The Impressionists Volume 2

[Music] early in the 1860s a few young artists began to paint modern life as they saw it around them they had quietly rejected the idea that art was to tell stories of religion mythology or history their subject had nothing to do with the past they wanted to capture not just the present but a moment the modern moment this idea of capturing the ephemeral that modernity consists in pinning down what goes by so quickly that modernity is captured in a minute a second a fraction of a second this was part of the Impressionist impulse Impressionism is not a style it's an attitude towards the relationship between life and art and it was a movement that believed it should express what people care about in their day-to-day lives and we still feel that now [Applause] the Impressionists were Claude Monet Auguste Renoir Burt Murray so Camille Pissarro and Edgar do gar this small group of artists dared to throw off the shackles of the past they created art that was ahead of its time challenging and evocative [Music] [Music] early in 1873 Claude Monet invited several of his painter friends to a meeting at his horizonte home he had decided it was time to find an alternative to the old system for over 80 years French artists had lived at the mercy of the salon jury for success at the salon the state-run art exhibition was the only path to a successful career [Music] Monet called the meeting to begin planning a group show that would be independent of the salon this move would mark the group not only as avant-garde but revolutionary the artists planning the exhibition included Monet Auguste Renoir Camille Pissarro Edgar Duga and Alfred Sisley to pull off an independent exhibition the group desperately needed money to get money they collected dues and looked to expand their membership Edgard Agha invited his friends Berthe Morisot and her sister admah durga wrote you know beckham only so and ed Momoa so they have real talent and they should join our group nothing about despite the fact that they're women or even though you think this may be a strange idea no he just said because they have talent they should join this group and it's one of the most perfectly non-sexist completely meritocratic moments i think in the history of 19th century art edna declined to goz offer she was married and had given up her art career barrett on the other hand immediately became a member of the group despite the advice of her good friend Edouard Manet MANET the leading avant-garde painter of the day had himself declined to join he was determined to make his name at the salon when Durga heard that MANET would not be participating he was incensed I definitely think Durga quipped that he is more vain than intelligent man a refused to exhibit with impressionist painters because he thought in fact that this whole exercise would marginalize his art he still till the end of his days hoped for government patronage and success according to the system that he understood and that he had been taught when he was a young man camille pissarro was busy helping to organize the show when he got word that his nine-year-old daughter Manette was ill with a respiratory infection the family doctor could do little and the infection grew worse Pissarro edged one last view of his young daughter as she lay still on her bed Manette died on April 6 1874 Pizarro's wife Julie was five months pregnant she felt such pain in morning that she worried her unborn baby would be hurt Pissarro on the other hand went right back to work this somehow did not seem to arrest him in his you know in his career and yet one shouldn't think I think for a moment that he was this sort of hard caris insensitive personality it's just that he had this capacity to take on the very huge emotional charges and and go on with his artistic pursuit call it obsession as if nothing happened [Music] Pissarro rejoined his friends in making final preparations for the show they found a space for the exhibition in one of the poshest sections of town on the boulevard de kappa scene Monet who showed a real instinct for marketing painted the view from the window now when people came to the show they could compare Monet's painting with the actual scene of modern life below they had banners they sold catalogues they printed tickets but it was very different than the salon because it was smaller the works of art were hung in a different way so you only saw one of them at a time rather than seeing lots of them together the rooms were small so that people could envision the works of art in their own domestic spaces and you could actually purchase from the from the exhibition so there was a sense in which it was a kind of one-stop shopping capitalist artistic endeavor [Music] the exhibition opened on April 15th 1874 [Music] [Applause] it immediately captured the attention of the art critics in fact it seemed that every art critic in Paris had something to say over fifty publications commented on the exhibition quite simply the negation of the most elemental rules of drawing and painting what do we see in the work of this school are not nothing but a define revolting almost an insult to the taste and intelligence of the public we have seen an exhibition by these Impressionists looking at the first rough sketch and is the right word peaceable you simply to have declared war on beauty seeing the lot you burst out laughing but with the last ones you finally get angry not all reviews were negative let us examine what we are told is so monstrous so subversive to the social order in these thoroughgoing revolutionaries I swear there is talent and a great deal of talent among them their art is lively it is vivid it is delicate in short it is ravishing the painting that became the cause celeb of that exhibition was my solid Livan impression sunrise by Monet and the word Impressionism comes from the title of that painting a critic said oh these are nothing but impressions meaning these are not