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Monument, moment and memory: Monet's cathedral in fin de siècle France
 9780838756713, 0838756719

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Monument, Moment, and Memory

Monument, Moment, and Memory Monet’s Cathedral in Fin de Si`ecle France

Ronald R. Bernier

Lewisburg Bucknell University Press

© 2007 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [978-0-8387-5671-3/07 $10.00 + 8¢ pp, pc.]

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bernier, Ronald R. Monument, moment, and memory : Monet’s cathedral in fin de si`ecle France / Ronald R. Bernier. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8387-5671-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8387-5671-9 (alk. paper) 1. Monet, Claude, 1840–1926—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Cath´edrale Notre-Dame (Rouen, France)—In art. 3. Architecture in art. 4. Architecture in literature. 5. Perception. I. Title. ND553.M7B47 2007 759.4—dc22 2006103293

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

7 9

Introduction 1. The Structure of Spontaneity 2. Canvases and Careers 3. Depiction, Perception, Memory: The Critical Response 4. Writing the Gothic 5. The Poetry of Architecture Afterword Notes Bibliography Index

13 18 32 48 63 80 90 93 105 111

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Illustrations BLACK AND WHITE Figure 1: Claude Monet, Les Bains de la Grenouillère, 1869 29 Figure 2: Claude Monet, View of Rouen, 1883 33 Figure 3: Camille Pissarro, L’Ile Lacroix, Rouen (The Effect of Fog), 1888 Figure 4: Camille Pissarro, Pont Boieldieu in Rouen, Damp Weather, 1896 Figure 5: Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, c.1910–14 65 Figure 6: Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, c.1910–14 66

35 36

COLOR These appear after page 32 Plate 1: Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873–72 Plate 2: Claude Monet, Paris, rue St. Denis: Celebration of June 30, 1878, 1878 Plate 3: Claude Monet, General view of Rouen, 1892 Plate 4: Camille Pissarro, Rue de l’Épicerie, Rouen, 1898 Plate 5: Claude Monet, Rue de l’Épicerie à Rouen, 1892 Plate 6: Claude Monet, Cathedral at Rouen (La Cour d’Albane), 1892–94 Plate 7: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral. Harmony in Brown, 1893–94 Plate 8: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight, 1894 These appear after page 64 Plate 9: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (in Sun), 1894 Plate 10: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, morning, white harmony, 1894 Plate 11: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral Façade and Tour d’Albane (Morning Effect), 1894 Plate 12: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, 1894 Plate 13: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, The Façade in Sunlight, 1894 Plate 14: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, Façade, 1894 Plate 15: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, morning sun, blue harmony, 1893 Plate 16: Claude Monet, Water Lilies; oil on canvas; 1910.26

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Acknowledgments OVER THE YEARS, A NUMBER OF PEOPLE HAVE GENEROUSLY AIDED ME IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THIS project. I would like to thank them for their support. I am particularly grateful to Professor Michael Podro for his many readings throughout its long gestation and for his thorough and insightful comments both on its central arguments and on details of rhetoric; above all, I thank him for his continued encouragement, counsel, and friendship. I owe a great deal as well to the teaching and research of professors Podro, Thomas Puttfarken, and Margaret Iversen of Essex University in England where this book began as a doctoral dissertation; their work has done much over the years to inform and hone my own thinking about art. I also owe a debt of thanks to Greg Clingham, Director, Bucknell University Press, for his interest and support in seeing this project through. I am also obliged to Bucknell’s reader, who diligently worked to improve my account by offering carefully considered criticism and suggestions for improvement, and to Julien Yoseloff and Beth Anne Stuebe at Associated University Presses for producing a well-designed book. Thanks also go to Brittany Kramer for her assistance with indexing. For generously underwriting its beautiful color reproductions—and for his support overall—I thank Darin E. Fields, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Wilkes University. Finally, I must give special thanks to my parents, Ralph L. and Theresa L. Bernier, to whom this book is dedicated; their steadfast support, encouragement, and faith helped to make the realization of this book possible.

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Monument, Moment, and Memory

Introduction a vast symphony in stone . . . the colossal product of the combination of all the force of the age; in which the fancy of the workman, chastened by the genius of the artist, is seen starting forth in a hundred forms upon every stone; in short, a sort of human Creation, mighty and fertile as the Divine Creation, from which it seems to have borrowed the twofold character of variety and eternity. —Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)

FOLLOWING THE TREMENDOUS CRITICAL SUCCESS OF MONET’S GRAINSTACKS AND POPLARS EXHIBITIONS of the early 1890s, a mode of painting that captured transience had come to be seen as an appropriate, and characteristically Impressionist, means of depicting its subject, when that subject was understood to be our variable perception in nature. The language of critical description— spontanéité, instantanéité, l’éphemère—confirmed that appropriateness. A critical understanding of “instantaneity” meant recognition of the ability of a particular depicting procedure to register and mime the mobility and instability of our perceptions of the visible world, of nature. Critics had learned to incorporate in that term a sense of the illusion of temporal brevity in nature seen within a painting procedure that suggests perceptual immediacy—a Baudelairean privileging of the transitory, the ephemeral, the provisional. In May 1895, however, Monet placed the notion of the painting of transience in the radically different and difficult context of the immutable façade of a Gothic cathedral. This provoked strong opinion. It was calculated to do so. The critical discourse and its complex negotiations—aesthetic, philosophical, and literary—with the images that elicited it, is the subject of this book. 





Struck by the unusual choice of an invariant—nonnatural—architectural structure as subject matter, critics, by now used to talking about “instantaneity,” continued to focus on the issue of temporality in their commentary, and that theme was addressed in two distinct but significantly related ways. First, there was the matter of perception—the temporality that is involved in engaging visually with the layered surfaces of individual canvases, the optical density of loaded impasto calling to mind through the procedures of painting the dense and layered complexity of our “momentary” perception. Then, there was the temporality involved in the real historical character of the motif itself, a sense of the persistence of memory embedded in the medieval edifice and the significations of heritage and nation in its representation. The first topic is addressed in the first half of this study, the other in the second. For the critics of Monet’s Rouen Cathedrals project in 1895, then, temporality was bound up with both depiction and its subject, with—in Hugo’s words—“variety” and “eternity.” For the painter, time in perception finds its fitting subject in the ancient monument. Unlike Monet’s earlier production of pictures which, as I will argue in chapter one, affected a sense of momentariness through a painting procedure that assumed the look of improvisatory execution, now the surfaces of Monet’s canvases were densely compacted, each canvas sustaining the appearance of long and calculated efforts of painting, cumulatively suggesting the palimpsestlike nature of extended perception. For the viewer, the endlessly shifting delineations of facture 13

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prompt a continuous alteration in our perception of forms, an awareness of the build-up and overlap of successive stages of the painted image. Chapter two examines, in considerable detail, the complexity of this depicting procedure in the Rouens, a procedure which captures a sense of features gradually appearing to our perceptual awareness, where features or aspects of the depiction are initially unnoticed and thus, in one sense, absent from our “momentary” view, yet always within the background of that experiential moment, within the storehouse of memory. It is the exercise of this perception that critics struggled to describe in 1895; this is the topic of chapter three. The issue of temporality in perception will be elaborated here in the context of the philosopher Henri Bergson, theorist of the primordiality of experiential time, and his concept of la durée in consciousness— conscious states and human perception understood not as a sequence of successive, isolated, and discreet moments, but as a multiplicity continually unfolding in the ceaseless and seamless flow of “duration,” building the past—memory—into the experiences of the present. Within this theoretical framework, then, it will be possible to consider Monet’s Rouen Cathedrals as achieving the pictorial equivalence of the temporal character of reality as duration rather than as instantaneity. That this theoretical position is not remote to an examination of painting in the 1890s will be illustrated by a discussion in chapter five of contemporary Symbolist aesthetic theory which was concerned with the distinction between the visual simultaneity of perception in painting and the temporal unfolding of comprehension in poetry. Conventionally, it had always been the absence of experiential duration and temporal sequence in visual representation that distinguished “figure”— synchronic immediacy and simultaneity in perception—from “discourse” and the temporality of language, its cumulative power and narrative, diachronic task. Monet’s Rouen series will be located within the undoing of these rigid aesthetic-conceptual categories, an undoing that was central to the Symbolist project. Moreover, the analogy with poetry was itself a recurring trope in the critical commentary on Monet’s serial images of the 1890s, and the painter was increasingly incorporated during these years into the sophisticated discourse of literary Symbolism. Much of the criticism in 1895, in fact, saw Monet’s depicting procedure as analogous to the recondite language of Symbolist poetry. Poetry in this sense was taken to be an appropriate analogue, in the Mallarméan sense, of the unusual use of language in description, wherein the subject of depiction is less immediately and concretely available to perception and only more gradually and evocatively suggested. While accounts of Monet’s art have addressed the commentary surrounding this unique group of canvases in 1895, curiously little has been made of the real historical implications and symbolic associations of the Gothic as cultural phenomenon in fin de siècle France. 1 Nineteenth-century attitudes to Gothic architecture, both public and personal, were various, and the expressive potential of the image of a cathedral wide open to artists—romantic and escapist nostalgia, picturesque disorder, sublime irrationality, nationalistic pride, and political agency. “Rediscoveries” of the Middle Ages took on various permutations in French literature and the visual arts in the second half of the century, and in particular in the French Gothic (and Catholic) revival of the 1880s and 1890s, 2 a discourse to which Monet himself is but one of many contributors. It is within this nexus of “histories” that I wish to situate Monet’s Rouen. It will be necessary, then, in my account of the paintings and their reception, to broaden the scope of the discussion to include the wider discourse on medievalism and to position Monet’s production of “the Gothic” within this complex gathering of meanings about memory, history, and the temporality of perception for artists, writers, and critical commentators at this time. Chapter four will explore these texts and how Monet’s pictures are refracted through them, beginning with a close examination of Auguste Rodin’s Les Cathédrales de France, an assemblage of drawings, watercolors, and written reflections on French Gothic architecture. Also to be considered in this chapter (in less detail) will be Auguste Renoir’s utopic writing on the moral superiority of medieval architecture and its collaborative fraternities of craftsmen; Emile Zola’s fantasy novel of medieval symbol and allegory, Le Rêve, published in 1888, which takes as its central player a Gothic cathedral; Joris-Karl Huysmans’s narrative of the vast exegesis of Christian faith found in the iconography of Chartres, La Cathédrale, published in 1898,

INTRODUCTION

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the same year as art historian Emile Mâle’s influential L’Art réligieux du XIIIe siècle; Marcel Proust on the nationalization of ecclesiastical property following the intense political struggle between church and state; and, finally, those who wrote of Monet’s exhibition in 1895, the critics themselves, and their own preoccupations regarding the signifying potential of the Gothic. 





In an article entitled Cathédrale, published in 1866, the nineteenth-century architect and restorer, Viollet-le-Duc, remarked, “To be sure, those cathedrals were religious monuments, but they were also national edifices, . . . the symbol of French nationality, the first and most powerful attempt to achieve unity.” 3 In a more contemporary context, and a useful model to approach this theme, is the historian Pierre Nora’s notion of the lieu de mémoire, or realm of memory, a multivalent construct to articulate the narratives of memory realized through representations—imaginary, historical, and symbolic—of French social and cultural identity. 4 Monet’s pictures and the response to them, as well as the broader discourse on the Gothic in which both are situated, will, in this sense, be viewed as an act of memory, a site of remembering the past through the lens—and as a function—of the present, open to the full range of possible significations. “Memory,” Nora argues: is always a phenomenon of the present, a bond tying us to the eternal present . . . Memory, being a phenomenon of emotion and magic, accommodates only those facts that suit it. It thrives on vague, telescoping reminiscences, on hazy general impressions or specific symbolic details. It is vulnerable to transferences, screen memories, censorings, and projections of all kinds . . . Memory situates remembrance in a sacred context . . . memory is by nature multiple yet specific; collective and plural yet individual . . . Memory is rooted in the concrete: in space, gesture, image, and object. 5

It speaks to the enduring significance and resonance of Monet’s achievement in the Rouen Cathedral series that, two decades after their completion, in November 1917, near the end of World War I, the French government commissioned the painter, at an astonishing fee of 10,000 francs, to paint Reims Cathedral, for which official authorization had to be secured for the painter to make the journey to that ravaged city during travel-restricted wartime. 6 From September 1914 to October 1918, the cathedral at Reims suffered brutal and devastating bombardment from German artillery. Numerous publications, accompanied by photographs of the wreckage, influenced emotion and nationalist public opinion on this subject, and a general exhortation to “never forget.” Emile Mâle, describing his country’s mourning in 1917, wrote: “When France learned that the cathedral of Reims was in flames, every heart was stricken. Those who cried for a son found fresh tears for the saintly church.” 7 And in 1921 echoing these sentiments in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, he wrote again: “I have seen the cathedral of Reims after its most recent injuries: a phantom church in the middle of a phantom city. At first, the charred cathedral, covered with deep wounds, was horrifying . . . [T]he cathedral resembled a martyr who had just endured agonies that his torturers had not been able to complete.” 8 Moreover, Marcel Proust, in 1919, in a reprint of his earlier essay, “La Mort des Cathédrales”— originally in 1904 a manifesto against the loss of the Gothic cathedral’s symbolic liturgical significance in its secularization by the State—now mourned its physical destruction in WWI. “When I discussed the death of cathedrals, I feared that France would be transformed into a shore where giant chisled conches seemed to have run aground, emptied of the life that inhabited them and no longer bringing to an attentive ear the distant murmur of the past, simply museum objects, themselves frozen. Ten years have passed, ‘the death of cathedrals’ is the destruction of their stones by the German armies, not that of their spirit by an anticlerical Chamber that is now united as one with our patriotic bishops.” 9 And not insignificantly, Herbert Read, in his preface to the English edition of Rodin’s The Cathedrals of France, remarks that Rodin, writing before the advent of World War I, could even then bemoan an insensitivity of the modern world toward the monuments of its historical past. “No

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one,” Rodin had written, “defends our Cathedrals.” “What would he have said,” Read wonders of the sculptor, “if he had known that within the next thirty years some of his most beloved edifices would twice fall within the range of a devastating war? In a few hours the guns and bombs of the opposed armies had done more damage to Amiens, Soissons, and Reims than five centuries of neglect.” 10 Even Monet himself, in early 1915, lent his well-respected name and the weight it carried, along with those of Bonnard, Matisse, Signac and others, in support of a publication entitled Les Allemands déstructeurs des cathedrals et des trésors du passé. 11 The threads of nationalism, spiritualism, and remembrance, it seems, are woven into the very fabric of the Gothic cathedral. Monet’s Reims, unfortunately, was never painted. It is significant, however, that during a time of political turbulence, public upheaval, and national crisis, the Gothic cathedral is invoked as a symbol of stability and tradition, the ultimate symbol of both nation and faith, a living symbol of France. Such a noteworthy official commission for a painting, depicting what was then taken to be one of the finest examples of French Gothic construction and an ancient seat of coronation, to be undertaken by one of France’s most renowned living artists, was surely a strategic appeal by the state to public sentiment and patriotism, where such a picture would stand as emblematic for the resuscitation of national spirit by invoking the past. At a moment when history—the actuality of war—besieges memory and threatens to erase it, commemorative vigilance is paramount. It is surely this sense of painting as cultural memory that Georges Clemenceau, radical Republican nationalist senator and later prime minister, had in mind when, on the front page of his newspaper La Justice on May 20, 1895, in an article entitled “La revolution des cathédrales,” he called upon the newly elected President of France, Félix Faure, along with Vice-President Raymond Poincaré and Minister of Fine Arts Henri Roujon, to purchase, in its entirety, the Rouen Cathedral series for the nation: And you, Félix Faure . . . you who rule graciously in Mme. De Pompadour’s [palace] with Roujon and Poincaré at your side to guide you in your art appreciation, I have read that you have made I-don’t-knowwhat personal purchases at I-don’t-know-what art market; that’s your business. But you aren’t just Félix Faure, you are the president of the Republic, and the French Republic at that. It’s in this title, obviously, that you went the other day to visit Napoleon’s night table, as if it were there that the great man had left his genius. How could you not have had, instead, the idea of going to look at the work of one of our contemporaries on whose account France will be celebrated throughout the world long after your name will have fallen into oblivion? What did Poincaré do, what did Roujon say? Don’t awaken those good sleepers; and because there is in you a bit of fancy, go and look at this series of cathedrals, as the good bourgeois that you are, without asking anyone’s opinion. Perhaps you might understand and, remembering that you represent France, perhaps you will consider endowing France with those twenty paintings that, together, represent a moment for art. 12

Alas, his plea went unheeded and the series was forever dispersed. Twelve years later, however, in 1907, now in his role as prime minister, Clemenceau succeeded in convincing the French national museums to purchase its first painting by its famous native son—a Rouen Cathedral. 13 





Finally a word on the premises of my argument. Chapter one takes up the material of Monet’s earliest critics, from 1874 to roughly 1883, the period during which the discourse of Impressionism—its canvases, critics, and careers—takes shape. This may at first seem remote to a study that purports to be about a circumscribed group of paintings at a specific moment in 1895. However, the critical issues and themes formulated in those years—depicting procedure and its complex negotiations with subject matter; the implications of temporality in Monet’s painting; and the analogies with language to account for both painting and perception—are central to an understanding of Monet’s achievement in the Rouens. Thus we begin with the much discussed “sketch-finish” distinction as it is invoked by Monet’s early commentators as a measure of judging the painter’s success or failure. Their’s was an argument about “incompleteness,” about what was perceived as the dis-

