fill in the visual imperfections with our own emotional reaction to the piece take a look at how he uses color to give the impression of shadow we know that this crowd is seated in the shade because of the contrast of the bright foliage behind them the light makes it look yellow while the closer leaves are a deep green the motion of the water throws back more light than the sky above it you've seen trees waving the wind before you instinctively know how to read those blobs of paint as tree but here's where monet really earned his accolades trace the reflection of the tree in the water below the trunk wavers it's even doubled against the leopard spot waves we looked at earlier the canopy is reduced to dark green air code the same lopsided circular pattern which becomes the spots and zigzags this great diversity of brush strokes was something he encouraged other artists to incorporate into their work you can almost imagine what this place sounds like heavy with the murmur of conversation the splash of bathers and the clink of dishware balancing each other out the late afternoon sun playing off the bushes on the distant shore the heat of the day now broken as friends recount the weekend's adventures so now you see what a huge change this was from delaware's snake wrangling you can understand how brave monet had to be in order to try and compete against neoclassical artists it looks incomplete the brush strokes are prominent and there's an overwhelming vagueness to it all neoclassical work feels impressive because this degree of precision requires expensive tools and decades of training it's the visual equivalent to a palace an expression of wealth and mastery impressionism rejects that impressionism tells us that a work matters because it speaks to us and how we see the world the institution doesn't get to decide what's beautiful we do this kind of rebellious streak resonated with the democracy-hungry french public with his fortunes changing manaed the resources to rent and then buy the home which would eventually become his world-famous residence by the mid-1890s he had converted a humble farmhouse into a cutting-edge estate complete with greenhouse and skylet studio he hired seven gardeners to help him manage his two and a half acre garden issuing daily instructions for the husbanding of his precious lily pads he went to no small expense to import every color and variety of lily pad that he learned about encouraging them to create hybrid blossoms and rainbows of hues blue yellow pinks that aged into a deep bread he would have his gardeners over winter the fragile tropical cultivars and especially licked greenhouses then replant them in his pond every spring so great was monet's love of water lilies that you can trace a change in his perspective when he first arrived at giovanni he would fix the horizon on his japanese footbridge but over time the gaze drops lower and lower until the only thing on the canvas is water and lily pads here he is in 1899 painting 12 versions of japanese footbridge fast forward to 1916 he started focusing on the shoreline here he is with one of his weeping willows printed out of concern for his son and countrymen fighting in world war one by 1919 his orbit abandoned the sky as nothing more than a blue contrast on the pond's surface this is a contemplative piece heavy with the burden of thoughts at this point he had outlived both his eldest child gene and his wife alice who passed away in 1914 and 1911 respectively alice's daughter blanche took over much of the day-to-day management of the estate inheriting that duty from her late husband jean if you're waited out by the idea of step siblings getting married no monet broke up a prior engagement between blanche and one of his other students so let's just move on as if he didn't have enough going wrong in his life it's during the same time that he begins to develop cataracts through the mid 19 teens up until he had corrective surgery in 1923 his work began to develop a reddish milky hue he responded by having his assistant prepare his colors for him rather than trusting his own perception for one who loved color we cannot imagine the immense psychological toll this must have had just compare this example from 1907 to the rendition of his footbridge from 1920. you can barely even make out the bridge it's just a dark cage of red around a raj of red foliage contrast that to these lilies that he finished in 1926 and you can see the blues and greens return to the forefront of his work there's a fair bit of scholarly study which suggests the operation likely gave monet the ability to perceive ultraviolet light as a white blue glow people want to believe the greats are superhuman that his special eyesight was what allowed him to paint like he did but this happened three years before his death of lung cancer on a list of things that enables genius to flourish specialize rank far far below a partner who manages your domestic affairs for you revisiting the theme of women who sacrificed themselves from an a we would be remiss not to mention the artistic talent of blanche jorge monet as mentioned the horches were frequent patrons of monet meaning that blosh had already grown up in an impressionist environment by the time claude took her under his wing in fact she also had started painting at the age of 11 and immediately took to the impressionist style the two work so closely together on some pieces that it can be difficult for experts to discern which hand created which work just compare her version of haystacks with a similar one from that series that sold at auction for all the money in the world sadly managing the family estate took up so much time that she stopped painting for about 30 years she enabled monet to focus totally on working through the last decades of his life but what would blanche have produced if she was given that same measure of support the opportunities women gave monet came at a cost to themselves their lives and their ambitions what adds insult to injury is that the large canvases monet produced with blanche's support were under-appreciated during monae's life even though museums would construct special wings just to display these massive works of heartbreaking beauty side by side as they were intended to be seen audiences were unmoved it wasn't until the 1950s thanks in large part to the charitable estate built by blosh that the large canvases were recognized for the immense works of beauty that they were renee died at the age of 86 in accordance with his wishes only 50 of his closest friends attended one tore off the black around the coffin and draped it and a floral print a fitting tribute for the color mad genius of the gardens so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and thank you for watching you

Channel: Biographics

Views: 101,024

Keywords: biographics, biography, biographies, people, famous people, simon whistler

Id: 3UhHT5TmJvw

Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020