finished works these are nothing but streaky looking sketches where you can actually see the individual brushstrokes they haven't been all blended together the way they should be it was a very negative term it was not meant to be a compliment the group of impressionist painters had moved from anonymity to notoriety in a matter of weeks but they did not sell enough to even cover their expenses they were so disappointed that it would take them two years before they could regroup to exhibit again [Music] [Music] I never had a fighters temperament and I would have given up many times over had not my good friend Monet who had himself a fighter's temperament bucked me up Renoir renoir had been inspired by Claude Monet since the day he'd met him in 1862 with Monet Renoir seemed to push himself to take more chances to work harder and to never give up Renoir painted with Monet whenever he could and he loved to have Monet and his wife Camille pose for him especially Camille [Music] over the course of a few years Renoir painted Camille no less than 15 times [Music] in fact Renoir dropped by Monet's argent toy homes so often that a bed was always kept open for him Edouard Manet also showed up at Arjun toy to paint with Monet MANET had long been seen as the leader of the avant-garde but he had yet to experiment with the impressionist technique he came because that first impressionist exhibition had generated enough press to make it clear that these younger artists with their newer forms of expression were becoming the avant-garde and MANET the older man upon that block had to keep a pace the kinds of pictures that many paints indicates that he came as a student of these younger artists also it's true that there are pictures where he paints a kind of homage to Mona himself as if he recognizes a Monet is indeed a leader of a new group of artists édouard MANET painted Monet at work in his studio boat he painted the Monet's in their garden and one sunny afternoon he began to paint Camille and Jean then Renoir showed up MANET and clen whare were both painting in Monet's backyard and their two paintings have exactly the same subject of Camille and Jean lying upon the grass in exactly the same location and the story was that Manny went to take a look at Renoir raised picture and he said the Monet this boy just can't paint really better tell him to pack it up this is something that was said absolutely as a joke because he recognized that the Renoir was one of the devastatingly successful sketch and indeed a sketch that makes Manny's own work look slightly stayed while MANET was painting with Monet in Argento his brother Eugene was vacationing in fake on on the Normandy coast also on vacation in fake off were the Maury Suze Berthe Morisot and new Jean Monnet an amateur artist spent days on end painting together one afternoon while on a painting expedition Burt and new Jen decided to marry [Music] while my damn Morisot didn't think much of Huijin she was thrilled that her daughter now 33 years old was getting married [Music] the wedding was on December 22nd 1874 who Jen wrote on the church register that he was a man of property Baird wrote that she had no profession Beth Louisa listed herself as having no profession as one of the canny strategies she used throughout her life to manage both a professional career and a satisfying personal life what difference did it make to her what was on a document but it made a difference to other people and she knew that so she gave them what they wanted and at the same time did what she wanted when Maury so set up house with you Jen monnet she did not build a separate studio when people would visit the maureesa household she would hide her work she would put it away she would want to appear as the conforming upper middle class lady rather than as a professional artist in the spring of 1876 the Impressionists began organizing their second group exhibition this time the group presented itself less as simply an association of independent artists and more as a movement what the second exhibition did was to get rid of some of the riffraff some of the people who were brought on because they would pay the dues to finance the first exhibition and it had more works of art by each of the members who were thought to be central to the movement the second exhibition opened March 30th 1876 while only a few thousand would actually attend the show newspapers from around the world were quick to cover the story of these independent artists some of the press played into their hands by saying that they represented your dangerous tendencies or this was a kind of degenerate art Sunday April 2nd five or six lunatics among them a woman have joined together and exhibited their works try to make Masuda gasp seriesin tell him that in art there are certain qualities called drawing color execution control and he will laugh in your face or try to explain to Monsieur Renoir that a woman's torso is not a mass of flesh in the process of decomposition with green and violet spots which denote the state of complete beautification of a corpse there is also a woman in the group called Burt Marissa in her case a feminine grace is maintained amid the outpourings of a delirious mind Albert Wolfe la Figaro one visitor though saw what the critic albear Wolfe failed to see Mary Cassatt an American artist living in Paris could not get enough of the groundbreaking work she was particularly taken by the arts she saw by Edgar de Gouw I absorbed all I could of his art it changed my life I saw art then as I wanted to see it Mary Cassatt by the time the doors closed on the second exhibition the Impressionists had sold enough paintings to allow each artist to receive the grand total of 3 francs in profit [Music] when the second impressionist exhibition closed in May of 1876 the group took solace in the fact that they did not lose money and they were pleased that the show had piqued the interest of a handful of new collectors but it