Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies and Mark Rothko

Yesterday, Voice from the Couch couldn't put down the Monet and Modernism book. He had already read up on Andy Warhol and then found Mark Rothko in an earlier section. Voice had this to say... "Well of course, Rothko would be connected to Monet. This is great." Some time later, Voice let me have the book back and I was able to continue my reading on Rothko and some of his thoughts on Monet.

The reactions [of the viewers]...say unanimously my work has the power to convery anew way of looking. This message becomes visible through a new structural language they have never experienced before. In my pictures you find an unspoiled, conscious, elemental humanity. Even the pictures of Monet have something of this, which is why I prefer Monet to Cezanne... Despite the general view that Cezanne created a new way of looking at things and was the father of modern painting, I prefer Monet. Monet was the greater artist of the two. I don't agree with the current public opinion about the colorists and their art... because color in itself is among the sensory components of art.

This quote is from a conversation between Rothko and Alfred Jensen on June 17, 1953.

The two paintings above show Claude Monet's Water Lily painting from 1916 and on the right Mark Rothko's untitled, 1952 in similar yellow greens and lavenders. Rothko has taken the horizontal Monet with its visual field of waterlilies and made it vertical. Rothko carries the abstraction one more step. Take a look at the Rothko piece and you can that see his technique of taking spaces filled with color and then have them hover is very similar to the inner spaces of surface found in Monet's waterlily paintings.

And of course there is also the series aspect of Rothko's work. Much like Warhol (see yesterday's posting), Rothko is indebted to Monet for pioneering the concept of repetition, the creation of a series. A prime example of that would be his Seagram murals (see below). Originally designed for the Four Seasons the original plan was for seven – that is all the rooms the restaurant could handle. How many did Rothko produce? Not just the nine that ultimately became part of the Tate collection but 21 others for a total of 30. To see all of the Tate murals click here. There's also a curator's video at that site as well as gallery notes. The image below is of three of the murals. Voice from the Couch is making plans to see these sometime this year! Until then he plans to make frequent visits to the Portland Art Museum's Monet - Waterlilies.

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies and Andy Warhol ~ Flowers

These two images are part of one of Andy Warhol's very successful series using the flower motif. The Flowers series in 1964 was based on a photograph of hibiscus flower blossoms. Warhol saturated the large images of the flowers with intense color and put them on a verdant background. They really do seem to float off the canvas much like Monet's treatment of lilies in his pond. Warhol deeply admired Monet's waterlilies spending much time with them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So in addition to leaving the artists of the next generations the legacy of rich, varied color, Monet also introduced the 20th century art world to the concept of the series - "a systematic approach to the the subject of art and to pictorial means." His many studies of light and haystacks, cathedrals and waterlilies were the precursors to the many varied uses of a series. Some artists may present images in series so that all things are different, for others, the images are increasingly similar. Monet's Legacy Series - Order and Obsession in Hamburg in 2001 explored the connection between Monet and artists of the twentieth century. It's catalogue was intended to:

investigate the historical and cultural backgrounds against which artists began to work in series. Factors such as the advent of industrial mass production and the accompanying development of reproductive techniques will be taken into consideration, as will philosophical issues such as the notion of the whole and its parts, the individual and the collective, perception, space, movement and time.

Warhol is quoted in Monet and Modernism, another exhibition during 2002 as having said...

Most artists repeat themselves all their lives. Isn't life a repetition of the same things happening all the time? I just like doing the same thing over and over again. It's one way of expressing yourself! All of my motifs are always identical but also very different. They change wit the luminosity (of the color), with time, and with the atmosphere. Isn't life a series of motifs that change while they go on repeatin themselves?

If you listen carefully, you'll probably hear Claude Monet agreeing with those last two sentences.


Unfortunately Claude Monet's Waterlilies is the only waterlily painting owned by the Portland Art Museum. So to see a series of them in person, you'll have to travel to New York and visit the Museum of Modern Art and see all three of theirs. Or you can do a search on Google.








Voice from the Couch sat down with Monet and Modernism last night and had this to say...
"Hmmm... Warhol was born in 1928 and died in 1987.
You have to include this portrait. Those eyes in the negative will stay with you all next year."

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies and Ellsworth Kelly, Tableau Vert

This Ellsworth Kelly painting, Tableau Vert, is the first one he painted after he returned from his trip to Giverny to see Claude Monet's home. That was back in August of 1952. Kelly had just discovered that Monet had painted work after the infamous Haystack series. When Kelly arrived at Giverny, he saw a different Giverny than we see today or when Monet was still alive. After Monet's death in 1926, his house and gardens had not been kept up and had fallen into a state of disrepair. At the time Monet's stepson, Pierre Hoschede took Kelly to the studio to see the paintings that had been completed after 1900, Kelly walked into a building where pigeons were flying around. Those birds had entered through broken panes of glass. Leaves were strewn on the floor probably similar to the peanut shells at certain bars. However, the room was filled with paintings of waterlilies - about fifteen of them were over twenty feet long. Kelly describes them as "overall compositions of thickly applied oil paint representing water with lilies, no skyline. I felt that these works were impersonal statements. ... Monet's last paintings had a great influence on me, and even though my work doesn't look like his, I feel I want the spirit to be the same."