INTRODUCTION

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junctive relation between painted mark and depicted object that involved an implicit standard of “verisimilitude.” Examination of the language of the critical response will show how the absence of immediate resolvability of paint-into-subject gradually leads to shifts in the notion of “reality” or “truth to nature” as an evaluative critical standard. Irresolvability of painting procedure eventually comes to stand for transitoriness of subject matter, and implicitly for instability in our perception. And capturing this mobility of our perception in nature is what comes to be identified as Monet’s famed “instantaneity.” What I will argue for in this chapter is that the picture beholder, no longer able to take for granted the relation of subject matter to paint, is forced to attend with uncommon alertness to the very difficulty posed by the painting procedure itself in order that his perception might be more replete; he must, in other words, pick out and resolve ambiguous configurations in paint, which interrupts and slows his ordinary and most immediate response to the subject while elaborating and extending his imaginary involvement with it. The Rouen Cathedrals pivot on this understanding of temporality in perception. It has been argued that the achievement in Monet’s later series painting lay in “overcoming the limitations of the pictorial instant.” 14 Yet the earlier pictures, I am arguing, those which evoked the instability already inherent in the “instant” of nature, had precipitated this. There is more of a continuity, then, between the earlier pictures and the series painting—and in particular the Rouen Cathedrals—than is typically acknowledged. George Heard Hamilton, in his exemplary essay on the Cathedrals published in 1960, is alone in hinting at this significance: “the instant had come to count less as a chronological moment and more as an extended perceptual experience reaching more widely through time and more deeply, so to speak, into the psychological structure of life.” 15 The aim of this book is to trace the framework in which Monet worked on the Rouen Cathedrals and in which he was discussed. It will rely as much on text as on image; yet my intention is not simply an archaeology of the contemporary criticism toward some general strategy of recontextualization. The intellectual commitments underlying this study do not include a view of criticism as primarily a function of artistic practice, a “response” ultimately determined, exclusively and unconditionally, by the work of art itself. Rather, the belief here is that critical writing is itself a construct having commitments and assumptions that may often be external to the pictures being addressed. Thus, I do not approach the written evidence of archives as standing in an unproblematic relation to the pictures which elicit it, as if that writing were somehow a coherent and unified index of “meaning.” What this book is fundamentally concerned to do is submit the critical literature, like the pictures themselves, to comprehensive analysis. And this involves close scrutiny of the theoretical premises and judgmental criteria that underpin what critics say, and checking for their appropriateness with respect to the pictures. So, it is not a straightforward relation between the two practices— painting and the response to it—that will be at issue here. My hope is that this book will offer not only a more critical and comprehensive insight into a certain body of images, but also a more interdiscursive approach to the visual in general, an examination into the multiple relations and dependencies between the two cultural practices of viewing and writing and how they are mutually illuminating, 16 and, ultimately, how the critical, the literary, the philosophical, and the pictorial converge to establish Monet’s Cathedral. 17

1 The Structure of Spontaneity I’m becoming so slow in my work that it makes me despair, but the further I go, the more I see that it takes a great deal of work to render what I’m after:‘instantaneity’ . . . and I’m more than ever disgusted with things that come easily, at the first attempt. —Monet, in a letter to Gustave Geffroy, October 7, 1890

DISCUSSION OF MONET’S ART HAS ALWAYS TURNED ON A CENTRAL NOTION OF “FIDELITY TO NATURE,” and that debate has endlessly shuffled the antagonistic terms of ébauche and tableau—the preliminary sketch versus the finished picture. 1 Throughout the critical discourse during the painter’s career, “reality” or “fidelity to nature” consistently stood as the assumed but unspecifiable standard by which evaluations of his work were made and by which he was judged successful or unsuccessful. The notion itself, however, was variable and always linked to the changing demands and expectations of pictorial seeing. The kind of reality a public was willing to accept always depended upon the kind of painting procedure it found convincing. From around the 1890s onwards, the term tache, used in contemporary critical commentary, referred descriptively to the non-naturalistic rhetorical device in Monet’s pictures, shed of its earlier and original negative connotation. And during the 1880s phrases like procédé de la tache were often used in Monet’s defense by sympathetic critics as an account of an advance in representational faithfulness to nature by directing attention toward fleeting appearances rather than fixed transcriptions. But by the earlier use of such words and phrases which focus attention on the insistent materiality of a painting procedure, critics meant something different—they meant an illegibility and imprecision and an ineffectiveness in painting believable illusionism. The terminology is constant, the connotations shifting. 2 It is the earliest of these critical responses that concerns us in this introductory discussion, relating the language of critical description to generalized notions of “truth to nature” implicitly held by those writers approaching Monet’s canvases in the 1870s and 1880s—in other words, the implied relation between, on the one hand, an unusual depicting procedure and, on the other, a centrally but unstably held notion of a “reality” which is appropriate for depiction. There are two things that come under scrutiny here: the representational norms and expectations implicit in a particular depicting procedure against which shifts in technique are measured, judged, and described; and the structure of assumptions, references, and judgmental criteria that underlie its contemporary critical institution. Typical in this regard are remarks of critic Charles Bigot, who in 1876 wrote, “Art requires retouching and finishing up . . . ; for an artist an esquisse is not a tableau . . . The new school suppresses the tableau, dispenses with work and offers the ébauche for public admiration.” 3 The issue is the consistency and stability of Monet’s earliest critics who were disturbed by a sense of the inachevé. It is a question of “finish,” the standard measure of finish being a picture’s ability to create and sustain complex illusion. For Monet’s critics the problem was one of a demand for certainty, resolvability, and visual clarity in what was depicted and an incomprehension prompted by the pictures themselves through their seemingly insubstantial, because unresolvable, form. The debate over the status of Monet’s pictures as either ébauches or tableaux needs to be read, then, as a confusion about the relation between subject matter and painting procedure. 18

1 : THE STRUCTURE OF SPONTANEITY

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A MATTER OF FACTURE Confusion is apparent from the outset of Monet’s public career in the very language critics use to make sense of the pictures they are reviewing. It is appropriate, then, to begin with the well-known and much-quoted passage by the hostile critic Louis Leroy which appeared in Le Charivari on April 25, 1874, in response to the opening of the first Impressionist Exhibition on the sixteenth of that month. Leroy’s mocking review takes the form of a fictional dialogue, set in the exhibition itself, between a horrified and incredulous (fictional) academic landscape painter (a monsieur Vincent) and Leroy himself as conciliator. Here he is referring specifically to Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines of 1873 (Plate 1). Unfortunately, I was imprudent enough to leave him too long in front of the Boulevard des Capucines . . . “Ah-ha!” he sneered in Mephistophelian manner. “Is that brilliant enough, now! There’s impression, or I don’t know what it means. Only, be so good as to tell me what those innumerable black tongue-lickings in the lower part of the picture represent?” “Why, those are people walking along,” I replied. “Then do I look like that when I’m walking along the boulevard des Capucines? Blood and thunder! So you’re making fun of me at last?” “I assure you, M. Vincent . . .” “But those spots were obtained by the same method as that used to imitate marble: a bit here, a bit there, slapdash, any old way. It’s unheard of, appalling! I’ll get a stroke from it, for sure.” 4

Leroy puts an emphasis on “touch,” an unusual application of paint, and its descriptive link with the depicted subject. “M. Vincent’s” horror is at the lack of resemblance, or correspondence, between a mark of black paint on the canvas and what should be read as a human figure. A conventional understanding of “truth to nature” here clearly requires the filtering out of a sense of the medium from a recognition of the represented subject. The critic seems concerned only with paint’s descriptive force, not with its own materiality, although that is what his prose most effectively describes. What he responds to is a broken brushstroke pervading the canvas, but he is unwilling to consider it as effecting any new relation to what it aims to depict. He holds up the procedure of Monet’s painting for critical attention, or rather he is arrested by it, as preventing or disrupting his response to nature, and in turn holds that Monet’s procedure exhibits inadequate attention on the part of the painter, and results in something left unfinished—“finish” having to do with a process of attention to the subject in making the picture, and one which allows the procedure to be forgotten. Four days after Leroy’s infamously scathing review in 1874, another hostile critic, Emile Cardon, writing in La Press, similarly reports on the disruptive effect Monet’s procedure of painting had on the viewer’s—that is to say, his own—capacity for recognition of its subject. Following Leroy, he remarks on an easy and haphazard facture, an ease of execution—a lack of attentiveness on the part of the painter to his subject. And he accounts for this depicting procedure—“frottez,” “piquez,” “salissez,” “barbouillez,” “flanquer”—as a “smattering” or “rubbing,” a “smearing” and “hurling,” “flinging,” or “jabbing” 5 — all vivid descriptions of random (unthinking) gestures which, again, impede or resist his own familiar response to what he, nevertheless, already knows the picture to represent. Also reviewing the exhibition that same day from a mixed but generally more favorable position, Jules-Antoine Castagnary follows up this definition of “impressionnisme”—a relation of approximation between a mode of pictorial registration and the thing it aims to depict—as something instinctively or intuitively grasped and thereby resulting in something left at the stage of ébauche. And attendant to this sense of incompleteness in the painting procedure is a willful disregard for any measure of objective truth to nature.

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. . . the end result is an unbridled romanticism, where nature is nothing more than a pretext for reverie, and where the imagination is incapable of formulating anything but personal, subjective fantasies, without echo in general reason, because it is out of control and without possible verification in reality. 6

“Impression,” then, was a critical term used to refer to what was felt to be an incongruous and irrational relation between the painter’s mark and the object he sees—what Heinrich Wölfflin was later to define as a “bewildering alienation of the sign from the thing,” 7 and Meyer Schapiro, still later, to celebrate as the “non-mimetic aspect” of the “image-sign.” 8 Defining line, clarifying a sense of volume, shape, and spatial relations of objects, and an organizing composition where objects and figures are presented so that they are clearly readable in an explicit sequence of planes: these were the missing elements that constituted a rational and disciplined convention though which the painter could harness his vision into a universally convincing, verifiable, and recognizable form—a form which would have its “echo in general reason.” But even when recognition of the subject is accessible—and it almost always is—that recognition, in effect, does not exhaust the critics’ attentiveness to the medium. This insistence on the sensuous character of Monet’s painting curtailed their looking at the painting simply for what it depicted. This point is made most eloquently, I think, in the often-quoted remarks of Ernest Chesneau also writing that year; he, too, singles out for special attention Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines. Never has the great animation of the public thoroughfare, the bustling of the crowd on the pavements and the cars in the street, the agitation of the trees on the boulevard in shadow and light; never has the elusive, fugitive, instantaneity of movement been seized and registered with such tremendous fluidity, as it is in this extraordinary ébauche that M. Monet has labeled Boulevard des Capucines. At a distance, this teeming life, this shimmering of light and shadow, we hail a masterpiece. But come closer and it all vanishes, there remains only an indecipherable chaos of palette scrapings. 9

Chesneau gives a remarkably accurate account of the visual qualities of the “indecipherable,” the “fugitive” and the “instantaneous” as functions of what Leroy had termed “innombrables lichettes noires” and “taches.” What disturbed these critics was the fact that Monet’s “lichettes” never became wholly “lichettes” nor wholly figures. Chesneau goes on to say of this “chaos of indecipherable palette scrapings”: “Obviously, this is not the last word in art, nor even of this art. It is necessary to go on and to transform a sketch into a finished picture.” 10 Monet’s broken facture of color-marks, however much responsible for admirable visual effects, was consistently deemed inadequate in terms of paint’s descriptive force and role. The critics remained locked in an inability to negotiate between the language of procedure—what in the relevant sense appreciated what the paint was doing—and their own expectations of what should be achieved in painting. But we can see that the criticism itself, what gets said, incorporates a sense of seeing—seeing both the subject in the paint and the painting procedure as controlling and modifying their sense of that subject. Critics were faced with the problem of how to deal with the mode of representation which this kind of painting offered, and their efforts to explain that mode of representation were in negative terms: an inadequate perception of the object in nature, a distortion of nature. What they saw as an autonomous vocabulary of color and stroke which is able to effect depiction is described in terms of a certain falseness, a sketch-like pictorial syntax that fails to present convincingly the visual experience of an object in a way which conforms to that artistic norm that was still identified with verisimilitude. The criticism—to put it another way—consistently centered around the question of reality and its painted depiction, and the sketch-like quality of Monet’s work was accused of a lack of verisimilitude, of explicit and convincing illusionism, or fidelity to nature. The dilemma for critics was what to make of pictures that appeared to eliminate precisely those devices that had always constituted the very basis of illusionism in painting—convincing spatial relations between objects marked by changes in scale, overlap of one form by another, relative degrees of clarity and focus,

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smooth scale of tonal variation in color and gradation in modeling—by which, it was felt, the world was given density and credibility in confirming the “look” of things. The dominant effect of painting which does this is its easy and reassuring legibility. It is a way of using painting to observe, examine, and mark down a “real” presence, to provide pictorially an experience of nature that nature itself could have provided, and to offer an account and confirmation of the look of the world. “Fidelity to nature” or “reality” in painting meant the picture—truthfully—“looking like” that which it depicts, and Monet’s canvases seem to fail on even this most basic level of critical criteria. Louis Enault’s remarks in 1876 make this especially clear: “I don’t know where he has seen the landscapes he paints, but I cannot believe he has found them in nature.” 11 By 1877 and the third exhibition of the Impressionist Group, Monet seemed to fare only slightly better with the critics in this respect. Paul Mantz, art critic for the influential daily newspaper Le Temps, is worried about Impressionism’s disagreeable facture of “abbreviation”, although—again typical of the response to Monet’s art around this time—he prefaces his charge against the inachevé with an enthusiastic and sympathetic account of the visual aspects of the world it depicts and of the genuine sincerity and sensibility he believes Monet to have brought to his pictures. Interestingly, he begins by invoking the official and superior version of variable visual effects registered by painterly inachevé by citing Corot, one suspects as sanction for his own grudging admiration for this kind of painting and the demands it makes on the imaginative activity of the spectator who attends appropriately to it. Corot—the first impressionist of them all—has achieved marvelous precision and clarity with only a few strokes of the brush. Here, unfinish [inachevé ] has an exceptional charm . . . Nothing is specified, but the character of the whole is seized, and it’s easy enough for the spectator to complete or imagine the missing detail . . . This is the golden age of impressionism . . . The impressionists today are far too complicated. It takes tremendous effort and one must be terribly discerning to understand their simplicity

And with equivocation he continues: In theory, the impressionist is a sincere artist who breaks with academic tradition, with its fashionable refinements, and translates nature with direct frankness. The representation of this spectacle, then, necessitates the elimination of detail . . . Three or four touches will have to do to register the fleeting image. The artist has to be content with the approximation, and, if he has talent and a quick hand, his abbreviations will be eloquent. 12

Like the others, he is unable fully to integrate this seemingly pleasurable experience in front of the canvases with his conception of what should count as a finished picture. He goes on to account for Monet’s painting as absolutely lacking a “feeling for reality,” in effect reiterating the ébauche-tableau dichotomy in response to his own critical inability to make sense of what he keenly feels to be a new relation obtaining between “touch” and “subject.” In a similar vein, Roger Ballu, inspector of the fine arts, had already passed his official view on Monet’s pictures as rendered in “vague outline” and exaggerated taches of color randomly “placed one next to the other, blended and blurred,” without “taking the time to analyze”—to refine, to order—“the spectacle in front of him,” to generalize from the wealth and matter of experience and reproduce on his canvas more than the apparent disorder he finds there. Monet takes in all of it indiscriminately, the ensemble, and, according to Ballu, it is this manifold that he proposes to reproduce on his canvas as “complete confusion,” 13 apparently in utter disregard for its intelligibility for his audience. One anonymous critic in 1876 succinctly summed up this problem of putting “the plough before the ox” 14—a problem of not acknowledging and not securing in representation the established order of things. A critical awareness about and insistence upon the structuring activity of the painter’s mind over the compositional features of a work, ensuring logicality and clarity over fragmentation and

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disorder in the viewer’s perception, had long been well established in classical aesthetic theory. Contemplation of descriptions of nature in painting had always been a highly determined visual operation which involved not only recognition of objects depicted, but also an implied awareness of an imposed compositional structure in which those objects described bore a systematic and synoptic relationship to one another, and through which the beholder’s visual interrogation of the depicted scene was encouraged and sustained: in other words, our “reading” of the picture’s subject, and hence the impression of order in our visual perception, is achieved through our following its composition, being led from one area of the canvas to another gradually and sequentially. It is a basic formula for the construction and articulation of pictorial space that invites extended perusal of an anecdotal or narrative character, and this involves the picture plane being firmly located at a fixed distance from the beholder, who has a secure foothold and an unchanging viewing position. For Monet’s critics, vision in his art is without such guidance—that is, the painter has failed to establish order or the consequentiality of thought in the sequence of our perceptions, which for critics like Ballu is not only necessary for our understanding of the picture’s subject, but is the basic condition of our rational understanding—it “echoes” the clarity and logicality of our “general reason.” Interestingly, about a fortnight after Ballu’s remarks, Marc de Montifaud (pseudonym for Marie-Amélie Chartroule) described this publicly held notion about the incompleteness of the Impressionists’ method as an inability, not so much on the part of the painter but on that of the bourgeois art-going public, to negotiate between a kind of painting procedure evident in Monet’s pictures and the recognition of a depicted subject as conventionally—and logically—understood. The critic writes: What is an intransigent? It is an impressionist who doesn’t compromise with the old bourgeois need to see everything clearly and without confusion and with his horror at puzzles . . . The bourgeois is absolutely insensitive to the charm of mystery, to the seduction of the vague and indistict, of inachevé. It will never understand that a sketch can be more interesting than a finished picture. 15

In 1879 and the fourth Impressionist Exhibition, Monet had twenty-nine canvases on view, two of which attracted particular attention and reaction: Rue Montorgueil: Celebration of 30 June 1878 (1878) and Rue Saint-Denis: Celebration of 30 June 1878, (1878, Plate 2), two views of Paris streets decorated with flags and bunting for the inaugural national holiday, the Fête de la Paix, and in celebration of the Worlds Fair that had opened in the spring of 1878. 16 A remarkably evocative description of Monet’s two Fête de Drapeaux appeared in La Vie moderne on April 24, by the critic Armand Silvestre, who attends to the “swarming multitudes beneath the banners,” and the way “the wind buffets them along in the sunlight . . . like a tempest pelting a ship with sails of the tricolor!” 17 Here the critic’s attention to painterly pattern doesn’t work against his interest in the subject depicted by it; rather, his attending to the tumultuous and turbulent bursts of color and frenetic movement of street festivals depends upon his attending to the modifying power of the painting procedure. The critic is responding to the reciprocal relation between the painting rhythm and the rhythm of the subject, that is, to the way in which the procedure of laying on paint in broad and quick slabs, sweeps, and thrusts recurs in the painting as thematic and gives actual substance and structure to what is relevant within the subject matter. Objects dissolve, and an increasingly effusive shorthand conveys, through the commotion of color and rapid brushstroke, something of the synaesthetic character of the scene itself. We are made to conceive of the medium as itself having qualities and features which project themselves into the look of the subject. And that subject is transformed, summarized in such a way that it offers simultaneous and incompatible areas of focus, or varying and self-multiplying perspectives. Monet here contrives an elliptical and eliminatory manner of painting, exploiting our temporary inability to attach a given mark of color to an identifiable shape or form. The thing depicted and the depicting procedure—subject and painting—are experienced as interdependent. It is only from this kind of subject, one which takes on flux and ambiguity as part

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of its character, that Monet can accommodate a certain method of painting which will continually adapt itself to allow the viewer’s sense of that subject continually to revise itself. This is effectively what the critic describes. But, despite his “infinite liking,” he still concludes that “nothing in all of this has the authority of reality.” 18 Echoing other critics, there is the lingering disapproval of a sketchlike technique which failed to present convincingly the visual experience of a subject in a way that conformed to what, in his view, should be achieved in painting. And that, still, was identified with verisimilitude.