was only a handful not enough to support the needy artists Pissarro Renoir and Monet the principal collectors of the Impressionists in the 1870s were a real rag bag there was a retired government official Monsieur shocky there was a pastry cook mr. yamura there was the department store owner Oh sh t and then there was a famous baritone singer from the Opera it's a group of people who in a sense became personal friends they were a sort of support system that the artists could call on the pastry-cook Muir a who himself had limited funds came up with a novel idea to help Pissarro a raffle he sold tickets at one franc apiece the proceeds would go to Pissarro a painting to the winner when the winner a local servant girl came to collect her Pissarro painting she took one look at it and another at Murase own works of art she asked if she could have a cream bond instead Muir a gave her the cream bun and kept the painting [Music] in the fall of 1876 Claude Monet left Camille and their nine-year-old son to work in mahjong on a series of paintings for his best patron Ernesto shidae a nest and his wife Elise were immensely wealthy they not only had a chateau but a private train to bring in their guests [Music] Ernest liked to spend money and he spent quite a bit of it on art or stay asked mone to paint several large-scale works depicting scenes around his chateau Monet set up a studio on the estate and moved in with Elise and her children meanwhile our nest was in Paris tending to his business [Music] that December Ally sauce day became pregnant with her sixth child a boy she would name Jean Pierre Jean Pierre grew up to believe that his father was Claude Monet Monet did develop in the late 1870s a relationship with Madame hoshido but it's very hard to know exactly what that relationship was like there are suggestions that in fact they actually produced a child but he was not a ladies man however he was not someone who seemed to be a philanderer in the spring of 1877 Ernesto stays business went bankrupt and he lost everything including the Chateau the Asha days were forced to find a new place to live but they had little money left [Music] mone was also in a difficult situation he was broke and his creditors were out of patience Monet Camille and Shaw moved to Vito and began sharing a house with Elise and her six children they hoped to save money by joining their families together Ernesto SH day stayed in Paris we moved into a small house Camille had been ill perhaps as early as eighteen 7677 there were eleven people together in this house it must have been rather chaotic to make matters even more difficult Camille was pregnant with her second child she gave birth to a boy Michelle in March 1878 but Camille seemed unable to recover after the delivery by the summer of 1879 she was alarmingly weak and in constant debilitating pain Monet borrowed a thousand francs to pay for her doctors but the doctors were unable to help on September 1st Alise brought the priest to perform the last rites four days later Camille was dead she was just 32 years old as Monet watched his partner of 13 years lay still and cold on her bed he found that despite his real grief he could not help but see her through his painters eyes I caught myself my eyes fixed on her tragic forehead in the act of mechanically analyzing the succession of appropriate color gradations which death was imposing on her immobile face tones of blue of yellow of gray this is the point I had reached Monet Camille was buried in a simple plot in the corner of the Vettii graveyard in the depths of his sorrow Monet stood for day after day in the brutal cold that came that winter and painted the sin frozen over churning with ice these paintings would soon spark new sales but for the rest of the winter Monet Elise and the eight children barely had enough to eat [Music] [Music] Edgard Agha had never concerned himself with earning a living from his art he had family money and he sold his works as it suited him but all that changed in 1878 de gAHS father had died a few years earlier and when the estate was finally settled he learned that he was no longer a wealthy man when his father died there were enormous debts digger had to pay off large sums and the only way he knew to pay off large sums was to make art and sell art Durga increased his production and concentrated on only a handful of subjects he concentrated the most on ballet dancers [Music] de gah would spend hour upon hour watching the young dancers then return to his studio to paint from memory the writer edmond de Gaulle Corps visited Dakar one cold February day and described the event in his journal I spent my afternoon in the Atelier of a strange painter named Oh God the painter shows you his pictures from time to time adding to his explanation by imitating one of their arabesques what an original fellow this too goth he is the man I've seen up to now who has best captured the inner nature of modern life the dance pictures did sell well from the beginning everybody said Dugger ballet they called him the painter of dancers dagger would paint ballet dancers for the rest of his life roughly half of all the pictures he would make over the next 40 years were of ballet dancers [Music] but he was not always enamored with painting dancers dancers Duga complained in a letter are the only thing people want from your unfortunate friend de God did paint other subjects he painted laundry girls and cafe singers nudes and prostitutes all of de gAHS subjects were taken from everyday modern life dig are called his brand of art realist it was shocking titillating engaging and it's sold in the 1870s durga did a series of mana types based on brothels there is no way of telling from the prints themselves whether he was there to observe whether he was there to participate shall we say there are a lot of these there are there are thirty forty fifty of these prints and they suggest that he had an acquaintance with those kinds of