Ellsworth Kelly recently gave Tableau Vert to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. In an interview he talks of how he created it "by mixing blues and greens to echo the colors of grass underwater". Unhappy with the result when he finished it, he had set it aside until 1985. At that time he had this to say “I liked it, but perhaps that was because time had passed." Now that Tableau Vert hangs at the AIC it presents new challenges that would probably interest Monet. Like most paintings it changes colors depending upon the light that it is seen under.

Photographer Robert Hashimoto, has worked for the AIC for more than 25 years, and says that Tableau Vert has been the work that has been most difficult to shoot. Although the name of the painting translates as "green picture" it is a mottled blue-green. Hashimoto felt that to him the painting seemed almost blue when he had it in the studio. Here is how the resolution of that issue went down.

The photo proofs were made on an ink jet printer and compared with the painting in the galleries. Digital prints “metamerize” in mixed daylight and tungsten light, making the colors look strange under different wavelengths. The warm, yellow Tungsten light used in the galleries makes the painting look greener than it does in the color-balanced light of a photography studio. “Perception of color is so subjective,” Robert says, “everyone sees color differently.” After cataract surgery, Robert now sees far more intense colors than he’d seen before – particularly in the blue end of the spectrum. “That’s when I call someone in to give me a second opinion,” he says.

Monet, having had his own issues with both cataracts and myopia, certainly would have taken great interest in how the issue of light unfolded in this scenario.

If you want to see Tableau Vert in person, you'll have to travel to Chicago and visit Gallery 297 in the new Modern Wing of the AIC. Of course, Monet's Waterlilies is a bit more accessible for those of us who live here in Portland. We just need to go to the second floor of the CMCA at the Portland Art Museum.

Voice from the Couch reminded me to tell you that the photo of Ellsworth Kelly in this post is of Kelly while he was painting Tableau Vert in 1952.

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies and Irises, Favorite Flower?

Ah, two days after Christmas and it's Monet time here at Fifty Two Pieces. The piece of the week is Monet's Waterlilies. Meandering around the internet I find multiple references to Monet's favorite flower. Now most of us might think it was a waterlily. After all, that was what he painted for so many years. But some would have it that the iris was his favorite flower. The iris isn't paramount in most people's minds or museums, but there are some images on the internet.


And Voice from the Couch weighed in with this ... "Lilies, I don't remember any lilies at Giverney except those fields of them heading towards the Mediterranean".

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies

Much has been written of Claude Monet's failing eyesight and how it would have affected paintings such as the Portland Art Museum's Waterlilies painted during the period 1914-1915. As early as 1905 Monet no longer saw colors with the same intensity as he had done before. Time marched on and his perception of color continued to deteriorate. In 1912 he was diagnosed with nuclear cataracts in both eyes by a Parisian ophthalmologist. Although he finally consented to an operation on his right eye in 1923 he spent many years seeking other solutions all the while refusing surgery. He was aware of the poor results on others including Mary Cassatt. Lisel Mueller presents another view of Monet's perception of color and image.

Monet Refuses the Operation

BY LISEL MUELLER

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Monet on Christmas Day

Monet has been in my thoughts today. Primarily about light. Light from my window here in Astoria. Start with the light from the stars at 2 am. Then the moon descending across the sky until it sets and the stars became even brighter. The overall brightness of the sky increased with the sunrise and the glow of pink on the clouds. Then the sun reflected from the water and now the pink of the sunset. It's been almost the full cycle. During all of those changes I thought of Monet and his various series – the haystacks, the cathedrals, the waterlilies. I'm most grateful that the Portland Art Museum has one of Monet's Waterlilies.

And for me this particular painting is one of the best. Waterlilies has a level of abstraction that attracts me. And yet I know without looking at the title that the subject is waterlilies. How much better can that be? The color is vibrant. Some say that was because Monet's eyesight was deteriorating from cataracts and that intense hues would have appealed to him. Even without cataracts they appeal to me. Look at it closely and you can start to see fish swimming in the water. Those little circles are most definitely from fish. Ask any person who fishes and they'll tell you. Like all of the pieces of art featured here in the last year, to truly appreciate the wonders of this painting, you'll need to see it in person.

Since I'm not near the museum, on this Christmas Day my present to myself was watching the light reflected from the Columbia River here in Astoria, Oregon. Different light and different water than Monet's but light and water nonetheless.

Voice from the Couch: Nice choice of river photos. I like the verticals of the piers with the verticals from the Waterlilies.

Claude Monet ~ Waterlilies

Dateline: December 24, 2009
Today marks the first day of the last full week of Fifty Two Pieces. It's been a great year and we'll have a recap on December 31. For now though we'll move along with our piece of the week, Waterlilies by Claude Monet. Some say it's the anchor of the first floor of the CMCA at the Portland Art Museum. It certainly commands your attention as you come up the stairs. Although it's neither signed nor dated, scholars have placed it as having been created sometime between 1914-1915.

Voice from the Couch and I are headed to Astoria and will be there through Christmas. Since Voice helped select this week's piece ("why don't you do the Monet?" were the exact words), I'm certain he'll have a few pithy comments and more suggestions during the week.