THE “LANGUAGE” OF THE SKETCH “Incompleteness” as a verdict on a picture, however, cannot, it seems, simply equate with, say, “incomprehension,” as that inability to comprehend is a response on the part of the critic, the observer, in a special use of his perception. Assuming painting to be understood as a form of response mediating between the painter and the situation he encounters, and the topic here to be critical commentary, the question remains how the painter’s responsiveness is defined by the critics: in what sense did these critics hold that that responsiveness, manifest in the painting, is incomplete? One way they tried to think about the pictures was in terms of language. C. Dargenty, writing for Le Courrier de l’art in 1883, put it this way: “if the art of constructing and setting up a composition is an important feature in the faithful representation of nature, M. Monet is no more than a gifted child who stammers in a charming manner bits and pieces of harmonious phrases that his ear has snatched in mid-flight but which his mind is incapable of stitching together.” 19 There is more at stake here than an objection to a lack of resemblance between signifying mark and object signified. To describe a sketchily “incomplete” painting procedure as “inarticulate” is to see it as without the structure, stability, and coherence—that is, without the kind of intelligibility— that it was believed language guarantees. What disturbed these critics was that a sketchlike pictorial syntax, in obstructing verismilitude, deprived the viewer of semantic completion, of stable and undemanding access to the depicted subject, and forced an indecipherability of a re-presented world. Incompleteness in painting was seen as like verbal incoherence, and so painting of this kind as an instance of failure in language to communicate effectively and unambiguously. The metaphor of spoken language to describe a painting procedure is revealing. It operates by drawing an analogy between, on the one hand, the seeing and marking within the repertoire of a painting procedure and, on the other, thinking and articulating thought in sound or words. Monet’s depicting, or signifying, procedure is seen (heard) as a “stammering” voice which renders the world, in “shreds” of meaningless sound, incomprehensible, like the charming but senseless and ineffectual utterances of the linguistically incompetent infant. The linguistic metaphor suggests two important and related categories of thought running through much of the art critical writing on Impressionism: first, language and its relation to the processes of thought—that is, language as the system of permanent and coherent concepts involved in thought; and second, rationality, as it is expressed through thought in language, every effort being made for the preservation of this rationality and for the maintenance of its system. Taken up in the metaphor of speech, then, visual images—or rather the painting procedures that constitute them— can be seen as inarticulate and irrational, their “utterances” considered as without meaning or significance, worthless and inadmissible as corroborative evidence in verifying factual information about the world. Their surface obscurity deflects meaning away from the referent. Attention in this case—that is, that of the metaphorical “listener” or “hearer”—is directed to and arrested by the words themselves. Our critic opposes this to a production of language which is at once controlled, selected, organized, and locked in a fixed and agreed, or more properly decreed, seat of meaning, which is recuperable and legible, but only according to a certain set of accepted rules whose role is to efface the weight and materiality of that very language. 20 Apart from serving the particular and

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intended critical function of rejecting Monet’s painting as failure, Dargenty’s remarks throughout the essay more broadly rehearse a certain commitment to what painting is, what it should do, how it should behave with regard to communicable meaning. If painting is the simple search for effect, a fantasy of color, a pursuit of the frivolities of light, a splashing about in the midst of pleasing color, lively touches, transparent fluidities of tone, rays of light . . . obscure and formless reflections . . . and the whole series of things that play in the atmosphere without shape or precision, if painting is that, Monet is a painter. 21

Monet’s “discourse” is “shapeless,” has no apparent precision or definition in the relation between formal means and depicted object; it is undefined, obscure, fluid and infinitely open with regard to meaning or reference, in opposition to the more stable communicability and finality of the critic’s idea of “discourse.” Determinate form (or determinate language), hence comprehensible and unambiguous determinate meaning, are absent from Monet’s pictures for these critics; and, implicitly, the goal of painting, like the goal of language, is on the side of determinacy. Vision, as it is engaged by painting, has long been described as a discursive practice. And at least since the Renaissance painters have been instructed and assessed within the criteria of rhetorical competence: an account and explanation of formal pictorial composition formulated in the language and categories of rhetoric. Since Alberti, composition, as a specialized technical concept, was a useful metaphor for transferring to painting a model derived from rhetoric—a hierarchical model of organization and relevance of parts to the overall effect of the whole. And this systematic and teachable framework of order, itself a structuring activity of the mind over the elements of language as a form of representation, was not only transmutable to painting, but necessarily so as the means of achieving logicality and clarity over randomness and disorder in the istoria. 22 Notions of the coherent sentence have consistently been drawn in aesthetic theory as analogies in the discussion of the coherence of painting, where one model of cohesion—grammatical or logical—is meant to elucidate another, pictorial arrangement. Variations on this norm are those which critics have long brought to painting. Academic theories of pictorial unity, for instance, were based fundamentally on the Aristotelian notion of dramatic action: the dramatist—like the utterer or the draftsman— connecting and reconstructing in coherent and logical patterns of consequential thought what is essential about the depicted subject, being revelatory or instructive of things and not simply aping appearances. This was a notion of the coherent plot, like that of the well-ordered speech, which served usefully as an analogy to discuss pictorial unity. And, so the analogy ran, it was through properly controlled formal means that the painter was expected to give clear guidance for our “reading” of his composition, establishing order in the sequence of our perceptions. 23 On this view, language is understood to reflect a rational and logical consistency between itself (as representation) and one’s experience of the world. It would seem to follow from this, then, that the metaphorical application of linguistic competence to painting implied that painting (as representation) was to perform a similar task. This kind of reference to the imitative relation between language and the world assumes that representation can and must adequately and sufficiently correspond to a fixed, unambiguous, and preexisting reality. By the nineteenth century, the analogy with language to account for visual experience had become a recurrent trope in journalistic art writing. For critics of Impressionist painting, the visual “incompleteness” of sketchy handling was consistently faulted through metaphors of rhetorical incompetence; canvases were dismissed as “inarticulate,” and as utterances of “non-sense speech.” Histories of Impressionism have often focused critical attention on one side of this visual-verbal imbrication, considering almost exclusively the issue of production and scrutinizing the problem of painterly “unfinish” and its challenge to established systems of representation and to the paradigms of pictorial seeing. What is still largely unremarked on in the literature is the significance of the terms of critical description itself, the use of a specialized analogy—our language in speech, rhetoric,

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drama, and poetry—to account for something thought to be separate but somehow essentially and conceptually related—the performance of visual behavior in picture-beholding. Our vision, as it is understood in this context, is ultimately construed or determined by our knowledge of the world, the set of concepts we have about it. So our knowledge of that world, and hence our seeing of it, is thought of as essentially linguistic. We should consider in this light the critic Albert Wolff’s wholesale rejection of Monet’s painting in 1879 as exemplary of the group of artists exhibiting together in April of that year in the third Impressionist exhibition: “the misfortune of this school is its desire to learn nothing, to elevate its ignorance to a standard principle, and its schoolboy scribbling to artistic theory.” 24 Wolff saw in the “scribbling” of the Impressionists—the writing of the stammering non-sense speech—a will to ignorance, to un-truth, in other words a lack of a will to knowledge, and thus to what is sayable in language—in painting, a lack of fixity in representation. Truth, for the majority of critics, lay not in the responsiveness obtaining between the artist’s depicting procedure and the situation he encounters, but in its form and its relation to what is referred to—measurable and classifiable objects. For these critics only some kinds of response are truthful just as only some kinds are articulate. Roger Ballu, writing two years earlier in La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, had reached a similar verdict: “This term [impressionist], I hasten to say, is not displeasing in itself, but, with a few notable exceptions, I deplore its application by some only to mask deceit and to disguise ignorance.” 25 Ignorance of their proper language was ignorance, willed or otherwise—more infuriating when seen as willed—of the relation, as they the critics conceived it should be, between perception or experience of the object in the world and the trace of that perception in its depiction. This proper link between object and touch, a crucial absence to many critics of Impressionism, was for Charles Bigot, writing in 1877, indeed a matter of perception, and furthermore a matter of capacity in conceptual judgment. “Nothing is more tiresome for the eye,” he writes, “than this insolent procedure of painting, and at the same time nothing is more false. Behind that eye and that hand, one searches in vain for a single thought or idea.” 26 This will to certainty in perception is imposed by the critics first on the painter and implicitly on his subsequent viewers as a disposition which is meant to take precedence in one’s experience of the world over any sort of continuous sensuous response to it, demanding the authority of a singular position, a certain viewpoint, and even a certain perceptual behavior in looking and verifying as opposed to catching a sense of fluency between procedure and object—or between language and the world—which denies determinacy. This sense of a will to truth seeks to base itself on certain notions of what constitutes “sincerity” or “fidelity to nature.” It is not just an inner impulse, then, but implies, in the Foucauldian sense, some publicly acknowledged order of things. Painting, in this way, is thought of as embodying some sense of discursive rationality, and that is dependent upon the viewer’s perceptual activity being determined not by unusual and perhaps admittedly more interesting visual effects—that was the basic problem according to Monet’s critics—but by that which is referred to, in other words meaningful subject matter. Critics were working primarily under the assumption that there exists, and should exist, a fundamental correspondence between objects in a picture and those in the real world for which they stand. And just as language was understood to reflect such a rational and logical consistency between itself and our experience of the world, the metaphorical application of it to painting meant that painting was to perform a similar task. Expressions like “procédé de la tache” were used by writers to refer in precisely this way to how a legible and logical perception of order and consequentiality of thought is prevented. Perhaps the most perspicacious observation of Monet’s early painting, while negative in its assessment, was made by Paul Mantz who, faulting Monet’s landscape painting for its infidelity to nature, writes: “M. Monet, without a doubt, has impressions; but he is so little bothered about being understood he doesn’t deign to make of his stammering properly controlled speech.” 27 The analogy with rhetorical competence, or rather incompetence, is made focal. The special signficance in Mantz’s observation is his claim that Monet’s inability to refine his ineffectual

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utterances into regulated speech is not an inability at all, but rather a willed and deliberate self-presentation of the very painting procedure he uses. So, what kind of “understanding” is Mantz really talking about here when he claims that the painter is “so little bothered about being understood”? Surely, Monet’s pictures are not nonobjective or totally abstracted from reality, nor were they ever seen to be. Recognition of the subject was always available to his critics.

THE ESSENTIALIST VIEW OF LANGUAGE AND DEPICTION What would it mean to be understood? First of all what we can say is that, for the critics we have looked at, comprehension is equated with undisturbed recognition of what is being depicted and, to stay within the metaphor of language, with coherent speech. What was implicit in the critical commentary was a pervasive sense of some sort of correspondence between expressions in language and their “meaning” or significant correlation in the real world of experience. It is a view of language that calls for individual words in a linguistic structure to name objects in the world, thus establishing a meaning for every word, where meaning is thereby correlated with the word, and where it is the representative of the real for which the word stands. It is an implied common understanding of the communicative relation between verbal language and lived reality and an understanding of the ways in which words and phrases are constructed to reproduce corresponding relationships in that reality. 28 And that understanding has to do with a supposed (and essential) harmony between thought and reality lodged in the grammar of language. Meaning is what correlates world and word. The assumptions implicit in this view, that there is a discoverable rationally recognized “real,” a fundamental intelligible reality of the world, and that the statements we make about it reflect this reality, is not inconsistent with those that underpin the critical attitude about painting that is our topic. This relation between thought and language or painting assumes that representation— verbal and visual—can and must adequately and sufficiently correspond to a preestablished and unambiguous reality. This has a long tradition in French critical theorizing about art. Roger de Piles, for instance, in his Conversations sur la Connoisssance de la Painture of 1677, had claimed: The painter is like the orator, and the sculptor like a grammarian. The grammarian is correct and adequate in his words, he explains himself clearly and without ambiguity in his discourse, just as the sculptor does in his works. We should understand easily what each of them presents to us. The orator needs to be instructed in those things which the grammarian knows, and the painter in those which the sculptor knows. They are necessary for each of them in order to communicate their ideas and to make themselves understood. 29

Around the same time theorists of linguistics and rhetoric in France conceived of the French language itself as uniquely representative, in the very way utterances in it are constructed, of the logical structure and fundamental order in nature, a truthful imitation of intelligible reality. In 1671, Dominic Bouhours argued, “It is only the French language which follows nature step by step, as it were; and it only has to follow [nature] faithfully to find that order and that harmony which other languages do not encounter without reversing the natural order.” 30 Interestingly, reversing the direction of the metaphor, Bouhours, in his later Manière de bien penser, invoked a visual analogy with painting to emphasize his point about verbal representation: “Thoughts are pictures of things, just as words are pictures of thoughts, & to think, to speak in general, this is to form the picture [peinture] of an object, in this way a thought is true, when it represents things accurately.” 31 The same view about the natural superiority of the French language in its unique imitative relation to the processes of thought and the aesthetic pleasure taken in that form of representation is put forward by Bernard Lamy in his treatise on rhetoric published in 1675; the extended use he, too, makes of a visual analogue is of significance here: “One will find that the pleasure one takes in a well-arranged discourse is caused only by that similarity which is found between the image formed by the sentences in our mind, and the things of which they paint that image . . . the truth of

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a discourse is nothing but the conformity of sentences with things.” 32 Thought, in other words, is expressed in a proposition such that the elements which go to make up the proposition correspond to the objects conceived in thought. A proposition, in this sense, is the sensibly perceptible expression or form of a thought. It is a supposed harmony between thought and reality lodged in the grammar and syntax of language. This commitment to uniformity in language is, I am arguing, that same misconceived view of language shared by Monet’s critics in their metaphorical disparagement of his painting as inarticulate speech—that is, a bias toward a disciplined mode of perception which guaranteed rational consistency against a fluency of experience. A critique of this view of language is already available in an aesthetic theory of poetic language in Friedrich Schiller’s remarks in his 1795 essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. The understanding of the schools, always fearful of error, crucifies its words and its concepts upon the cross of grammar and logic, and is severe and stiff to avoid uncertainty at all costs. 33

“Understanding” is, in the sense that Mantz and other critics used the term, the taking of language for granted; it is the mistaken view that there is some other “thing” out there which corresponds to what one says that is what one unequivocally means. What causes the critics discomfort is that they are made to see that painting is not transparent and so the reality it can carry is not fixed—there is no going “behind” the depiction to get to some ineradicable appearance of nature. The painting is the thing that our perceptual activity has to deal with. And so the indictment of incompleteness is leveled at the impenetrable surface. For these critics, satisfaction or resolution of the painting cannot involve the process of visual and mental adjustment and readjustment, or the play of perception, triggered by aspects of that surface.

THE CONSTRUCTIVE IMAGINATION AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION While the painted sketch had official justification in the sense of its being precursive to a more complete description of a depicted subject, the concept of “unfinish” in aesthetic theory had long been concerned with how the procedure of painting itself figured in the free play of perception, how the viewer imaginatively reconstructed the subject in representation in seeking to make his grasp of it more replete—the non-fini in painting, in other words, understood as a means of invoking the spectator and the activity of his imagination in the process of creating illusion. This activity is what Baudelaire, in his Salon review of 1859, had called the “constructive imagination” 34 and Delacroix, in a journal entry in 1853, the “responsive” powers of the imagination 35—for both, a spontaneous and determined activity triggered by vague and summary execution, effecting ambiguity in the viewer’s perceptual grasp on things. Delacroix’s “responsive imagination” proposes a sense of seeing in vague and elusive masses where contour is deliberately dissolved by the agitation and flurry of the brush, where aspects of the depicted subject are suggested without contour being clearly marked out for the eye, where objects dissolve and volumes merge as we perceive them in painting, and where, precisely as a result of non-fini, we are aware of a multiplicity of directions and a number of potential forms, and where the viewer is left with the much more formidable task of finding or making the appropriate connections and conclusions. This liberating power of inachevé upon the imagination of its beholder was articulated by Diderot in his Salon of 1767: “The sketch addresses itself to us more forcefully because in its indeterminacy it allows for greater freedom and pleasure in our imagination.” 36 In this sense, then, every perception we have in the visible world can be continually revised. While “thought” (in language) demands a certain homogeneity, “perception” allows the wealth of variable experience. Thought, in this sense, has a greater degree of consistency than ordinary experience because it synthesizes the complex material of that sensuous experience into concepts

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which are, in fact, merely forms or figures of the objects of sense-perception to which they refer. By adjusting the mass of experience and sensations into tidy objects of thought, language can articulate the world of experience. But whereas consistency is enhanced by language (the essentialist view), it is so at the price of the content of that experience; it is a constraint on sensibility. And this view may inform thinking about painting in two interrelated ways: first, in terms of the demand on the infinite extendability of our perception (Diderot’s “responsive” and Baudelaire’s “constructive” imagination), and, correspondingly, in the denial of an overly literal attitude toward the subject of depiction. “Subject matter,” Schiller had argued, always has a limiting effect upon the spirit, and it is only from form that true aesthetic freedom can be looked for. Herein, then, resides the real secret of the master in any art: that he can make his form consume his material; and the more pretentious, the more seductive this material is in itself, the more it seeks to impose itself upon us, the more high-handedly it thrusts itself forward with effects of its own, or the more the beholder is inclined to get directly involved with it, then the more triumphant the art which forces it back and asserts its own kind of dominion over him . . . The plastic arts, at their most perfect, must become music and move us by the immediacy of their sensuous presence. 37