establishments dada was a confirmed bachelor still he did have several close friendships with women including Burt Maurice oh and Mary Cassatt Cassatt was an American painter living in Paris when Durga first met her in 1877 he admired her work enough to ask her to join their next exhibition Durga was also close to Mori so they'd been friends since Edouard Manet introduced them a decade earlier in 1878 de Gouw learned that Mori so was pregnant Morisot had longed for a baby since she'd married to Jean Monnet four years earlier and finally at the advanced age of 37 she got her wish on November 14th 1878 Bert morisot gave birth to a baby girl she named Julie dah dah despite his often hard manner had a soft spot for children I don't know why people say de gAHS disagreeable Julie said as a teenager he has such a nice way about him and kisses us in such a fatherly manner [Music] he regretted that he hadn't married and didn't have children I don't think he could have ever made the kind of personal sacrifice that was necessary in order to sustain a relationship with one person living alone without any family is really too hard I never would have suspected it would cause me so much suffering people think be cheerful because I smile idiotically resignedly I'm quickly sliding downhill rolling I know not where wrapped up in lots of bad pastels as if in so much packing paper to God he was one of those people I think who moved from low points to tremendous high points and there are even hints that he might have been contemplating suicide bringing the whole thing to an end but within a very short time we find himself throwing himself artistically into another project getting excited about a new technique or another exhibition doog are always kept busy when he wasn't painting he was at the Opera holding court at the cafe or he was visiting friends [Music] Durga also threw himself into organizing the impressionist exhibitions but he was abrasive combative and only interested in his own opinion dakar was a bit of a control freak and he tried to mold the Impressionists in a way that suited him and he was very active in the organization of impressionist exhibitions to try and push it one way rather than another for the 1879 exhibition durga issued an ultimatum members of the group could no longer choose to submit works to the salon and still exhibit with the Impressionists wanting to gain access to larger commissions and better collectors and whatever certain of the artists and Renoir was was the first decided to do both the artist who was the most steadfastly against this was of course Digga who believed completely that you know you're either with us or against us and if you exhibit with the cell on your with those conservative bastards and it's awful and you shouldn't do it and out you go there are in Paris hardly 15 art lovers capable of liking a painter unless he's in the salon my contribution to the salon is completely commercial in any case it's like certain medicines if it doesn't do any good it doesn't do any harm either Renoir dagger would not forgive Renoir for showing at the salon but Renoir had made a wise business decision his 1879 salon submission Madame Charpentier and her children was a huge success and Renoir was on his way to becoming a sought-after portrait painter when was in his mid-30s he's not in debutant he's not a newcomer and he's eager to be painting large canvases of what we might call Parisian sociability and to paint these pictures he needs models and to have models he can use some of his friends but he has to pay for certain models he needs income to forward his ambitions renoir finally had the money to paint what he wanted in the summer of 1888 raveled to Chateau and began a large-scale work he would call it the luncheon of the boating party the painting trip to Chateau was quite successful one of his models a laundry worker named Alan Shari ko became his mistress and Renoir dealer was so pleased with luncheon of the boating party that he purchased it right away Renoir was now selling on two fronts his Impressionists are to his dealer and portraits to the clients he won through his good showing at the salon [Music] for Renoir it seemed that after nearly two decades of struggle he had finally made it [Music] [Music] Claude Monet had spent day after day during the winter of 1879 working in the frigid damp air he was painting the sin as it flowed thick with ice that spring Monet submitted two of his canvases to the salon he'd seen how well Renoir had done there the year before and now he wanted to give the conservative jury a try himself something he hadn't done for a decade but this meant that Monet could not exhibit with the Impressionists in 1880 de gAHS anti salon rule kept him out its Jigga's stubbornness and since that he should make the rules and should determine under what conditions others would participate and that he was as absolute as he was in those rules particularly the anti cell rule that created the biggest tensions in the movement Durga was divisive yes there's no doubt about that he could be extremely obstreperous he would fight to fight and fight against plans that other people put up and it didn't help the future success of the movement or the group of the Impressionist to have this difficult man there at the center with Renoir and Monet out and Dugard the helm the impressionist group after years of fighting for recognition now appeared to be on the verge of collapse [Music] daga fumed at Monet and Renoir Monet thought he might fare better in solo exhibitions and Renoir a conservative no longer wanted anything to do with the liberal Pissarro the art dealer Paul durand-ruel saw the group self-destructing before his eyes [Music] he had been buying impressionist art off and on since 1871 and had a large collection of it sitting unsold in his gallery he's the only dealer crazy enough to buy these paintings in the sense that very few people wanted almost you could say no one