So for Schiller it is the artist’s attending to the very structure, elaboration and organization of his procedure which arrests the usual and ordinary dominant effects and interest that subject matter has on our perception—that is, our looking at representation simply for what it represents. What Schiller’s remarks point to is simply this: that we can recognize the subject in painting and see it differently. This is what Monet’s critics do and this is what they resent doing. They (we) are made to conceive of the “unfinished manner of painting” as calling upon the complexity of our visual experience and doing so in a way that is not pre-determined by the “real” presence of the subject outside of its projected or imagined world in representation. This is to invoke the mind’s imaginative activity, and the pleasure taken in that activity, of resolving aspects of the view presented in painting that can be available to us only in representation—in the way, for instance, our unconstrained visual behavior is engaged by Monet’s system of brushmarks. For painting this means that our “constructive” or “responsive” imagination is free to scan the surface without being forced into a given pattern; it is our perceptual imagination that is in control of how we resolve the image, using the medium now in one way now in another, giving the material shape and drawing from it visual conclusions while remaining free from the fixity of set combination or determinacy. We are provided the opportunity to avoid that attitude we should most readily adopt, eluding a tendency toward given solutions, toward easy legibility, explicit resemblance, and, as Gombrich put it, “the psychological pull toward the . . . ‘conceptual’ image that characterizes mimesis.” 38 This practice is what Gombrich had designated as the “beholder’s share,” 39 a concept which refers to the implied presence of a beholder who, in a certain kind of depiction, attends to the procedures of painting. Gombrich addressed the special activity of the beholder in transforming and combining, in the mind, immediate sensations of pure form into perceptions of a represented world which, by definition, includes an element of judgment. It was his view that what occurs in this situation, what gives pleasure in our looking and what excites the mind to conceive of the subject in depiction, is not simply the weaving together a sense of coherent representation from painterly technique, but more the mind’s awareness of its own imaginative capacity coming into play. For Gombrich it was a mental state of preparedness in which the beholder projects anticipations onto the ambiguous formulations on the canvas before him in order to complete a sense of the depicted subject that these forms initiate. Yet this sense of recognition leaves out a sense of how we, the beholder, actually use the medium variously and deliberately beyond mere projection onto it of what we already know or expect, how the character of the surface figures actively in our sense of the depicted subject. Rather than separating recognition of the subject from a sense of the medium—Gombrich makes it a matter of theory that we cannot see both simultaneously—the critics of Impressionism, I am suggesting, however reluctantly, came to see the painting as directing them

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Figure 1. Claude Monet, Les Bains de la Grenouillère, 1869, National Gallery, London.

to explore its own facets and features, many of which become revelatory of its subject. In attending to the inachevé in Impressionist painting, the critics never lost the sense of that “unfinished” manner of painting as permeating the very subject of depiction and making demands on the instability of our perception. Let me take as an example Monet’s early Bathers at la Grenouillère of 1869 (figure 1), in the National Gallery in London. In this picture Monet directs the viewer’s attention not to a unified narrative or synoptic view of things but to the lack of homogeneity, both in the procedure of painting and in the subject itself. The demand on the flexibility of our perception puts new pressure, as Schiller had argued, on our conventionally held attitude toward subject matter in painting. We become aware of how the subject of Monet’s image, mediated by its procedure, can be transformed and presented to us in a different and unfamiliar way. The entire surface of the image is caught up in a continuous visual movement determined and performed by quick flicks of paint. The painting’s impression of immediacy and instantaneity is afforded by a system of variegated colors and the inclusion of fleeting, shifting, elliptical, and accidental details—an irregular registration of paint where the brush accommodates different elements in its subject: lean for sky, thicker and more abrupt for foliage, a rapid combination of short back and forth zigzags for the water, and long, thin strokes for the boats and footbridge. And only by attending closely to those marks do we reconstitute form—for example, what we read to the right of the picture as the heads and torsos of bathers bobbing up and down in the water is indicated only by the quick juxtaposition of dark and light flicks of paint which distinguish their forms from the rippling water just behind the standing

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figures on the footbridge, themselves barely emerging from fragments of longer, darker strokes. Premium is put on the elusive quality of things suggested, obscured, and half-glimpsed. The sense of continuous motion, flux, and change, set up by this system of brushmarks, charges the picture with an element of instantaneity, the kind of immediacy involved in catching a glimpse of nature. Yet the subject of the painting can be perceived only by a careful attention to—a synthesis of—the depicting procedure itself. The picture, then, possesses a kind of extended time as well, a time which includes the real time of beholding. It is a way of painting that exploits the very ambiguity of color and form to invoke something in the subject itself. The array of sensations possible within Monet’s accidental shapes retains the recognizability and force of its subject—we see what is intended to be shown—yet at the same time effectively does away with any notions of the independence of the perceiving mind to the objects of depiction. It recruits the temporality of our looking. What we can say, then, about Monet’s painting is that what we see—and what was seen—is the represented subject and the consistency of the medium as reciprocally adjusting to each other. In phenomenological terms, the world in painting is apprehended from within its own fabric. Thus, critics were simultaneously affected by the stuff out of which the configuration arose as well as by the subject which was articulated through the form. A “language of the sketch” comprised both subject matter and material, exploiting the tension between representation and material by retaining the quality of “brushstrokeness” when conveying a figure. Attention to the work of the brush, to “changing aspects” (in the terminology of phenomenology) of a depiction, does not distract from our interest in the subject but is the very condition of it. That attending is a slow and unconstrained activity in which we visually and mentally have to reconstruct the subject, unification or resolution now dependent not upon the unity of the subject but upon the combinations and correspondences we pick out between paint marks and moving figures, or between broad sweeps of color and the ambiguous configurations in nature, the very “incomplete” procedure not only permeating the depicted subject, but becoming part of that subject. It is a procedure of painting that is appropriate to a view of the world in which features and qualities are always and already present but concealed in the “background” of our original experience of looking, a sense of the objects of our perceptual experience which is always and immediately incomplete. This is like what Edmund Husserl defined as the “horizon of possibilities” which an object of experience can yield, wherein the content of our perception involves not only the view we presently hold but includes a sense of other possible aspects on which we could fixate, other features and qualities that we could make focal—aspects and features which go unnoticed in our ordinary perception but which, nonetheless, “when unreflected on . . . are already there as a “background” and therefore in principle available for perception, like unnoticed things in our external field of vision.” 40 For Husserl, perception of the spatial object is equated with the sum of its profiles or “aspects.” He elaborates: A certain inadequacy belongs . . . to the perception of things . . . In principle a thing can be given only “in one of its aspects,” and that not only means incompletely, in some sense or other imperfectly, but precisely that which presentation though perspectives prescribes. A thing is necessarily given in mere “modes of appearing” . . . and more or less vague indeterminacy . . . To remain forever incomplete is an ineradicable essential of the correlation Thing and Thing perception. 41

Husserl’s phenomenology of perception is a rigorous examination of perceptual attention itself, how our experiences of temporality are themselves felt, how the phenomenon of temporality arises in consciousness. And in this sense, it is crucial to our discussion here. How it is useful in thinking through the perceptual difficulty of Monet’s painting that critics admire but disapprove of is by offering a model of how we are able to maintain an ongoing perception that continually refers to more than the instantaneity of what is before us in any one “moment.” What Husserl allows us to consider is perception, in its structural richness and complexity, as the key to what transpires in the flux of appearance. The mobility of our perception is possible in representation when a procedure of

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painting allows for a lack of complete resolvability of the thing depicted. Monet’s painting functions precisely in this way; it affords a sense of the look of the world which is immediately incomplete, yet intrinsically charged with the potential continually to revise itself, thereby continually revising our sense of the look of the world. It points forward to possible patterns of perception which continually passing off into one another, coalesce in the unity of a single perception in which the continuously enduring thing in every new series of perspectives reveals ever again new ‘aspects.’ 42







This “structure of spontaneity,” as I have called it, is what commentators found themselves faced with in Monet’s painting, a deliberate indirectness of procedure which encouraged the illusion that the depicted scene is immediate and instantaneous. Inachevé, by now, had to do with a procedure of painting and implicitly with our always “incomplete” perception of the visible world and the perceptual instability that the painting procedure afforded the spectator. The critics’ estimate of Monet was that he was involved with capturing the transient qualities of a particular moment in nature, and their efforts were to resolve each picture into a single and pure experience of that instant. What they found difficult to come to terms with was the relation between the fictive moment seen and the moment dilated in the picture. The experience of nature in Monet’s painting, they found, could not be perceived in its presumed completeness, it could not be “grasped adequately in its full unity,” as Husserl put it. Rather, Monet’s early efforts were to encourage the viewer further to examine the painting as painting and to consider how the use of the medium figures within our awareness of its subject. Monet’s painting, in other words, disrupts our usual, univocal relationship with the world by opening up the possibility of ambiguity and fluidity, stimulating our imaginative and visual interpretation. The critics, while receptive to it, could not endorse that flexibility of perception. This was to become emphatically and unavoidably the critical issue in the Rouen Cathedrals, where the very subject of depiction itself—the medieval monument—calls upon the temporality of perception and, more specifically, the phenomenology of memory in perception.

2 Canvases and Careers He said he regretted he could not work in the same spirit as once . . . At that time anything that pleased him, no matter how transitory, he painted, regardless of the inability to go further than one painting. Now it is only a long continued effort that satisfied him, and it must be an important motif, that is sufficiently absorbing—‘If what I do no longer has the charm of youth, then I hope it has some more serious qualities, and that one might live for longer with one of these canvases.’ —Theodore Robinson and Monet in conversation, 1892

SOON AFTER HIS ARRIVAL IN ROUEN IN THE WINTER OF 1892, 1 MONET, ANTICIPATING WITH ENTHUSIASM the success of his new project, wrote home, “I am enchanted with Rouen, of all that there will be to do here,” 2 and again a few days later, about the interest that his work there was already generating: “I’ve received several letters asking to have the first of my canvases of Rouen.” 3 An exhibition of a series of Rouen canvases, which was to take place some three years after these remarks, and after a three-year public absence, seems to have acquired a special significance early on, both for the painter and for his contemporaries. Rouen, a city which lay almost midway between Le Havre, where Monet spent his youth, and Paris, was a city that was very much admired by the painter and to which he returned—to paint it— many times. 4 In fact, Rouen as a city held a great attraction for many artists, including those who came well before Monet’s first painting campaign there in 1872 and for several of his colleagues and contemporaries as well. It is a city many aspects of which have a long history of being sketched, painted, described, and narrated. Most notable perhaps of Monet’s closest associates is Camille Pissarro, whom Monet visited in Rouen in October of 1883, with his brother and son along with Durand-Ruel and his son. During Monet’s visit in 1883, Pissarro was painting and sketching in the city. He, like Monet, was to undertake several campaigns there: twice again in 1896 (in winter and late summer) and then once again in the late summer of 1898. Alongside its importance as a medieval city with its deep historical and religious traces everywhere, Rouen was undergoing rapid modernization during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and for Pissarro, as Christopher Lloyd has discussed in considerable detail, 5 much of the city’s visual appeal was manifest in the incongruity between past and present the painter found symbolized in the contrast between medieval architecture and busy modern port. Monet’s earliest recordings of Rouen demonstrate a sensibility and attitude toward the city not unlike Pissarro’s: for instance, his view of the cathedral, dappled with light, clouds, and reflection, seen prominently from across the Seine, in his View of Rouen of 1872. 6 Monet’s painting would surely have been known to Pissarro in 1883, the year he executed his own two painted versions of this view, as it was exhibited in a one-man exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s that year. Moreover, Monet executed a drawing after this 1872 painting in 1883 (figure 2) while in Rouen with Pissarro that year, for reproduction by photogravure in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The reproduction was to illustrate an article reviewing the exhibition of Monet’s work at Durand-Ruel’s that included the 1872 painting. 7 In a similar vein, soon after his arrival in Rouen in February 1892, Monet painted two versions of View of Rouen from the Côte Sainte-Catherine 8 (Plate 3), early examples of a more exploratory approach 32

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Figure 2. Claude Monet, View of Rouen, 1883 black crayon on white scratchboard, 1955.1914, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

to possible motifs in the city. But this was temporary, a tentative attitude to the place, on the periphery of his concerns, preparing the way for an account of the medieval city far less narrative and more disengaged from that of his contemporary Pissarro, ultimately manifest in the familiar cathedral facades of 1892–1893. As Lloyd’s detailed study points out, Pissarro’s initial representation of the city is part of a long topographical tradition, 9 described and illustrated in guide and travel books, most notably in the three volumes devoted exclusively to Ancienne Normandie, in Baron Taylor’s Voyages pittoresque et romantique dans l’ancienne France (published between 1820 and 1878), and the Guide Joanne (which George Heard Hamilton linked iconographically to Monet’s obliquely oriented facades). This tradition of the “motif pittoresque” to which Pissarro repeatedly returned, mainly in the illustrational form of prints, is confirmed in the painter’s letters from Rouen to his son Lucien: “Yesterday I made a drawing of the rue de la Grosse Horloge. I had scarcely finished it when I saw a lithograph of the same street done in 1829 or 1830 by Bonington.” 10 This remark testifies to the long visual history in the picturesque mode the city already had; the painter then goes on more specifically to lament the drastic changes this “beautiful city, so old and artistic” 11 was now witness to. And by the end of the century, feeling incited to action against the municipal destruction of these streets, he prompted the organized preservation of its historic buildings. I received your kind letter in which you informed me of the decision that the “Gentlemen of the Upright Line” have just taken concerning la rue Saint-Romain, which, it seems, offends their love for the banal. You ask if I will support you in protesting this vandalism, alas! Dear Sir, I lend my own powerless voice of protest to yours, certain that we are shouting in the desert. Poor Rouen, admirable and venerable old city, she is trivialized day by day, to the enthusiastic cheers of the municipalities!! If my weak voice can help to save this wreck, I shout it for you!!! 12

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Fueling remarks like these is a romantic nostalgia for things medieval, the last vestiges of which Pissarro saw disappearing in Rouen. He writes to Lucien as early as 1883, confirming his admiration for the sculptural embellishment that decorated the exteriors of the houses, the meticulous decoration typical of Gothic craftsmanship, on those streets he will later come to defend: the street has changed: in the foreground there is a house with wood carving which is no longer to be found. I have also made some drawings from wood sculptures, pure Gothic, with little ornamentation, they are simply marvelous. This is the way to understand the realism of that period. 13

It is an admiration for a Rouen the visible traces of which are to be found in many of the sketchbook studies made during the artist’s initial investigation of the city in 1883, studies which sustained a vivid sense of the past and particularly a Gothic past: “If I had an influence, it would be a true Gothic one, the kind I see at every turn here, it is splendid, derived from nature while at the same time decorative, and without the insipid prettiness and sentimentality of its modern imitations.” 14 Pissarro was certainly not alone in his feeling. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a number of museums and collections dedicated to medieval art and architecture were established. The period also saw the founding of various conservation organizations, associations, and commissions. 15 In fact, illustrated editions of Victor Hugo’s Nôtre-Dame de Paris spawned this preservationist spirit and sparked popular debate about the “vandalism”—both demolition and restoration—of medieval properties. 16 Speaking of the “fashions” of restorers, Hugo had written, “The fashions have in fact done more mischief than revolutions. They have cut into the quick; mangled, murdered, the building, in the form as well as in the symbol, in its logic not less than in its beauty.” 17 This feeling of mournful pride is just as profound for Pissarro in 1896, only three years after Monet left Rouen with his Cathedrals, and a year after their much-hyped exhibition in Paris, in the artist’s thinking about making other prints of the city’s medieval streets: “I began some sketches of old streets which are being destroyed . . . I wish you could see the rue St. Romain, it is splendid.” 18 It is a sentiment that looks back, in some measure, to a lingering Romantic attitude of picturesque disorder, of the sort that Hugo’s novel had captured, wherein the Middle Ages is depicted in its imagined irregularity and grotesque irrationality; or perhaps as characterized even earlier in Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme (1802) which found in the Middle Ages (in a chapter devoted to “Des églises gothiques”) an impenetrable mystery of nature, an “age of magic and enchantment.” The English travelogue, Bibliographical Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, published in London in 1821, described this Rouen: What narrow streets, what overhanging houses, what bizarre, capricious ornaments—what a mixture of modern with ancient art—what fragments or rather ruins, of old delicately-built Gothic churches . . . The narrowness and gloom of these streets, together with the bold and overwhelming projections of the upper stories and roofs, afford a striking contrast with the animated scene upon the quays:—where the sun shines with full-freedom, as it were, and where the glittering streamers, at innumerable mastheads, denote the wealth and prosperity of the town. 19

It was this very contrast between the old and the new, the medieval and the modern, in Rouen that so delighted Pissarro and that he depicted, in both prints and paintings, in the early 1880s and again in the mid-to-late 1890s. Pissarro was to engage a Rouen altogether different from the one Monet eventually settled on, but one that is important to understand in seeking to define what it was that Monet sought there. Pissarro’s is a Rouen which maintained the signs of modernity and sociability in the old city, symbolized in part by the relatively new mechanized forms of modern transport, railways and steamships which had begun to intrude into the landscape all along the Seine, particularly in the area of Rouen, during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The city was extensively rebuilt and transformed in these years, specifically along its main quays, by its increasing commercial importance as a port. 20 Pissarro, in fact, depicted this expansionist effect

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Figure 3. Camille Pissarro, L’Ile Lacroix, Rouen (The Effect of Fog), 1888; oil on canvas, John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

of industrialization on one of the two small islands in the Seine facing the quays, in his painting of 1888, Island of Lacroix, Rouen, effect of fog (figure 3). 21 Both parts of the city—old and new—were linked by two bridges, subjects which also recur regularly in Pissarro’s work—the Pont Corneille (also known as the Pont de Pierre) opened in 1829, and the Pont Boieldieu, or Grand Pont, constructed of iron and opened only as recently as 1887. Of the older stonework bridge Pissarro executed at least two lithographs in 1896, and at least three paintings in 1898, pictures which seemed concerned to capture, in a typically Impressionist mode, the motif under varying atmospheric conditions and at different times of day, and emphasized the animated social activity of a fully industrialized, fully modernized quay-side and port. 22 To the newer bridge, the Pont Boieldieu, Pissarro was even more attracted as a subject for painting in 1896, and again under the shifting conditions of light, weather, and times of day. 23 The kind of interest Rouen held for Pissarro is made focal in two paintings in particular of the Grand Pont in 1896—The Boieldieu Bridge, Rouen, damp weather (figure 4), now at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the similar Grand Pont 24—confirmed in one of his more descriptive letters dating from that year. To Lucien, in February, he wrote: “One canvas, Boieldieu Bridge, Rouen, damp weather, is about 36x28 inches. The theme is the bridge near the Place de la Bourse with effects of rain, crowds of people

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Figure 4. Camille Pissarro, Pont Boieldieu in Rouen, Damp Weather, 1896; oil on canvas; 73.6 x 91.4 cm; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift of Reuben Wells Leonard Estate, 1937.

coming and going, smoke from the boats, quays with cranes, workers in the foreground, and all this in grey colors glistening in the rain.” 25 Isolating the cathedral itself from its real, physical and immediate environs—in the way Monet eventually settled on in his concentration on the west façade—had little appeal for Pissarro. The latter’s sense of his own separate interest in Rouen, separate from that which he takes to be, in 1896, already claimed by Monet, is articulated to his son in the same letter: “I have effects of fog and mist, of rain, of the setting sun and of grey weather, motifs of bridges seen from every angle, quays with boats; but what interests me especially is a motif of the iron bridge in the wet, with much traffic, carriages, pedestrians, workers on the quays, boats, smoke, mist in the distance, the whole scene fraught with animation and life.” 26 When the cathedral does appear in Pissarro’s painting, 27 it is seen in its topographical and narrative context, at the center of the concentration of medieval streets, buildings, and markets which surround it on the north side of the Seine. It appears, for example, in 1898, dominating the background of three paintings of the rue de l’Epicerie, which was the narrow street leading from the south end of the cathedral to the medieval market known as the Ancienne Halles which can be seen in the foreground: The Old Market at Rouen and the Rue de l’Epicerie, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Plate 4). 28 Interestingly, six years earlier, in 1892, Monet had painted this same motif, seen virtually from the same viewpoint (The Rue de l’Epicerie in Rouen, private collection, Plate 5),