else wanted but he believed in these artists he had he admired these paintings he put together an extraordinary collection of works by these artists durand-ruel felt his fate was tied to the success of the group and decided it was time to take action he stepped in and organized the 1882 show himself when the exhibition opened on March 1st the Impressionists and durand-ruel were in for a surprise the critics expressed less outrage and collectors were starting to express more interest [Music] but after the 1882 exhibition durand-ruel felt that the impressionist artists were simply too difficult to organize he decided it was time to hold solo exhibitions in his gallery the one-man shows marked the end of an era Monet Renoir juga morisot and Pesaro would never again mount their own group exhibition one of the reasons why there ceased being impressionist exhibitions was because the various Impressionists began to think that not only could they have their work shown at dealers but also that it might be a better idea certainly it would be less trouble and they would make more money that way the Impressionists had split apart they were no longer a working group but in the end the personal bonds they had forged over the years were so strong they could not be broken [Music] early in 1886 the art dealer Paul durand-ruel shipped more than 300 impressionist works across the ocean to America durand-ruel was desperately short on cash and needed to find a new market for his crowded inventory of impressionist works [Music] in April 1886 he opened an exhibition in New York City it was the largest show of impressionist art ever held anywhere and the show was a resounding success do not believe that the Americans are savages on the contrary they are less ignorant and less conservative than our French art lovers I have been very successful with paintings that took me 20 years to get people to accept in Paris Paul DeVoe Morel with his New York Show durand-ruel opened up a huge new market for impressionist works but just at the moment that financial success was at hand both Renoir and Pesaro decided it was time for them to do something different I've gone to the end of Impressionism and I've reached the conclusion that I don't know how to paint or draw Renoir I am much disturbed by my unpolished and rough execution I should like to develop a smoother technique while retaining the old fierceness Pizarro each of them in their own way has a sort of crisis in Renoir's case it's this sense that he doesn't know how to draw that he didn't know anything but he has to go back from the tube to basics and pizarro experiments with a different type of technique in some ways each of the artists is looking at this language it was so radical and finding it in some ways lacking Renoir thought that his work was too concerned with the effects of light that it lacked composition that it was monotonous around 1885 86 he did this major painting which has loads of sketches and so on called the great bathers the figures themselves are solid rigid though they're in kind of moving positions they're frozen and this is like a declaration I am NOT going to do Impressionism anymore or I'm not going to do pure Impressionism anymore my figures are going to be clear but Renoir himself felt that his new paintings were failing I wipe out I start over I think the year will go by without one canvas I'd want to find what I'm looking for before giving up I've gone too deeply into the series of experiments to give up without regret success maybe at the end Renoir while Renoir was struggling to find his way Pissarro quickly shifted his style after meeting a painter half his age 26 year-old George sera sera painted using tiny distinct dots a method called neo-impressionism and later pointillism Pizarro hoped the new method could help him create more vibrant works and he took it up with great excitement now instead of painting quickly outdoors he was working in his studio day after day laying on innumerable tiny distinct strokes and when he finally had a few works to show for his efforts durand-ruel rejected them his dealer simply felt that this were paid these paintings were unsellable not only were they unsellable but pizarra took a considerable amount of time to produce a single painting weeks and weeks as opposed to days Pissarro worked long and hard but brought no money and to support the family his wife Julie had had enough in the fall of 1887 she wrote to her eldest son Lucien my dear son Lucia I have no money and nobody will want to give me any more credit we are eight at home to be fed every day when dinner time comes I cannot say to them wait this stupid word your father repeats and repeats [Music] I had decided to send the three boys to Paris and then to take the two little ones for a walk by the river you can imagine the rest everyone would have thought it an accident but when I was ready to go I lack the courage my poor Lucia I'm terribly unhappy goodbye ma'am um Julie was the one who carried the brunt of the irregularities of the unevenness of their lifestyle if one wants to take Julie side which is definitely you know very legitimate one can see in Bazaar a selfish bastard Pissarro did his best to move forward with pointillism not only was it slow going but he struggled with a recurring eye infection I shall try to work with one eye he reported to Lucien de God does it and gets good results with one eye bandaged shut Pissarro continued working renoir though felt he was not making progress his career was at a standstill both Renoir and Pizarro had been painting for over 30 years still they struggled with their craft alone in their studios [Music] [Music] late in 1888 Auguste Renoir was busy painting in his drafty Paris studio he caught what he thought was a cold but he suddenly found that he could not move an entire side of his face Renoir had developed rheumatoid arthritis he tried everything to overcome it including electric shock therapy but nothing helped [Music] with stiffened painful fingers Renoir did his best to keep working he found it more comfortable painting with less detail using broader strokes so he shifted his style back to Impressionism the shift paid off for within months he was again selling to durand-ruel [Music] Pissarro also moved back to Impressionism he had become excruciating ly bored with painting dots [Music] but his pointillist experiment had helped him his new canvases were more vibrant he still uses the new impressionist palette to a very great extent there are still lots of greens and purples that create this kind of quivering a symphonic palette of colors on his canvas so he has learned a big lesson from Syrah and he picks up the ball and runs with it durand-ruel was thrilled with Pizarro's new work and quickly purchased his latest canvases Pissarro could now afford to take painting trips away from his irani home while he was painting in London in 1892 julie was forced to make a decision by the house they had rented for the last decade or face eviction Julie wanted to buy so she called on an old friend for help Claude Monet Monet gave her a loan and in return he received a Pissarro painting passado comes back from London and he hears this story has a fit and feels absolutely terrible about the fact that his wife behind his back went to beg as he put it to bake money to to give them money Pissarro worried that he might not be able to repay his friend but this time he had little reason for concern Pissarro sales would only get better in fact sales were getting better for all the Impressionists it had taken nearly 30 years but the Impressionists had finally won over the French public the precious become quasi established artists people who are still pushing the envelope so to speak but we were providing French public's with pictures that they wanted to see auguste renoir was well on his way to becoming a wealthy man he painted almost constantly seemingly in defiance of his debilitating arthritis we know that run was literally crippled literally crippled by the most hideous deformations pain and incapacities it is a very moving story to look at the last production and see how in the end his craft his capacity for painting his commitment to painting doesn't subside doesn't diminish doesn't die Renoir was painting nude afternoon he used to say to his models it is with my brush that I make love Renoir r--'s models had to be a certain type he insisted that he could only paint a woman who did not think Renoir especially liked women who did household chores women are best off when they kneeled to clean the floor light the fire or do the washing these movements benefit their stomachs Benoit he made a lot of statements about how stupid women were how anything but being pretty and being a wife and mother was being a total fool this is not his idea alone this is part of the doxa part of the belief system of men of his times Renoir's views of women did not extend to his good friend Bert Murray so in the summer of 1891 Renoir painted with Morrie so at her country house while he was there Bert maurices husband Lou Jean Monnet became seriously ill for months he wasted away then on April 13th 1892 Huijin MANET died I want to go down into the depths of pain because it seems to me it must be possible to rise from there but now for three nights I've wept merci merci I don't want to live anymore [Music] Duga and Hanwha rallied around Mizzou and became companions in her life in a way which made the end of her life very very rich when they were young they embarked on an artistic project which required them to become like a fighting squadron but as they got older and they didn't need to fight anymore the people who had been the battle companions became the Companions of old age the Companions of success [Music] in 1889 Claude Monet got caught up with a new idea painting a series of canvases covering the same subject in his series paintings Monet's interpretation of light and color became central [Music] Monet had found focus for the rest of his career capturing the atmosphere itself and rendering it on canvas it was a way for him to be able to reveal how versatile he was to take a single subject hone in on it and create different pictures from that same motif and these pictures sold fabulously and they made him a very wealthy man [Music] in 1889 Monet bought the house he and Elise had been renting for the past six years in the norman village of javonni he could finally afford his expensive lifestyle he brought in a butler a cook and he hired gardeners Monet had always enjoyed gardening now it became his passion he designed his garden ordered greenhouses built and traded plants with friends I'm good for nothing when they said but gardening and painting in 1892 Monet traveled to rural to paint the Cathedral he struggled to apply what he had learned about painting a series of poppy fields or haystacks to a building My dear Elise I had a night filled with bad dreams the Cathedral was collapsing on me it seemed to be blue or pink or yellow Claude what do you have with the Rouen Cathedral series was the absolutely startling range of emotions and of situations you realize that the building itself is an armature on which to hang the strokes is a skeleton to be clothed with paint this guy was flying by the seat of his pants this is pure innovation and invention we left this morning for Giovanni it rained all day Monsieur Monet showed us his cathedrals there are 26 of them they're magnificent painted in broad areas and yet one can see every detail Julie many in 1895 Julie MANET was 16 years old she had spent nearly every day of her life with her mother bear - Maurice Oh Maurice Oh painted her gave her art lessons and schooled her at home [Music] late that winter Mauricio became ill had trouble breathing and was so weak she could barely pull herself out of bed she had contracted pneumonia and there was little her doctor could do to help her my