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which shows the street leading to the south flank of the cathedral. On the left of both Monet’s and Pissarro’s pictures is the Tour Saint-Romain (or Tour d’Albane). In the center background of Monet’s version we can make out the south portal (the Portail de Calende), which in Pissarro’s version, however, the commotion of traders, market stalls, and the concentration of other buildings (houses and shopfronts) in the middle ground block from view. About his new subject, Pissarro had written to Durand-Ruel on October 28, 1898: “Yesterday I found a beautiful spot where I will be able to do the rue de l’Epicérie and even the lively market, that takes place every Friday.” 29 Monet’s much more loosely worked version of the same motif clearly eliminates that aspect of commercial sociability of the marketplace given such prominence in Pissarro’s painting of it and which Pissarro deliberately chooses (obviously setting up his canvas in front of the motif on Fridays) as the subject of his picture. While both painters were apparently attracted to the same general subject—the tiny pedestrian passage with its irregular projections and overhanging upper stories and rooftops leading to the south end of the main cathedral—their versions vary considerably, and tellingly. While Pissarro attends to the lively human activity and interaction between the medieval structures and the bustling market community, Monet pays greater attention to the emptiness of the street, emphasizing the sagging and collapsing weight of the old fragile wooden structures clustered around the monumental cathedral. Whereas the background church itself, in Pissarro’s picture, is given equal attention and the same level of painterly discrimination as all the other elements in his picture, in Monet’s it seems to hover over the rest of the architectural complex almost as a separate object, more lightly painted, and rendered much less physiognomically articulate. Pissarro was acutely aware of the success Monet’s exhibition of Rouen Cathedrals enjoyed at Durand-Ruel’s; candidly expressing his admiration for his colleague’s achievement, he wrote to Lucien from Eragny on May 11: “Monet’s exhibition opened yesterday, he is showing twenty Cathedrals of Rouen! Forty canvases in all. This will be the great attraction.” 30 He, like others, had been enthusiastically anticipating the exhibition, “very vexed” at having arrived in Paris in May 1894, only to find the exhibition repeatedly postponed. 31 In fact, Pissarro had been aware of Monet’s progress on the series well in advance of its exhibition due mainly to word sent to him from Lucien who was in Rouen at the same time as Monet in the spring of 1893. On May 26, 1895, the painter wrote to Lucien of his deep regret that his son would be unable to arrive in Paris before the exhibition was closed and the series dispersed: “If only you could get here before Monet’s show closes; his Cathedrals will be scattered everywhere, and these particularly ought to be seen in a group.” 32 And again the following month: “I arrived in Paris today expecting to see you, but I see from your letter that you will leave too late to see the Monets. This is a great pity.” 33 Remarking on the widespread but hardly unanimous favorable attention the exhibition received from other of Monet’s artist contemporaries and from his critics—the exhibition actually had to be extended to accommodate public interest—Pissarro aligns himself with those admirers and with the praise that the Cathedrals were eliciting. I am carried away by their extraordinary deftness. Cézanne, whom I met yesterday at Durand-Ruel’s, is in complete agreement with my view that this is the work of a strong-willed but level-headed artist who pursues the intangible nuances of effects that are realized by no other painter. . . . the Cathedrals are being much talked of, and highly praised, too, by Degas, Renoir, myself and others. I would have so liked you to see the whole series in a group, for I find in it the superb unity which I have been seeking for a long time. I can tell you that it pains me deeply not to be able to see the series several times with you. Naturally! I regard it as so important that I came especially to Paris to see it. 34

Yet Pissarro’s remarks reveal slightly more than fraternal good will toward his colleague’s immense popularity and great success. As early as 1883, his own Rouen pictures seemed to show a shared interest in Monet’s efforts at recording different atmospheric effects:

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looking towards Rouen, one has at the right all the houses of the quays illuminated by the sun in the morning, to the bottom the stone bridge, to the left, the island with its houses, its factories, boats, and rowboats, to the right, huge barges . . . In the evening, I work on the Cours-la-Reine, the motif you know. Yesterday, not having the sun, I began the same motif in gray weather, viewed a little more to the right . . . I leave you now to go back to this motif . . . I will begin with a morning fog effect . . . This will be rather interesting, the square in fog with the trams and the general coming-and-going. 35

And on several occasions he took the opportunity to compare his work with Monet’s. Those occasions centered primarily on a group of pictures intended for his own one-man exhibition, also sponsored by Durand-Ruel, exactly one year after Monet’s great triumph. There was a lot at stake in this exhibition, which came, like Monet’s, after a three-year public absence; it held for the painter a great deal of promise and expectation of increased professional success. Among thirty-five entries of mostly recent work, the catalogue lists at least eleven subjects from Rouen—the Pont Boieldieu, the Pont de Pierre, the port, quays, and faubourg of Saint-Sever—all under varying atmospheric conditions and times of day. Despite the critical acclaim that it received, as the painter himself lamented, “that does not translate, sadly, into money . . . only two pictures sold.” 36 Pissarro was certainly still some way from achieving the financial success that Monet had now reached: “All my friends say the exhibition is very beautiful . . . From a financial point of view I did the best I could; I much preferred to sell Durand eleven pictures than to wait on the caprice of collectors. I am not cunning enough for transactions of that kind and they bore me. I accepted 14,000 francs for the lot.” 37 Monet, on the other hand, was at the same time commanding up to 15,000 francs for each canvas, and Pissarro was acutely aware of this: I saw M. Depeux yesterday evening . . . He confirmed the purchase of my Roofs of Old Rouen and he retained another canvas of 36 x 28 inches for his brother-in-law, but he didn’t speak to me about the price . . . and it didn’t occur to me to bring this question up. Would he give me 5,000 francs for each? He bought a Cathedral from Monet for 15,000 francs. 38

But it wasn’t only the disparity in commercial success that worried Pissarro; he was also deeply aware of the different pictorial use each painter had ultimately made of Rouen. Once again admitting the special significance that his own Roofs of Old Rouen, grey weather had for him, Pissarro wrote on March 17, 1896: I don’t know whether Depeaux will accept the price I shall set, so much the worse for him if he doesn’t, I want to keep the Roofs of Old Rouen for myself. I don’t want to show it on account of Monet’s Cathedrals, I am afraid it isn’t good enough to stand the inevitable comparison, although it is quite different. 39

And again on April 8: Arsène Alexandre came Monday to see my pictures. He found my Roofs of Old Rouen very beautiful and was very insistent that I exhibit it. I decided to do so. And what the deuce, it is so different from Monet that I don’t think my friends will regard me as spiteful in showing it. 40

In contrast to the Rouen of his colleague, the absence of sociability for Monet is internal to the content of his pictures. By 1892–93, and the series of close-up views of the cathedral west façade, all vestiges of an early narrative or topographical approach had been eliminated. In the first few years of the 1890s, Monet moved from depictions of the isolated grainstacks and poplar trees, subjects distilled from their natural context, rehearsed and re-rehearsed a number of times, to the unusual subject of a man-made structure—a Gothic façade. In fact, also appearing in the “Cathedrals exhibition” of 1895 were eight views of another Gothic monument, the church of Notre-Dame at Vernon, painted in 1894, immediately following Monet’s Rouen campaign. Vernon, like Rouen,

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was an old and picturesque Normandy town on the rail-route to Rouen. While never really figuring in the literature among the painter’s major “series” projects, the group of Vernon canvases is a revealing set of pictures for what it tells us of the painter’s interest in exploring and reformulating certain resonant motifs repeatedly, building up, as he was to do at Rouen, an intense familiarity with a single subject in a continued and isolated attention to it. Like the Rouen series, the Vernon pictures are marked by the deliberation upon things never really changed from one picture to the next, repeating the motif from a single viewing position but in variable effects of light, weather, and atmosphere. 41 In 1892–93, Monet is distilling Rouen, a practice he was to continue to exploit in his next major series, the Thames pictures, and even more emphatically in his own gardens at Giverny. His painting now seems to place an enormous value on isolation or detachment. But what makes subject matter relevant and meaningful for Monet? What, particularly, about this subject—Rouen Cathedral? How, in fact, does one claim one’s own hold on it and resist others? Monet’s task was one of sustaining his painting procedure so that the result would be, as he put it to Theodore Robinson in 1892, “sufficiently absorbing.” What we need to look at are unanticipated uses of the medium; Monet’s calling up analogues between the subject and the procedure. In doing to, we need to reflect on a métier sensibility.

THE PICTURES With the elimination of all traces of an earlier picturesque quality of the kind still visible in 1892, in View of Rouen, from the Côte Sainte-Cathérine, 42 The Rue de l’Epicérie in Rouen, 43 and even the much earlier View of Rouen of 1872 44 (and the drawing of 1883 after it), Monet began to focus exclusively on the cathedral facade itself, eventually to the point of its near total distillation from any vestige of narrative content. 45 Two canvases painted in early 1892 confirm this process of deliberation in the early stages of the painter’s response to his motif. The Cour d’Albane (Plate 6), at the Smith College Museum of Art, 46 and The Cour d’Albane, grey weather (private collection), 47 both of which take a side view of the cathedral, painted from ground level, depict the area immediately to the east of the tower, the Tour Saint-Romain, 48 which encompassed a group of small medieval-built houses (destroyed in World War II) clustered around the north flank of the cathedral. A letter to Alice Hoschedé dated March 26, 1892, indicates that these were painted sometime around the middle of that month, not long after the painter’s arrival there in February. 49 In the Smith College picture, long thin passages of variegated color—blue, ochre, and green— delineate the vertical edges of the shaded buttress forms and the horizontal striations across the breadth of the exterior corresponding to the interior division of levels. A varied and mottled palette of equally precise directional strokes picks out, deliberately and in a high degree of resolution, the various features of the houses and other buildings that abut that side of the church—rooftops, dormers, windows, chimneys, and archway. This drawing in paint of structural features is in marked contrast to the broader, looser, and much more chromatically uniform portion of visible sky at top right. It is a painting procedure that shares more of an affinity with Monet’s early painting in the 1870s and early 1880s—that is to say, a highly descriptive notation where the work of the brush revises itself within the fiction of the picture to accommodate different elements in its subject. The painterly ambiguity of later examples is decidedly absent in these early versions. This is true also in another example from 1892 (like all of the other canvases discussed here, later reworked and dated 1894), The Portal, harmony in brown, 50 now at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (Plate 7), and one of only two versions which take a direct head-on view of the cathedral facade. Passages of paint, relatively uniform across the canvas, particularly so in the lower half of the picture at the level of the portals, resolve themselves into distinguishable architectonic elements within the subject. We can pick out with little difficulty that the two turrets framing the central gallery above the rose window

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are unadorned with the pinnacles or bell turrets and their sculptural definition which they were to receive in restoration several years later. Again, this degree of detail is much less in evidence in the later canvases. In The Portal in the Sun, 51 at the National Gallery in Washington (Plate 8), the monument is now seen obliquely from a point of view slightly to the right of head-on frontality, executed from a merchant’s upper story window on the north-west end of the block at 23 Place de la Cathédrale. 52 (Monet was also painting at this time at 31 Place de la Cathédrale at the south-west end, alternating between the two locations.) Yet, like the more narrative Smith picture, Monet’s attention is still focused on the detailed surface area of the facade between the two towers—the lateral portals and central gabled portal—with an even greater emphasis on the delicate tracery and open sculptural perforation of the upper gallery. The north tower, The Tour Saint-Romain, is partially obscured by the left-hand turret. Light passes and shadows shift across the facade from left to right as the afternoon light falls directly on the uppermost area of the cathedral; as the facade is illuminated, a brighter palette and more thickly encrusted pigment are used. At the same time, in the lower register, the deep recesses of the portals admit only a limited amount of that light. Together with the oblique orientation of the edifice, which runs in the picture from far left to the near right, gradual increments of shadow are recorded in the portal recesses. From left to right in the lower register, shadow, and thus imprecision of detail, becomes an increasingly dominant feature. If we follow this reading into the Metropolitan Museum version with similar title 53 (Plate 9), the time of day seems to be slightly later by comparison, suggested by stronger light now more fully penetrating the portals and further blanching out almost entirely any discernible figural articulation in the mass of stone throughout the upper half of the building. 54 Monet returned to Rouen in mid-February of the following year, 1893, 55 with the intention of completing certain canvases begun the previous spring, as well as taking up the motif again from scratch. He assumed two positions from which to view the motif: the first a familiar location, 31 Place de la Cathédrale, in a house opposite the Tour de Beurre, just southwest of the central portal; the second, a new one from a shop window at 81 rue Grand-Pont (in a building which no longer exists), 56 situated to the right of the location where he had painted in 1892, on the southwest corner of the cathedral square. Monet’s new vantage point now allowed him to extend his field of vision to the left to include, together with the west front, the Saint-Romain tower and the encircling parish houses—a more encompassing, almost narrative, first view (note, for instance, the fluttering birds around the tower in the upper-left corner in Rouen Cathedral, morning, white harmony (Plate 10), 57 before once again returning to the isolated cropped facade. 58 In this group of images, references to the shifting light of day, as well as to changing atmospheric conditions, are relatively consistent. In Plate 10, now at the Musée d’Orsay, the morning sun has just risen behind the cathedral, its effect first felt in the upper-most region of the enormous tower at the upper left of the canvas. The degree of sculptural articulation and sense of architectural volume, still vaguely perceptible in the lower more darkened area of the facade, particularly to the right, are imperceptible in the upper left. In the Boston version, The Portal and the Tour d’Albane at Dawn (Plate 11), 59 morning has just risen behind the cathedral. The canvas is bisected along a diagonal axis from the lower left corner to the upper right with alternating levels of resolution falling on either side. At the upper left, where the morning light has fallen on the upper reaches of both the Tour Saint-Romain and north turret of the facade, nearly all sense of three-dimensional space and volumetric form, usually suggested by the open lattice tracery of the pinnacle of the turret, is denied. The turret is in fact nearly—but not quite (I will return to this)—imperceptible as a qualitatively different and spatially distinct object in relation to the tower behind it. Here there is little contrast in thickness, size, weight, and direction of the brush, and color is most uniformly applied in lighter shades of pinks, blues, and violets. In the lower half of this diagonal bisection of the canvas (right side) which incorporates most of the actual cathedral facade, and which—according to the fiction of the picture—has yet to receive the illuminating force of the slow-moving light, the brush mark is more varied and color less uniform. In

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the depiction of protruding buttresses between portals, paint is more thickly applied, almost relieflike in contrast to the smoother application intended to suggest forms which recede from those vertically projecting supports, that are just beginning to catch reflected illumination. Color in these areas (the sun-lit buttresses) is lighter in tone, repeating some of the same pastel shades used in the left upper-most section but here less saturated, in subtler doses, and darkened slightly—suggesting the absence of full light—by underlayers of deeper darker colors. The deep recesses of the portals are accordingly rendered with a fuller intensity of those dark colors. In contrast to the upper left region of the diagonal bisection, there is a more immediate correspondence between the work of the brush and the form it depicts: coagulated vertical strokes suggest the forms of the buttresses and the structural features of the center gable and gallery above it; shorter, broader, and more rounded marks pick out the curve of the archivolts in the doorways in alternating layers of russet, violet, and green, one contiguous with the next. Similarly, a much more linear trace of the brush clearly defines the individual features of the houses at the lower left. Color discrimination and density of paint build-up, then, in relation to the objects described, achieve greater perceptual resolvability in the lower half of the bisected picture plane; this gradually diminishes in variation and intensity up the canvas to the top left, suggesting a gradual loss of focus and spatial clarity toward the periphery of our visual field and the obscuring effect of bright light in our apprehension of form. Also in that year, 1893, Monet took up another viewing position. In The Portal (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Plate 12), 60 Rouen Cathedral, The Facade in Sunlight (Clark Institute of Art, Plate 13), 61 and Rouen Cathedral, Sunlight Effect (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Plate 14), 62 both the Tour Saint-Romain at the left edge and the south turret with its pinnacled top at the extreme right are made more visible, the turret now appearing contiguous with the central gallery. Indices for reading accurate spatial relations, suggestible in painting by allowing a small trace of visible sky to intervene and separate the two masses so that one logically appears “behind” the other, is eliminated or at least made increasingly more difficult by this oblique shift to the right. For instance, in the earlier National Gallery version (Plate 8), the sky is visible between the central mass and the left turret in a thin vertical strip of blue, suggesting three-dimensional space, while at the same time the turret is made indistinguishable in space from the tower behind—an overall effect which invokes a conventional mode of rendering space through succession and overlap, making the anticipation of ready response felt in the first instance (the relationship of turret to facade) but taking away its efficiency in the second (turret to tower). But now let’s compare this with the later Boston version (Plate 11). I suggested above that the turret was made nearly, though not quite, indistinguishable from the tower behind it. What is significant here is that the sense of intermediary space is suggested (not depicted) between the turret and tower. Viewed from a certain distance, although the left turret is placed against the tower as in most of the oblique views, here it does not appear flatly against it to the point of completely eliminating all sense of depth. Directional strokes of muted blues indicate the structural form of the open tracery of the turret pinnacle, while lighter shades of more broadly applied pinks and oranges indicate the surface of the sunlit tower behind, seen through that open fretwork of the upper turret. The turret’s form is still vaguely distinguishable from the tower, occupying a space in front of it; this is suggested through the subtle use of color and variation in brushwork. By 1893, Monet seems to be enforcing that obscurity of spatial relations prompted initially by the oblique view, inducing in the viewer a near claustrophobic lack of space through increasingly shallow depth at the bottom edge of the canvas, allowing little or no fictional-illusionistic point of entry from “this” side of the picture plane, and, at the top edge an increasingly limited amount of open sky. These features are most emphatic in The Portal (Harmony in Blue) (Plate 15) 63 and in Rouen Cathedral, The Facade in Sunlight (Plate 13). All traces of geographical or narrative specificity have disappeared now; however, times of day and changes of weather and atmosphere are still discernable. The Orsay version, Plate 15, depicts the late morning sun which has already risen from behind the building and is now moving overhead,

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not yet falling full onto the facade, thus allowing for a more clearly differentiated surface and resolvability of form. The distribution of color, predominantly light shades of blue, orange, and pink, is relatively consistent across the canvas, although gradually becoming more saturated and more thickly applied at the center, where our attention is concentrated. This is further supported by the observation that, as the facade moves further out of that focal center, obliquely off to the left and back, brushstroke and palette become more uniform and the features depicted recede into indeterminability. 64 Visual sharpness is most pronounced in the Boston picture of 1893 (Plate 14), as the blinding effect of midday light has passed. The two buttresses between center and lateral portals and those at either end of the facade protrude, relieflike, in their dense build-up of paint layers in lighter shades of orange, yellow, and pink, “behind” which the three portal niches extend diagonally back (due to their oblique orientation to the picture plane), scooping in deep pockets of light which carves out their interior space. Brushmark in these areas, mainly a mixture of green and ochre and muted pinks, darker than the more highly lit buttresses, is laid on in a way which mimes the imagined curves of the archivolts, in rich contrast to the linear, vertical strokes used for the buttress supports. This highly contrived laying-on of paint is most noticeable in the archivolt regions of portals. There the work of the brush is almost systematic in its application: the first, lower curve of the arch is picked out in an orange-ochre tone, repeated above by a contiguous layer of darkish pink; then another layer of orange-ochre follows, over-arching the previous marks and extending down further laterally on either side; and finally completed by a darker brown-violet. The movement of the brush, its arching semicircular gesture, its dense and broad application, and its alternation of color value from lighter to darker tones, shares an intended relation to what it sets out to depict. It is an implied relation between states of perceiving: our gradual apprehension of moving light picks out the uneven and densely textured surface of a sculpted doorway with shifting degrees of resolution; this is suggested by an analogous mode of varying and controlling the levels of discrimination of facture in painted passages and their chromatic relationships.