dearest little Julie I love you as I die I will still love you when I am dead I beg if you do not cry this parting was inevitable I would have liked to be with you until you married you have never caused me one sorrow in your little life tell Monsieur de God that he is to choose one of my mayonnaise a keepsake from Monet one for Renoir do not cry I love you more than I can tell you Bert Murray so died Saturday morning March 2nd 1895 she was 54 years old [Music] one year after maurices death Renoir diga and Monet organized a retrospective exhibition of her work at durand-ruel durga as always argued over every possible detail refusing to compromise on even a single point as he grew older durga became increasingly difficult and obsessive he was consumed by nearly anything that he found of interest when de gAHS saw Rose Karen play brood Hilda in the Opera Sigurd he was so enraptured that he painted her composed sonnets to her and went back to see her perform the same role 37 times but not all of his obsessions were quite so benign in the mid 1890s Durga who'd had Jewish friends all his life became rapidly anti-semitic his shift came as a result of a political controversy the Dreyfus Affair captain Dreyfus was Jewish and he was accused of espionage the trial that followed fueled an explosive national debate over dreyfuses guilt or innocence and it gave rise to virulent anti-semitism all across France there goes behavior over the Dreyfus Affair was simply unforgivable in our Terms he was he was openly and some anti-semitic in his conversations and it brought out the very worst in him he had an old servant who'd been with him for many years she would read him excerpts from the anti-semitic press he cut himself off from the Jew piece a foe who had been one of his closest associates he said that he could not look at peace of host work with unprejudiced eyes the Dreyfus Affair was not easy for a Pizarro for a number of reasons he was in Paris working and he realized that he had this terrible problem which is that he couldn't go out because Pizarro looked like a Jew it was a very very difficult thing and one of his greatest and most moving self-portraits he only painted himself four times in his life in oil was made in the hotel room that he couldn't get out of Pissarro painted many of his Paris scenes from his hotel room window [Music] and despite the trouble that confronted him on the streets his paintings were a hit in the galleries camille pissarro 'he's time had finally come [Music] [Music] at the turn of the century Camille Pissarro paintings began selling like never before he had spent much of his adult life barely earning enough to get by now the Pizarro's were living comfortably he began to make marketable paintings and he actually thought about that he was making images of LaBelle Falls and the paintings were extraordinary and the painting sold Pizarro's paintings sold for over 5,000 francs apiece and he turned out nearly a painting a week but he would enjoy his success for only a short while in October of 1903 the 73 year-old Pissarro fell sick in the depth of his illness he relived the discomfort he had felt years earlier when his wife had borrowed money from Claude Monet he started having hallucinations in which he imagines that money is absolutely fiercely angry with him and his wife for having borrowed that money and that this is staining the relationship it's over a decade later passar is dying and he relieves that episode [Music] when Monet heard not only a Pizarro's illness but of his anguish he immediately wrote a note to reaffirm their friendship but the letter arrived too late [Music] on November 13th 1903 Camille Pissarro died [Music] Monet traveled to Aaron yay to say goodbye to his friend of 43 years [Music] upon his return to jovani monet focused on a series of paintings he called nymphaea the botanical name for water lilies [Music] a decade earlier he had started work creating his water landscape a pond he'd had constructed below his flower gardens [Music] Monet's pond captured his attention like nothing else [Music] but then early in 1910 all his attention suddenly shifted Alysse his partner for over 30 years was sick the woman who had raised eight children and who liked to take Monet to see the local wrestling matches was now confined to her bed after months of suffering alleys Monet died May 19 1910 Monet's loss of alleys was devastating devastating he wrote letter after letter to friends about how he simply couldn't survive he couldn't paint he couldn't think and in fact he stopped painting for an entire year [Music] friends visited trying their best to boost Monet's spirits but Monet could not bring himself to work he spent days on end reading and rereading the letters that Elise had written him when he was away on his painting expeditions then one by one he threw them into the fire and watched them burn [Music] [Applause] it was just too painful a moment in his past I think the depth of his feeling for a lease was so powerful that he simply couldn't bear the notion of her presence even in her own written hand Monet wrote a short note to durand-ruel in it he said simply I no longer feel anything not long after Elise died Edgard Agha arrived at severe need to pay his respects Monet was pleased to see the difficult man he always thought of dagger as an old friend dagger was growing death and the two had difficulty carrying on a conversation his sight was so bad that he had trouble discerning the nuances of the paintings in Monet studio but when did I return to Paris he kept pressing forward with his own artwork despite his terrible eyesight de gAHS art had become increasingly abstract he admitted that the shift reflected as he put it not my mind but my eyes then in December of 1912 dagger gave up I no longer work I don't care I'm letting everything go it's astonishing how indifferent you become in old age Duga mercy what a state he is in he scarcely knows you he neglects his