ON TIME AND REPAINTING Such detailed analysis of the paintings has been concerned both with their subtleties and with Monet’s inventiveness and obsessiveness. But, we need to ask, what was Monet seeking in adjusting and refocusing the same basic elements over and over again? The answer, I think, involves another issue that requires attention here before moving on to consider the critical response to the canvases, and that is studio repainting, from memory and away from the motif, which, as other studies have shown, greatly altered and affected the final appearance of the paintings. Grace Seiberling has observed, for instance, that “because of inconsistencies due to the later elaboration of effects . . . it is not possible to see them as representing changes of light at intervals of, say, fifteen minutes.” 65 And she is quite right. We should not think of Monet’s Cathedral series as a complete sequential record of meteorological and temporal changes registered by light, despite the enthusiastic efforts of critics, as we will see in the next chapter, to convince otherwise. Studio repainting, as Seiberling suggests, often makes the specific time of day in any particular canvas ambiguous, or at least different from what the painter would have originally seen there, and often impossible to detect with any degree of certainty. This is due, in part, to repainted passages often not corresponding to particular features of the subject. In fact, it is in no way clear what, exactly, was done in the studio as Monet worked long enough on site for repaintings. There is, I suggest, a further significance to repainting, whether in the studio or in front of the motif. These reworkings involve the sorts of additions, reformulations, and re-visions Monet made both back in his Giverny studio (in the intervening months between visits to Rouen and before the exhibition two years after his last campaign there) and in front of the motif, reworking earlier canvases on later visits. What is done in the studio is

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not discontinuous with what is done before the model. Rather, it is a question of Monet’s rethinking his subject and the mode of procedure appropriate to it, sustaining a long process of variation and reformulation. What this extensive reworking away from or after the original “moment” of the motif does signal is that Monet was concerned with something other than a record of the visual phenomena of atmospheric and temporal effects; the paintings in their final form necessarily bear only a limited correspondence to the immediate physical conditions at the motif. The thick encrustation of paint that is the central feature of these canvases—a dense build-up of shorter, smaller, and more layered brush marks than his plein-air subjects typically called for—when viewed at a distance less than that appropriate for some degree of illusionistic resolvability, bears little resemblance to any particular aspect of the subject the painter sees; rather, the pictures sustain a look which is the result of the conditions of their making. In some canvases thick textural strokes of paint, built up layer upon layer over the canvas, are allowed to dry before other colors are superimposed on them, but where the prior layers are not obscured. In others, thinner opaque coats of surface color are dragged across the thickly encrusted coagulations of dried pigment underneath, filling the deep crevices in the underlying texture strokes. As a result of these methods, the pictures retain their earlier configurations, allowing a distinct but less emphatic reworking over them, so that the visual effect of the earlier stages is just as present to our awareness as the final surface marks. The insistent presence of earlier phases is fused with later stages, giving evidence of varying and sometimes inconsistent ways the subject could appear to the painter. 66 Yes, Monet’s project is a matter of tracing chronological time. But it is more than that. It involves the kind of time we mean when we say something like “this last hour has passed slowly”—that is, the experiencing of time rather than its external measure. Something more akin to Proust’s felt time, a bringing together of duration, space, perception, and emotion. It is something closer to what George Heard Hamilton called “an extended perceptual experience reaching more widely through time and more deeply . . . into the psychological structure of life.” 67 For Monet, it is an intense concentration on the motif and an absorption with the sensuous properties of both his subject and his material. The dense webs of paint and layered surfaces of the Cathedrals result from the uniqueness of the motif itself—the irregular surface of a Gothic cathedral facade made entirely of carved stone. And what Monet elicits from the viewer is a continuous alteration of forms, an accretion of successive stages of the same image which demands that the attention and focus of the viewer shift with it to consider the various perceptual possibilities within the object. The object of our perception is the same, it is we who are changing. It is a matter of perception and all that that entails. Monet is presenting the object as having properties but also the experience as having properties and qualities of changing and unrealized possibilities. It is not so much a matter of combining different views of the same thing seen over time, but rather of catching the temporal flow of perception itself. This is what critics will struggle to describe in 1895, the topic of chapter three.

AN EXHIBITION Until this time Monet seems never to have taken so much time and spent so much effort in completing a single group of interrelated canvases for exhibition. From the very start he appears to be working on the Rouen pictures with some sense of them as a cohesive group, unified by simultaneous painting: “From now on I do not want to sell my canvases in advance. I want to finish them first, without any pressure, and then choose those I will sell.” 68 This sense of significance that the series as a whole had for him is reinforced in his frustration over repeated attempts at getting it right: “it’s not going at all well, I fumble about and don’t get what I want; it’s distressing.” 69 Such frustration suggests that the painter had something rather specific in mind in approaching this new motif, something that sustained an interest for him beyond the concerns of the ordinary narrative

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and topographical conventions of land- or cityscape, something which demanded close scrutiny and focused attention. I am absolutely discouraged and dissatisfied with what I’m doing here, I’ve tried too hard and have destroyed what was good. I’ve not worked for four days and am thinking of abandoning the whole thing and returning home. I do not want to unpack my canvases nor do I even want to see them for a while. 70

And the maintenance of such a level of intense and recursive attention toward the same motif, which for Monet involved near complete isolation with that subject, is a repeated theme in his commentary on his own practice of painting. Postponing his wife’s scheduled visit to Rouen while he was painting there in February 1893, Monet wrote to Alice, “Your coming would disturb me now when I absolutely need all of my strength, all of my will, to pull me out of his great difficulty.” 71 He wrote again several weeks later of this self-imposed—nearly fanatical—discipline and of his slow and considered response to his subject: I attack this like a madman . . . I work hard, but to no avail. Tonight, I wanted to compare what I’d done with older work that until now I’ve avoided looking at so as not to make the same mistakes. Well! The result is that I was right to be dissatisfied earlier; it’s horrible, and what I’m doing now is just as bad, worse even. 72

These remarks are revealing in that for Monet, it seems, the only possibility of giving new accent to a conventional subject, one already refracted through the vision of others—as we will see, the Gothic cathedral enjoyed immense popularity as subject matter not only for artists but for writers as well—lay in working one’s way slowly and deliberately through it, coming to know it thoroughly, and ultimately reflecting that behavior in the pictures themselves as a distinct familiarity with the subject—both a physical and a mental mastery of it—to the point where its interest changes character for him beyond the merely literal. And this was a painstaking process. Thus the frustration Monet voices in these more private letters refers less to a matter of inability than to the struggle to capture the ineffable in his subject. Theodore Robinson records in his diary how the painter had first mentioned to him in December 1893 his intention to exhibit his Cathedrals the following spring. 73 But already by mid-February Monet is once again discouraged and begins the first of a protracted series of delays and postponements to the exhibition. From Giverny on February 20, 1894, he writes to Durand-Ruel after a visit from the dealer’s son: “Your son must have told you that he found me a little discouraged. I am on the verge of giving up the idea of exhibiting the Cathedrals which I do not seem to be able to do to my satisfaction.” 74 Before the end of that week, he promised the dealer, he will write again to inform him of his final decision; he suspects, however, that he will decide against exhibiting. Yet, at least at this stage of the negotiations, Monet apparently had decided to go ahead as planned, but on April 12, virtually at the last minute, he hesitates again, asking Durand-Ruel to hold off the opening “for a few days,” say, around the 15th of May [1894]. 75 Around this time he is still expecting an exhibition the following month and, with relatively few of the pictures completed and while still working on them in the studio, he invites Durand-Ruel to Giverny so that together they may make final preparations and selections: “we will make the decisions for my exhibition and you can choose two of the Cathedrals that I am sure to be able to finish, and that will allow me to offer others to other people.” 76 Monet’s insistence that, until ready for exhibition, the series would remain together to allow him to work on the canvases simultaneously and side by side, one in relation to the other, in the studio and away from the motif—a restriction he had not imposed with such severity in the previous Grainstack series—is typically explained in the Monet literature as a disinterested aesthetic decision on the painter’s part, invoked as evidence for a view of the series as a decorative ensemble with little relevance as to the subject matter they depict. However, other more practical considerations clearly contributed to the repeated postponement of the exhibition, as Monet’s closing remarks in the letter

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above indicate. And this had to do with the painter’s own management of his public image and the considerable financial success that was contingent on this long-awaited show. He writes to DurandRuel on May 7 (1894) now “absolutely” refusing an exhibition that year and goes on to say that “If I am asked for the Cathedrals I will sell only at the price that I asked of you, but on the condition that they remain in France for a certain time, in order to put together an exhibition at the appropriate moment.” 77 These are the astute and carefully considered remarks of one who clearly sees himself as in control with respect to his public and not the other way around. In their most immediate and practical sense, they reflect part of a shrewd campaign, managed by the painter himself, around the most profitable deployment of his pictures. It was by now a typical maneuvre on Monet’s part which a rather less financially successful Pissarro was to call in 1887, not without some bitterness, Monet’s “salesmanship game.” 78 And this game was a long, drawn-out, and not particularly amicable one having to do primarily with the sensitive issues of prices and prestige. It is a well-remarked-on aspect of the Monet legend that Durand-Ruel was astonished by the exorbitant prices the painter was demanding for each Cathedral canvas, signaling, in Monet’s art-market savvy by the end of the century, not only self-confidence and assured commercial success, but also the high standard and special significance which the painter himself attached to this particular set of pictures. Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien on February 19, 1895, three months before the exhibition was even set to open, that a well-known collector had purchased three Cathedrals from Monet at the price of 15,000 francs each. 79 This is a remarkable sum when considering that the painter had purchased his entire estate at Giverny only five years earlier for 20,000 francs. Monet at this time seemed confident in commanding these kinds of sums, and, inflexible on the issue, he began what can most charitably be described as a shrewd managing of dealers and collectors, one played off against the next, to a point at which his rather undiplomatic handling of those who wielded financial power nearly backfired on him. On May 2, 1894, Monet casually announced to Durand-Ruel that he had just received word from another dealer (Valadon) who was due to arrive at Giverny in a matter of days (the implication, of course, is that the dealer is to make preliminary selections from the pictures), and furthermore, that he (Monet) is corresponding with other (unnamed) parties who have expressed an interest in these canvases, and (again implicitly) who may be more willing to pay the prices he is asking, 80 all the while adamantly refusing to compromise on this issue. 81 On May 25, apparently realizing the delicacy of a rather awkward situation he has himself created, Monet makes a gesture of concession, informing Durand-Ruel that his intention now is to put aside a certain selection of the Cathedral pictures, “those I believe to be the most important,” which will not be sold for anything less than the highest price, allowing the dealer to sell the remaining ones at a more reasonable and agreeable price. Happy with his decision to put off the exhibition for now, he further informs the dealer that he can expect it to take place toward the end of that year, October or November. 82 Seemingly content with the widespread unofficial publicity, popularity, and general agitation that the Cathedrals generated before their exhibition, Monet writes somewhat disingenuously to yet another interested collector, a M. Joyant, on August 7, “You must know that I have put off and disappointed others interested in being the first to choose from the Cathedrals,” anxious to give Joyant first refusal (or, more accurately, to have him believe he is getting first refusal) of what remains available for purchase, provided he is still in mind to pay the price already discussed between them. 83 As if not wanting to appear too anxious, however, while at the same time cajoling his customer, and in truth protecting himself against what he recognizes as a potentially embarrassing meeting of rival dealers and collectors, Monet several days later writes back to Joyant to add that he is of course welcome to come to Giverny for a private viewing (and, hopefully, to make a purchase or at least place a reserve) at any time, providing he give Monet notice of his arrival at least one day in advance. 84 These sensitive and not altogether above-board strategems and negotiations continue throughout the summer with the various parties concerned, each coming to Giverny one after the next—

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Joyant, Glaenzer, Comando, Manzi, on a first-come-with-the-highest-price, first-served basis 85— until Monet finds himself embroiled in a tricky and indefensible situation of his own making early in September. On the 10th of that month, the painter writes to Durand-Ruel informing him that, despite the dealer’s predictions to the contrary, his Cathedrals had found purchasers at the price he was demanding and hence many have been promised away (in other words, unavailable to Durand-Ruel). He further tells of a visit that same day (September 10) from Valadon who claimed to represent the dealers Durand-Ruel, Montaignac, and Valadon in a common agreement to make Monet a firm and final offer to purchase, but at a price so far below what Monet found reasonable that he would not accept. However, Monet goes on, Valadon further made it quite clear that if the painter refused this proposition, Valadon would be obliged to relinquish all interest in the future dealing of his paintings. 86 The painter, confessing his “disbelief,” now found himself faced with a formal demand by a coalition of dealers who up until this point Monet had managed to play individually one against the next to his own benefit. Valadon returned almost immediately demanding a price from Monet that would be acceptable to Messrs. Durand-Ruel, Montaignac and himself, and on September 12, Monet committed himself to a compromise of 12,000 francs instead of the original 15,000. 87 Soon after this incident Monet wrote again to Joyant, the buyer who had all along been prepared to pay the higher sum, and from whom Monet, it seems, had not had recent word, evidently worried about what had quelled the man’s original enthusiasm and further anxious to hear from Joyant the gossip behind this recently developed coalition of dealers—“the underground campaign against me,” as Monet rather melodramatically referred to it. Reporting with trepidation to the collector the events taking place at Giverny within the past few days, all on account of the Cathedrals, Monet goes on: “As you know, I have had three visits (and it’s not over yet); formal reproaches and incessant haggling that will not stop until I give in and sell the Cathedrals at a bargain.” 88 When completed, it was an unfriendly transaction that was to cause lasting damage to the personal and professional relationship between Monet and Durand-Ruel, one with reverberations long after the exhibition. With ill feeling still evident six months later, Monet wrote to the dealer on November 23, 1895: It is clear to me that, from the day I decided to set my own price for my Cathedrals, our relationship has changed, the coalition formed against me was the beginning of the hostilities. It is no less certain that, since my exhibition, much was done to prevent the sale of the pictures, and if this had not been such a concern and source of anxiety between us for months, I would have written you before now. But you have given me the occasion to tell you frankly that which I know for certain, that many foreigners came to Paris with the intention of purchasing a Cathedral and, not being able to, were told by you, when they expressed a willingness to come to Giverny, not to disturb me. (“M. Monet is unwilling to sell.”) To others, you said that you were unable to purchase because of my exorbitant prices (that I would not sell for less than thirty thousand francs). I know specifically of a number of people that you dissuaded. See here, Monsieur Durand, after our long relationship, do you call this loyalty? 89

An irritated Durand-Ruel was quick to respond the next day; that response is worth reproducing in full here to get the tenor of ill-feeling: Your letter came as quite a shock . . . I nevertheless appreciate your honesty, as it allows me to clarify what has become so distorted and to vindicate myself from these absurd accusations . . . There has never existed a coalition between Boussod, Montaignac and myself, nothing of the sort. We all were simply quite surprised and taken aback at the value you attributed to your Cathedrals; it is we who have suffered with respect to our customers because of your prices. We would have been forced to add 10-to-15 percent for ourselves and would have been accused of gouging, no one being able to believe that we had had to pay so dearly ourselves . . . You do not realize that we, too, had to deal with considerable ill-feeling about this from a majority of very important dealers as well as from one of your own friends, and [on top of this there is] the market crisis in America . . . Considering all this, and with the threat of financial ruin in my

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case, it was with great sadness that I was obliged to pass up your Cathedrals which I greatly admire. . . . The proof that I have no nor have ever had any animosity toward you and that my admiration for your talent, as well as my friendship for you, has not changed, is that I committed myself wholeheartedly to your exhibition, and that I did everything in my power to ensure its success, and to sell your work; and, if I was not more successful, this is certainly not my fault . . . Anyone who said to you that I prevented the sale of your Cathedrals, during or after the exhibition, has lied to you. They lied also when they told you that I discouraged people from going to Giverny, that you did not wish to sell anything, or that you would sell your Cathedrals for no less than 30,000 francs. There is not a word of truth in any of this, and I really don’t know what would possess anyone to put these or any such absurd ideas in your head. I simply said to some people who were inquiring privately of your Cathedrals that I had returned to you those that had not been purchased, and that I had not made a purchase myself, finding the price of 15,000 francs too high for a dealer in my present circumstances, but always adding that the pictures themselves were wonderful, that you had sold several even before the exhibition, and that I had placed some on commission to some of my clients, and that if I were wealthy I would have wished to have purchased the entire collection from you. This is what I have always thought, this is the way in which I have always spoken of you, always with the same enthusiasm for your talent, always wanting to do well by you, and without any ulterior motive on my part, and never have I uttered a single word resembling these stupid fabrications you have been told . . . I am both astonished and hurt that you were able to believe these absurdities for a moment . . . You have known me long enough to know that I have never sought to profit at others’ expense, and, quite to the contrary, I often put aside my own interests to support those of my friends, and that I have never given you or anyone else cause to doubt this. 90