clothes he takes no interest in anything it is dreadful Mary Cassatt the end of his life is a sad story by cars he was solitary he didn't have a partner he didn't have any close family by that stage he lived in wrote virtually in isolation Dugard did little other than walk he walked the streets of Paris aimlessly alone and he did it for year after year it was it seemed his final obsession Edgard Agha died on September 27th 1917 at the age of 83 it's fortunate for him Renoir wrote any conceivable death is better than living the way he was Renoir although his body was ravaged by arthritis was still painting he would not allow his pain or discomfort to stop him [Music] he had his brush placed in his hand and he would sit in his wheelchair and work [Music] painting itself as the physical act of manipulating the staff was his lifeline just actually doing it and I think that although the fingers must have been inflexible in some ways when you look at the delicacy of some of the touches of color even in the very very last works it's perfectly clear that he had all the control he needed to paint the sort of pictures he was painting [Music] renoir suffers at times greatly he is doing the most awful pictures of enormous Lee fat red women with very small heads his friend Villard persuades him they are fine durand-ruel knows better Mary Cassatt late in 1919 Renoir had just completed his large-scale work the great bathers and turned to paint a small still life of flowers before he'd finished the still life Renoir suffered a heart attack and on December 3rd 1919 he died Pierre Auguste Renoir was 78 years old [Music] the painter Arie Matisse remembered what Renoir had once told him pain passes Renoir had said but beauty remains when was death hits me like a painful blow a part of my life vanishes with him the battles in the enthusiasms of youth and here I am the only one of the group left it is hard to carry on alone though it certainly won't be for long every day I feel age gaining on me Monet [Music] since the death of his wife in 1910 Claude Monet had painted precious few canvases any work that he attempted seemed to him only a failure and to make matters worse Monet found that he was slowly going blind it was the thought of not being able to see that made the 74 year-old Monet throw himself into what would be the biggest project of his life he dreamed of creating not just a work of art but recreating the sense and feeling of actually being in his water garden [Music] to do it he would paint on canvas panels as big as seven feet tall and 28 feet wide he would call the series they Grande Decker SEO Monet began work just as the first battles of World War one broke out in the summer of 1914 [Music] at times he could hear the sound of artillery fire in the distance My dear durand-ruel if those savages must kill me it will be in the midst of my canvases in front of my life's work mo name [Music] while others evacuated jovani monet kept painting he worked day after day year after year when the war ended in 1980 he offered to donate lagron decoration to the french state in honor of the armistice but there was a catch there's a wonderful moment where he exact sees price he's going to give them to the state but on one condition which is that they buy from him his women in the garden that had been rejected at the salon in 1867 finally in 1922 the French government agreed to pay for the once rejected work and they paid handsomely two hundred thousand francs in return Monet agreed to go through with his donation to the state but a year passed and then another and Monet refused to release the paintings he did not consider them done and he continually reworked and retouched them in 1926 Monet found that he had little energy to paint he was 86 years old and only managed a few hours of work a day September 18th 1926 my dear Clemenceau I was so much better that I thought to getting my brushes and palettes ready for work again but relapses and new pain kept me from doing so if I do not gain the strength to do my panels as I would like to I have decided to give them as they are yours more than ever Monet on December 5th 1926 with his friend georges clemenceau by his side Claude Monet died [Music] five months after his death la grande de corazon were installed permanently in the musée de la rosary in Paris [Music] but by the time Claude Monet died Impressionism was out of favor the art world had moved on in a radical new direction almost no one came to see Monet's last work at the Orangery the Impressionists artists who had ushered in unprecedented change had been forgotten early in the 1950s almost a quarter century after Claude Monet's death historians began to slowly rediscover Impressionism major museums brought Impressionists art to a new generation and Impressionism was reborn reborn nearly 100 years after Claude Monet Auguste Renoir Camille Pissarro veldt morisot and Edgar dagger first began making paintings that captured their modern moment the Impressionists defied the conservative art establishment they challenged the world to see art in a new way they freed art from the confines of what was expected [Applause] their commitment to a certain kind of vision a certain kind of language a certain kind of creation tells us a heroic story the thing that still impresses me is just how brave they were how original they were their art was tough and demanding and difficult and what they did was extraordinarily brave art that had been made in the distant past now struck a new chord reaching out across a century to engage viewers with its sense of the moment it's immediacy its beauty [Music] you

Channel: Sherway Academy of Music

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Rating: 4.8646979 out of 5

Keywords: music education, piano, guitar, violin, voice, bass, organ, TV, visual arts, transportation, history, Impressionism

Id: 0WcNKMYchwo

Length: 89min 22sec (5362 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018