As for the much-awaited exhibition itself, the difficulties between dealer and painter which began in the autumn of 1894 prolonged the delayed opening still, and it is not until December 25 that Monet writes to Georges Durand-Ruel (the dealer’s son and assistant) suggesting a possible date toward the end of the following April, that is, if his father is still in mind to comply with the decisions concerning details of its arrangement reached the previous year. If not, Monet asks—still stubbornly refusing to relinquish the upper hand—should he seek another venue? After the series of repeated delays—mainly at Monet’s own instigation—the painter concludes, “it [the exhibition opening] needs to be the most advantageous, and naturally with the least delay possible.” 91 And apparently Monet wasn’t bluffing; he had indeed made inquiries about the possibility of another venue for the exhibition (and, hence, dealership control) as a letter to Georges Petit dated January 19, 1895 indicates, informing the rival dealer—“regretfully”—that apropos their earlier discussion and contrary to his (Monet’s) expectation, his exhibition is, finally, to be held at Durand-Ruel’s. Apart from its own intrigue, this story is recounted here to underscore the kind of importance the “Cathedrals exhibition”—it is always referred to as such by Monet—held for the painter, and to suggest the intensity of anticipation and sheer curiosity Monet himself skillfully generated around the pictures before their public debut. Yet the postponements and delays were still not quite over. Monet wrote to Durand-Ruel from his painting expedition in Norway in the early part of March 1895, sheepishly inquiring if it would not be too inconvenient to put off the exhibition, yet again, this time for about fifteen days—he suggests the 10th or 15th of May 92—so that he might finish what he is presently working on 93—a series of views of Mont Kolsaas in Sandiviken, six views of which, all seen from the same viewpoint and under variable conditions of light and weather, which were also shown at the 1895 Cathedrals exhibition. Back in Giverny in April he wrote to DurandRuel on the 21st of the month to say that, although he is still working on many of the canvases he expects to show, he will be ready to open on May 10, 94 and expects to be in Paris shortly to finalize arrangements. On May 5 Monet submitted his catalogue checklist, 95 and, finally, five days later the exhibition opened. Firmly entrenched at Giverny and fully confident of the success he is enjoying in Paris, on the 19th he somewhat haughtily writes again to the dealer: “I am determined not to budge from here for the next week. If you have news for me about the exhibition, write me.” Signed, abruptly, “C.M.” 96

3 Depiction, Perception, Memory: The Critical Response objects retain something of the eyes which have looked at them, . . . old buildings and pictures appear to us . . . beneath a perceptible veil woven for them over the centuries by the love and contemplation of millions of admirers. —Proust, In Search of Lost Time

IT WAS IMPORTANT TO PAINT THE CATHEDRALS, AND MONET’S CRITICS SAW WHY; IT HAD TO DO WITH THE convolutions of time. First, it is a matter of perception—the kind of temporality involved in engaging visually with the dense surfaces of individual canvases and with the series as a whole, suggesting the layered complexity of our “momentary” perception. Then, there is the kind of temporality that is implied in the real historical character of the motif itself, a sense of the past embedded in our present experience of the medieval edifice. Struck by the unusual choice of the invariant Gothic monument as subject matter, critics, used to talking about “instantaneity”—now less a description of speed in painterly execution than an attribute of perception—continued to focus on the issue of temporality and the complications of permanence and change in the exercise of that perception.

THE CRITICS By the 1890s, Monet’s facture was no longer widely considered a defective mode of representation. Procédé de la tache and phrases like it were still used in critical commentary on the painter, but now in defense of the painter by sympathetic critics to give an account of his method of painting as an advance in representational faithfulness in effecting fleeting appearances. The measure of verisimilitude, by equating brushmark to depicted object, was no longer the crucial criterion of success or failure. However, now faced with its application to subject matter critically unclassifiable within Impressionism’s range of references, some commentators still found it necessary to talk about a procedure of painting in terms of its transcriptive force and accuracy in representation. One such reviewer in May 1895 argued for what he believed to be Monet’s methodical observation and reportorial notation. Using the analogy of scientific precision, he described what he took to be the painter’s transcription of uninterrupted changes of light and atmospheric effect—a depicting procedure interpretively and expressively indifferent to the depicted subject, where that subject serves as mere framework of invariance against which a virtuoso display of color combinations can be used to evoke the optical effects of reflected light. Far from being improvisers, these artists [Manet, Monet, etc] are analytical and laborious researchers. Their doctrine, when one examines it rationally, has a very scientific character. It is based on the breakup of the sun’s rays that present to the eye the sensation of natural light and atmosphere that surrounds objects. 1

Other critics, adopting a more typical view, maintained this idea of Monet’s painting as factual reporting, but, in view of the deliberateness of an implied temporal quality in the series, combined 48

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that notion of optical veracity with one of romantic interpretation, allowing a subjective dimension to Monet’s observation, still not specifically of the cathedral itself, but of the multiple effects of light and atmosphere. Henri Pellier wrote: This is the first time that a painter has embraced nature in all its forms with such fascination and determination. Not a single detail of atmospheric effect has escaped his painstaking and sure vision. One feels that the artist was consumed by nature’s spectacle, and that he was able to register on his canvas each new fleeting effect of light that he both saw and felt. 2

Thiébault-Sisson, writer for Le Temps, similarly conceived of the ensemble of canvases as a scientific analysis of the shifting conditions of light and atmosphere across a stable unvarying structure, describing the series as a sequential temporal unfolding of those changing conditions over the course of a single day. The Cathedrals were, on this view, about time—the march of days, hours, minutes, seconds—painstakingly calibrated through light. At every hour of the day, in all conditions, gray skies, clear skies, sunny skies, under the cold morning mist, under the thin vaporous veil that follows, in a fog that absorbs the sun, under the gold dust-cloud of midday, under the pink light of sunset, under the gray ash-blond of twilight, he has captured each aspect of Rouen Cathedral. 3

Georges Clemenceau, like other reviewers finding a certain order or system to the twenty canvases on view, similarly described an analytic decomposition of the object of depiction over actual time in perception—“tight, clear, mathematically precise sketching”—while emphasizing the significance of the beholder in distinguishing the different and constantly variable states and aspects of the thing perceived, stressing the continuity of change within the duration of our perception. the artist realized that . . . if in an equal day of light, the morning joins the evening through a series of infinite transitions, each new moment of each variable day constitutes, under the mobile light, a new state of the object which never has been or never will be again. The perfect eye should be as apt to grasp that state as the hand to render it. 4

Still other critics, however, while adopting the analogy with scientific observation, objected that Monet’s painting did not, in fact, represent an advance in truth-to-nature, holding instead that Monet’s facture was an affected, exaggerated plein-airiste analysis of nature. In this close examination of atmosphere made visible as slow-moving color, and to better express . . . the most fugitive of atmospheric nuances, they [Impressionists] made good use of all that science has been able to tell us about color; they have analyzed the various elements of tone, and juxtaposed them on the canvas to obtain, by optical mixture, more transparent light, more brilliant vibrations of light . . . It is true that one must be extremely gifted with the power of illusion to represent nature in this way, as the Impressionists do, to capture fugitive effects, it is said, beyond all conventions . . . M.Claude Monet, for example, paints only en plein air, they say, unable to work anywhere but in the presence of nature and—at the slightest breath of air that sweeps a cloud along and thereby modifies the light, and thus the whole physiognomy of the landscape, he moves quickly between several canvases, jumping from one to the next, according to shifts in the breeze . . . Such acrobatics seem to me as much puerile as vain. 5

The author of these remarks, the critic and art historian André Michel, writing in 1896, launches an attack on the by now standard justification of Monet’s painting as true to nature, arguing against the logic of painting’s naive claim to capture a “true” representation of sunlight and atmosphere; an impressionist painting technique, Michel argues, is a fabrication, an artistic convention like any other with a set of criteria entirely independent of nature. The graduation of color values is simply not the same in nature as in paint; it is impossible to paint the sun accurately; a work of art is never an accurate recording, it is always an interpretation. 6

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A recording of transient appearances of natural phenomena, the claim of many of Monet’s commentators—detractors as well as supporters—is, according to Michel, necessarily and logically false. the impressionist wants to fix the more fugitive aspects of nature, that which is most limpid, the most elusive, the most fleeting. And this is at once his charm and his weakness . . . It goes against all common sense to constantly pursue the evanescent and fleeting, where the painting loses form and solidity, which requires and deserves close examination and observation. 7

Michel takes exception mainly with what he understands to be Monet’s intention: “to seek by close analysis the elusiveness of luminous vibrations and thereby to dissolve line and form in an exasperated radiance, a kind of universal palpitation of colored molecules . . . over a monument of stone . . . in arbitrary and over-lyrical evocations.” 8 Like other critics, Michel felt compelled to discuss Monet’s painting in terms of technique, negatively concluding that “M. Claude Monet applies to easel pictures, a painting procedure that has something exasperating” and “extreme” about it, to the point where it “exhausts itself and will die.” “Twenty times, one after the next, without repetition, with astonishing virtuosity and extraordinary subtlety of the eye,” “variously imagining the theme and its different effect,” he ultimately brings a “disconcerting facture.” 9 Michel’s richly comprehensive account of the Cathedral pictures echoes the sort of reluctant opposition to Monet’s painting and its facture some twenty years earlier, wherein a certain enthusiasm derived from the visual experience in front of the pictures themselves, but where that enthusiasm is ultimately tempered by a resistance to “inappropriate” procedure—astonishing spectacle and power of illusion when viewed at a distance, but where that illusion dissolves on closer inspection. Michel goes on: In the center of the room, at eight or ten meters from the picture, there is a point, a unique point, where everything mixes on the retina and you will be able to see, in their delicate shade, their fine transparencies, the harmonies moving and vibrating, produced by the combination of color fragments.

But, he continues: Closer, it is a crude and shapeless mass, a confused congestion of tiny fragments, bits of greens, rose, vermilion, some blue and yellow . . . If you come too close, it is nothing more than irregular blobs of color 10

In a not dissimilar way, Thadée Natanson, writing in La Revue Blanche on June 1, 1895, took Monet’s main intention in the Rouen series to be the methodical observation and transcriptive recording of the actual visual sensations of changing light and shadow against an indifferent and invariable motif, for which the painter developed a scientific formula of color analysis. The series format served the painter, on this view, merely as armature against which to register chromatic changes intended to inventory the multiple perceptions of variable light impulses. Like other critics who took the view of Monet’s Cathedrals as a naturalistic documentation in paint of the visual experience of changing light, unmindful of the interpretation of those appearances of shadow and light, Natanson, invoking the invariance of the motif itself, excluded the possibility of meaning with respect to subject matter. It seems . . . that he was obsessed with this new subject, where nothing would distract or disrupt the worship of light . . . the single pursuit of a formula for the light impressions . . . over, rather paradoxically, a block of stone. 11

Monet’s facture, for Natanson, if still ungainly, or at least suspect, was a necessary technical means by which the visual effects it achieved were produced. And this is the point at which this critic’s main objection to Monet’s painting is most interesting and illuminating; his remarks signal a certain unease about the appropriateness to the art of painting of a concentration on the transitory; typical

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of much of Monet’s unfavorable criticism, they show an awareness and a critical appreciation of what the paint is actually doing. He admires Monet’s facture for the visual effects it achieves, explicitly invoking the way it takes light; but in the end the critic resists a more favorable judgment precisely because of that attraction which is felt to be in some way out of keeping with a notion of what painting should achieve. He is, in effect, perturbed by the idea that the viewer might be seduced from the ‘l’objet proper de la peinture.” if the best among them [painters] limit themselves to their favorite spectacles of nature and this exclusive preoccupation with capturing fleeting impressions of light, are they not distracted from the real object of painting? In single-mindedly pursuing the elusive moment, are they not in danger of losing focus? . . . Monopolized by this pursuit—as phenomenal as the results may be—to capture the luminosity of the instant, to the detriment of finished painting, to devote oneself entirely to this search . . . where can it end successfully? 12

While lamenting the course of painting, the critic remarks revealingly, and somewhat grudgingly, on the “pleasure” one takes in “considering the ensemble of these canvases, evoking even other absent variations;” but he is “worried about a painting procedure,” “doubtless necessary,” but nevertheless a “disconcerting virtuosity;” he is disturbed by this “construction of crusts of paint, almost sculptural.” “One prefers,” in the end, something “less fugitive, more moderate perhaps, but more lasting.” 13 Unlike his earlier painting, now Monet’s canvases are densely and emphatically compacted, each canvas sustaining the appearance of long and calculated efforts of painting and considerable repainting and presented as such so as to suggest the textural richness of our perception. A greater variety of hues and thicknesses of touch are juxtaposed against and embedded in one another such that the surface of the canvas is built up gradually into a multivalent and accumulative experience of color and texture effecting the illusion of moving light on an irregular surface, where color changes are meant to register our sensitivity to the progress of day and season as part of the nuances of momentary perception. In a rare moment of commentary on his own practice, in a letter to Gustave Geffroy dated October 7, 1890, Monet struggles with this paradoxical notion of the complexity and slowness which go into his effort to capture instantaneity. I’m hard at it, working stubbornly on a series of different effects . . . I’m getting so slow at my work it makes me despair, but the further I get, the more I see that a lot of work has to be done in order to render what I’m looking for: “instantaneity,” the “envelope” above all, the same light spread over everything, and more than ever I’m disgusted by easy things that come in one go. Anyway, I’m increasingly obsessed by the need to render what I experience . . . 14

That effort is to capture his subject in a continued and sustained relation to it, a method of painting which itself can be further broken down into a notion of slowness that is not merely a means of production but a consequent elaboration of the experience of perceiving the object. 





One of Monet’s more astute critics in 1895 was also one of his detractors. Camille Mauclair, the young symbolist writer for Mercure de France, identified a paradox or tension built into Monet’s “disconcerting”—the word is his—series. In his review of the exhibition in June of that year Mauclair began by admitting, even giving faint praise to, the painter’s technical achievement, while objecting to a certain danger which he felt inhered in this kind of painting. M. Monet is unquestionably the most prodigious virtuoso that French painting has seen since Manet. While there is little agreement today on what painting is, on this there is general agreement: that M. Claude Monet is the premier painter of his era. 15

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The painting’s shortcomings are those more or less familiar from an earlier generation of critics: an alleged formlessness through willful inattention to linear draftsmanship and compositional clarity, lack of regard for descriptive legibility, undisciplined unmodulated color, and an overall melting imprecision. But these earlier charges are invoked again, in this context, to accuse Monet of an inexcusable hedonism: Monet’s effort is considerable and particularly significant. After a life of shimmering sensuality, to grapple with the verticality of these pictures, where all the planes are reduced to a single one, and to attempt to apply to these ascents of monochromatic stone, to these linear definitions, an art which is exclusively color-concerned and orgiastic, this is the deed of a very audacious and very powerful man. The very idea that Gothic art, that cerebral art par excellence, is being used by this superbly sensual, pagan [artist] is a bit repugnant . . . All that his genius does is to add excessive color—admirable but excessive—to these facades which, by the sole fact of their orientation and of their rhythm, signify plastically as much as these fireworks, and signify morally everything that they negate. 16

Mauclair is arrested by a “disconcerting” facture, and where his account of painterly procedure is perhaps more interesting than that of his colleagues is in his holding it—and Monet—accountable to the subject matter it addresses. Other reviewers had taken for granted Monet’s facture as an attempt to capture the continuous mobility of light, atmosphere, and climate over an invariable and indifferent motif, itself incapable of natural transformation; Mauclair takes exception to Monet’s crude and self-indulgent display of virtuosity, his subjective art of color, as inappropriate to Gothic construction, an art of line, volume, and proportion. For Mauclair what is disconcerting is what he sees as Monet’s indecorous, “insolent,” and purely sensuous exploration of the medium “gone too far,” an affront to the intellectual sobriety of Gothic measure and order. This series of portals of Rouen at every hour and in every kind of light is amazing in its mastery, its strength, its bright colors, its delicacy and its magic . . . [But] M. Monet goes a little too far in the iridescence. Certain portals look multi-colored and seem blended in the azure of the tropics. Others are drowning in a powdery effect that pleases the eye, but disturbs the impression of the severity of the old Gothic stones. 17

The critic holds this surface seduction—its excess and exaggeration—as morally (blasphemous and orgiastic) and intellectually (irrational) inferior, not simply to the linearity and regularity of architecture as an art form, but the principled and rational severity of Gothic architecture: “And what insistent seduction of surface, of patina, what painterly abandon! There is nothing thoughtful, intellectual here.” 18 The critic’s indignation is with a “decadent” and “pagan” art of the senses, a “sparkling sensualism,” a “decadence that knows only virtuosity for its own sake,” lacking all moral restraint, and when applied in heroic scale and format to an art of the intellect, “the intellect feels disappointed and at loose ends.” 19 The critic is perturbed by the surface animation of these pictures, by their obtrusive layers of paint, by the dense weave of loaded impasto which called to mind the procedures of continual re-painting and re-casting in the build-up of successive layers of paint. And this is to get it right. Mauclair’s “Gothic” has more in common with the views of architect-restorer Viollet-le-Duc, who set about a dispassionate reappraisal of Gothic architecture, rigorously subjecting it to what he believed was an impartial and scientific positivist approach. Viollet had claimed that “la vérité”— a truth to materials and logical principles of structure—revealed by the methods of modern science, was what in fact defined “le sérieux” of the medieval style. In Viollet’s Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XI au XVI, published in 1854–66, a multivolume study which, as its title indicates, was concerned with an objective and systematic analysis of the various architectonic facts and rational functionalism of building construction in the Middle Ages, categorically defined Gothic structure as “the result of a rational system,” 20 and medieval architects as “des rationalistes.” 21 Nothing could be further from the “fantastic,” “horrible,” and “monstrous” irregularity and picturesque disorder of Victor Hugo’s melodramatic romanticism. Viollet had argued of Gothic

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architecture, “this art follows a logical order,” in which “nothing is left to chance . . . everything is calculated from the outset, everything is in its proper place.” 22 “The true merit of the architects of the Middle Ages,” he goes on, “lay in their having well-defined rules, to which to submit and serve . . . Our masters of the Middle Ages were serious, they came to the task knowing how they were to proceed; they moved methodically, with geometry, leaving nothing to chance.” 23 This unsentimental approach is made even more evident in his own highly schematic architectural drawings, where Gothic buildings are treated with linear precision and clarity as abstract and ordered objects of mathematical measure, symmetry, and proportion, without reference to their human environment and without regard for the natural conditions under which they are seen. It is to this “Gothic” that Mauclair finds Monet’s virtuosity unfitting. For critics like Mauclair, what seemed important was the integrity of the motif and its associations with a moral and intellectual bearing inappropriate to the sumptuous skill of Monet’s mode of depiction. Painting procedure here is seen as incongruous to depicted subject—and this is to give critical importance to subject matter. There were others who maintained this view. The anonymous critic for Le Matin, for instance, wrote: Now, above all these are “effects;” surprising as they may be, it must be said that a cathedral is not a luminous synthesis, a phantasmagoria of light; its details exist as does its mass, and this mass asserts itself with more of a crushing force than these castles of colored mist, these epidermises of sun and fog. 24

Others, like Georges Lecomte, reviewing the exhibition in La Nouvelle Revue in June of that year, attributed a distinctly expressive role to those encrusted, opaque surfaces of variegated color and texture, suggesting more of an analogy with the tactile stone facade they depict: “This is a joy to see the character and the poetry of stone rendered as such magnificent color.” 25 Lecomte’s analogy between the lapidary character of Gothic cathedral and Monet’s build-up of thick layers of color is not mere poetic embellishment to descriptive prose, but something he finds intrinsic to the production of the pictures themselves, expressive of “this beauty of atmosphere and stone.” 26 Moreover, for this critic, the appearance of Monet’s subject, affected by the character of natural phenomena against the visual and tactile irregularity of its own physical construction, is like the mobility of our real perception, and therefore highly appropriate to Monet’s nonstatic representation of it. Perceptual intricacy and the textural complication of canvas surfaces reinforce one another. Twenty canvases that express the poetry of stone, the audacious majesty of Gothic architecture and the charm of dream . . . that the subtle and varied atmosphere gives to things . . . the pink bloom of sunrise, the magnificence of noon light, or the delicacies and nuances of evening, [the cathedral] rises in mist or in gleaming light, fiercely colored under the sun, the proud facade in its character, its style, its nobility . . . through values of color meticulously analyzed for their appropriate placement in the reliefs, the depth of the shadows. All is complete, harmonious, and this grandiose stone poem is rendered in its majesty and its true meaning. 27

Ary Renan, writing in La Chronique des arts on May 18, focused rather on Monet’s consistency within the series, praising him for remaining “true to his procedure of an almost identical repetition of the same motif.” 28 And while Lecomte’s concern with the notion of change in our visual experience of the world was couched almost exclusively in his analogy with the visual irregularities of the stonecarved facade, Renan’s delight in “toute chose mouvantes” was determined by the apparent flow of time measured in the mobility of light expressed in changes of color over the stable motif. While Lecomte spoke of the “poetry of stone,” Renan admired the series as “an epic poem of light,” but he, too, held the pictures’ subject matter as the significant term in his analogy, a poem “in several verses inspired by the portal of the old Gothic wonder.” 29 Renan and Lecomte single out facture as responsible for the kind of optical effects in which both obviously delighted. For Renan, Monet’s procedure seemed as much inconsistent as controlled,

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somehow expressive of the ambivalent sense of permanence and change that he felt inhered in the subject itself. The painterly procedure, the whims and discipline of the brush, have never been more strangely disturbing in M. Monet’s oeuvre. An impasto that is synthetic to the extreme, brutal yet gentle, summary but nevertheless rich, colors of the rainbow at the service of these ambiguous visions. 30

It was a palpable sense of color configuration and surface pattern that this critic carried into his perception, a facture capable of sustaining his interest long after the initial compelling attraction it had for the eye, at once defining the object of depiction and resolvable by reference to that subject matter. And so for Renan the deliberate choice of a Gothic facade as paintable subject matter for Monet was inextricably bound up with the mode of procedure that would depict it. It is a subject saturated with connotations of sublime imaginative vision, of the epiphanic beyond the literally transcribable, and it was these associations which, for the critic, were appropriate to and triggered by Monet’s procedure of painting. In twenty canvases of equal and simple grandure, twenty different mirages of the massive facade projected on the retina . . . Rouen, city of opaline fogs, has a mysterious light; banks of clouds envelop it, sharpening and magnifying its aisles, its towers, its spires. In a minimal number of notes, sonorous and vibrating, the artist plays variations on a theme, on architecture bathed in its atmosphere, and its evanescent harmonies of evening and morning. 31

For this critic, just as for many others, this “facture synthétique”—exaggerated color and successive layers of paint application—worked on the viewer anagogically, transforming his real sensual experience of the object into the incorporeal, intuitive aspects of perception accessible only in the act of beholding, in a manner not unlike the parabolic meaning of allegory which the subject itself conjures up. Renan imputes to Monet’s mode of painting “the secret of transposing real spectacle into artistic parable!” 32 Charles Frémine, commenting on the exhibition in Le Rappel, opened his essay by making the comparison with Monet’s previous and extremely successful series exhibitions where, on his view, unlike in the Cathedrals, Monet’s ‘natural’ subjects offered the viewer a spatially and temporally bounded visual experience of the perceived world, where subjects like poplar trees and grainstacks prevented any kind of symbolic associations of history, memory, or mystery. To these earlier subjects of natural-world phenomena, he favorably opposed what he believed to be the superior spiritual and intellectual potency of the Gothic building in its shifting appearances. After the Grainstacks, after the Poplars, Claude Monet has this year sung the Cathedrals. A poem . . . this ensemble of studies that address the same object and where each is its own verse of light and color. Like the Poplars on the banks of the Epte that he reproduced around fifteen times, at all times of day and in all seasons . . . Claude Monet has brought the portal of Rouen Cathedral under the same scrutiny. But here the inspiration is greater, the song more enchanting. Stone has surpassed nature. 33

Through an obsessive repetition and intense concentration with which Monet returns to and reformulates his subject—for Frémine, an almost devotional or pious attention (the critic “remembers” as many as forty different versions)—the pictures transcend any measurable criterion of objective visual accuracy as to specific physical conditions which they ostensibly register, such as atmospheric effects and times of day, and beyond any observable degree of topographical precision or picturesque convention. Monet’s many variations, viewed comprehensively, are meant to congeal in the imagination of the beholder, where the innate spiritual or transcendent character of the subject is triggered by the multi-image expression. And it is not fifteen times, it is thirty, forty times that Claude Monet has reproduced this magnificent portal—under grey skies and clear, at midday and at twilight . . . and at sunset—bathing it in atmosphere,

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enveloping it in fog and in reverie; and these multiple images, these forms, these colors, meld in our imagination, in our thought, briefly as a whole; we see a single portal and, as that vision emerges, expands, the full cathedral presents itself, luminous, fantastic, with its spires, its finely wrought facade, struck by mystical glistening light. 34

More specifically, it is the modifying power of Monet’s facture in each individual picture which prompts this imaginative sense of the elaborately carved and embellished visual irregularity of the Gothic facade. Recall, for instance, our example of the Boston canvas of 1893 (Plate 14): the two buttresses between center and lateral portals and those at either end of the façade, protrude, relieflike, in their densely compacted layers of lighter shades of orange, yellow, and pink, “behind” which the three portal niches extend diagonally back. Brush mark in these spaces—and it is precisely this sort of effect Frémine is calling attention to—is disposed in such a way which follows the imagined curves of the archivolts, in contrast to the linear, vertical strokes used for the buttress supports. In the archivolts of the left and center portals, the first lower curve of the arch is picked out in an orange-ochre tone, repeated above by an adjacent layer of darkish pink; another layer of orange-ochre follows, overarching the previous marks and extending down laterally on either side; and finally completed by a darker brownish violet. The movement of the brush—its arching, semicircular gesture, its thick and broad application, and its alternation of color value from lighter to darker tones—shares an intended relation to what it sets out to depict, and this is not lost on critics like Frémine: “I do not believe that painting has ever before penetrated architectural mass so searchingly, so deeply, with such magic and poetry.” 35 In the same picture, within the fiction of the image, the spatial relations that obtain between isolable features across the facade surface are articulated in the rendering of the rose window of the nave gallery behind the central portal gable. The extreme inner left-hand side (our left) of that circular recess—the left edge of the window’s stone frame—is painted in light shades of green and ochre; this area catches some of the reflected light of the protruding buttress supports and gable, while the window itself further in depth (a window of colored glass thus absorbing what light there is) is painted in much darker purples, browns, and greens. Here again the direction of the brush echoes the form of the object it depicts, as paint is laid on in a continuous circular movement, in direct contrast to the thinner, vertical strokes of the buttresses. This heightened sense of visual clarity and three-dimensional relations between parts of the facade is suggested in two additional areas. First, at the upper left-hand corner a much lighter and less varied palette is used, and the paint itself is more smoothly applied and less differentiated in terms of direction, size, and so on. As a result, the individual features of the upper tower are indistinguishable to us; that area is both furthest from our primary focus on the visually animated center of the canvas and furthest from any source of light as the sun has lowered and is just about to pass behind the houses across the square. This absence in the tower of implied volume and chromatic discrimination is even more pronounced in its contrast with the pointed pinnacle of the left turret “in front” of it which is rendered in a much more encrusted and chromatically varied pigment. A second example of spatial relations between parts of the cathedral facade is found in the depiction of the rose window. It would be within the scope of the intended fiction of the picture to assume—imaginatively—that due to the oblique orientation of the facade to our viewing position (plane of the canvas), the right-hand side of the center gable would be “closer” to us, and, by extension, more noticeably distanced from the surface of the window deep within its circular niche. Monet has far more heavily layered this broader right-hand edge of the gable’s triangular form in contrast to a thinner, less opaque indication of its left edge, as if to suggest this. And it is these kinds of observations about the distinctiveness of facture that perceptive critics like Frémine were making. Another writer, the correspondent for Gil Blas, took the view even further, describing the sensually evocative capacity of Monet’s painting procedure, appositely poised, to define the sort of

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sensations the subject itself conveys, suggestive of the physiognomic sense of warmth and coolness, for instance, in the way the subject appears to us—the cold, time-worn stone of the cathedral façade receiving the warmth and mobility of sunlight. it is the historic and enflowered cathedral that Monet has wanted to beatify in his recent years of work, because cathedrals have a soul, and one could believe that, after centuries of embodying the mystical aspirations of the multitudes, they have become human, they have become flesh and flower . . . Silence! the smoky monument, where light carves out allegories, seems surrounded by transparent veils; but the sun is seductive and attracts us to the pinnacles, like so many congealed jets of water, and then it is like the assumption of the cathedral. 36

Invoking the historical significance of the life of the Gothic cathedral, this critic, too, finds Monet’s “matière” appropriately “pénétrable.” A facture of color and stroke, through which the viewer is called upon to work his way slowly and deliberately, is analogous to the way the animated play of the intangible elements of light and shadow and murky veils of weather and climate contribute to the carving out of the variegated surface articulation of the façade, transferring physical appearance to a dimension of metaphysical or mystical signification. For this critic, Monet’s pictures behave in this anagogical fashion, where the sensuous presence of the material has a genuinely metaphorical or “symbolic” value. 37 Among the most perceptive of Monet’s critics in 1895, however, was Henry Eon who, writing for the Symbolist review La Plume, admired the imprecision and subjectivity of Monet’s pictures, a function, he believed, of a particular procedure of painting where the subject of depiction only gradually emerges from that procedure in the viewer’s contemplation of the series in its entirety, an ensemble where the facture visibly bathes the object in and endows it with mystery: “an imaginative impression that he has extracted from the cathedral which only adds a new and curious note of mysticism to its glory.” 38 Particularly revealing is the chain of analogies Eon’s description demonstrates as obtaining between Monet’s subject and his painting procedure in the spectator’s extended visual experience in the exhibition: the critic links a notion of the historical character of the Gothic monument, which itself elicits a sense of extended imaginary engagement as part of our “real” (present) experience of it, to the temporality incorporated in the painting of it, the perceiver holding in mind both aspects of permanence and continuity through the force of this kind of representation. The language of Eon’s description is deployed in such a way as to echo or mime this rhetorical strategy of the pictures. He begins his account of the exhibition as a temporal narrative of meteorological changes affecting the motif during the course of real time, a recording and conveying of information about our continuously altered natural perception of the building as a result of the activity of light and atmosphere over its uneven surface: Hourly, the sun ornaments the buttresses, the spires, the large tower, and the delicate tracery that adorns them, in new colorful vestment, as the sculpture becomes gradually more visible, appearing in ever nuanced variations. First there is the morning mist—the monument appears to be emerging from a haze. Then, there is the gray-pink vaporous light that surrounds it. The facade remains in shadow; only the top of the tower slowly emerges through the rising sun; as the bells of the angelus ring, a flight of crows scatters through the sky. Then we see the portal frontally, without excessive detail. Then, the same portal in grey weather has a whitish and iridescent patina and a velvet rust drapes over like a cape, wrapping the trefoils of the spires, and laying slivers of drapery on the small columns. 39

From here, Eon’s description shifts to the insistent physicality of Monet’s paint surfaces as a procedure concerned as much with the way it conceals as with the way it reveals its objects, disclosing its own qualities of sensuous suggestiveness as a check on simple illusion. The mobility of light is important for the critic because it is manifest as changes of color, and these changes have, in the mind of the viewer, an emotional suggestiveness like that of the depicted subject.

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Soon, all these patinas vanish; the Cathedral stands majestically under the powerful noon sun—that sun that gilds, warms and dresses the cathedral with a rich and magnificent cloak. It is no longer a church, it is a dazzling shrine . . . The day goes on and the sun sets. The blinding gold that the sun has applied to the walls now clings in the corners of the cornices, in the protrusions and on the gargoyles. This portal—this deserted, hermetically closed and mysterious portal, as silent as a grave forever sealed—fades back into the darkness. 40

Eon enfolds a seemingly straightforward analysis of real optical and physiological experience of the cathedral facade through the passing of measurable and objective time, into a poetic elucidation of vision derived from the imagination; he describes the flux and compounding of fragmentary experiences within the consciousness of the individual, where perceptual experience takes on symbolic value of infinite explorability, connecting past with present, absence with presence. This is sustainable only in representation, and achieved in Monet’s particular procedure of painting. Let us follow the artist around the edifice. We arrive in the Cour de la Maitrise where the grey slate roofs are in harmony with the grey stones and rose-colored lichens. Old houses, just like weary pilgrims are leaning against the buttresses and seem to wait until they are asked to tell us the pious feelings of the past centuries. 41

And a bit further on: The sun shifts, and we have in front of us now no more than an imposing outline, its pinnacles detached against the emblazoned sky. This is the culmination of poetic inspiration and a powerful art. 42

The critic makes clear that his account of the viewer’s real perception of the cathedral facade is analogous to the evocative associations sustained by Monet’s procedure of painting it. The dense and heavily encrusted surfaces of the canvases, he insists, are analogous to the way the erratic visual quality of coarse rough stone interacts with the way surface is cut by light and shade; and that experience, Eon wants to stress, is comparable to the dissective attention imposed upon the picture-viewer by the facture of the painting. He brought to this carved marvel a series of extraordinary effects . . . And the canvases, close up, present only thick encrustations of paint comparable to a bed of gnarled stone, creating a remarkable relief surface . . . Claude Monet has lived up to his reputation for vague impressions . . . he haunts us with a ghost-cathedral that seems to oscillate in an opaque atmosphere; the eye searches in vain to find a fixed point. 43

The very procedure of painting for this critic is an apposite expression of the Gothic structure— that is, appropriate to the motif’s own involvement in and transcendence of actual sensuous being, suggestive of Gothic mystery or mysticism.

BERGSON, DURATION, AND MEMORY The philosophy of Henri Bergson, whose central thesis is the primordiality of experiential time— time as flux—provides a practical way of thinking about Monet’s achievement. 44 The idea of extended perception I have described in the series of images may be thought of, I want to argue, as like Bergson’s extensive consciousness located in time: conscious states understood not, in the mathematical, scientific conception of time, as a sequence of successive, atomistic, and discrete moments—the time of clocks—but as a multiplicity continually unfolding in “duration.” The order or organization of conscious states, on this view, does not correspond exactly with the order of things in a material—that is, spatial—system. These units distort rather than reflect our inner (subjective) experience of time; they serve the practical conception of time that regulates society, but

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are inadequate as symbols of felt experience. Duration of reality, for Bergson, is an indivisible “flow” which our intellect, for practical purposes of manipulation and control, separates into definable and rationally manageable pieces; it does this by translating time into a logical system of stable concepts, into space. Bergson, in fact, as early as his 1889 Essai sur les donnés immédiates de la conscience 45—literally “Essay on what is immediately given in consciousness” and as such a more accurate description of his main concerns 46 (but actually translated into English as Time and Free Will)—defined reality as an indivisible pervasive continuity of time. Here Bergson described the temporal dimension of human consciousness as synonymous with creative freedom; in seeking an alternative to the limitations of scientific knowledge, he urged artists to free themselves from the spatiality of external objects in order to depict reality: a succession of conscious states must not be interpreted, as is the inveterate habit of mind, he argued, as an order of states in space—the phenomenal order of experience is not itself a spatial order. The enduring reality of changing conscious states—indivisible continuous consciousness—is absolutely different from a reality extended in space, and Bergson saw the artist as one who disentangles definite shapes from within that continuity of consciousness. Whereas entities in space are impenetrable, states of consciousness on Bergson’s view “mutually penetrate each other” and are bound together in a relationship of enduring continuity—a ceaseless flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. The successive and interpenetrative states of consciousness merge into one another, each retaining something of what has just passed and each giving intimation of what is to come—a fusion of the past with the present and the anticipated future. States of consciousness—and I am making the link with our perceptions here—come and go and have their temporal meaning in a “duration” which is always within consciousness itself. And as he argued in Matter and Memory (1896), our perceptions come in “an aggregate of contiguous parts,” and as such memory participates in present duration; our entire experience in the present presupposes the indivisible continuity of durational flow—what for Proust would be the simultaneous multiplicity of our states of awareness that we tend to spread out successively in time, recoverable in the layering of ideas, images, and feelings of memory. Fundamentally informing Proust’s Recherche is the idea that the most rudimentary awareness in the present already involves a temporal synthesis with an aspect of the past. And in An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) Bergson had argued similarly: There is . . . a continuous flux . . . a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it. They can, properly speaking, only be said to form multiple states when I have already passed them and turn back to observe their track. Whilst I was experiencing them they were so solidly organized, so profoundly animated with a common life, that I could not have said where any one of them finished or where another commenced. In reality no one of them begins or ends, but all extend into each other . . . consciousness means memory. 47

The external time with which we organize our ordinary experience of the world, in the spatial world of succession of points or “presents” is, the philosopher argued in Time and Free Will, something entirely incommensurate with this inner reality of “duration” as we experience it in conscious life. We can thus think of simultaneity as without spatial distinction. I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form, the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more probably, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity. 48

It is this theme of memory that is of interest here—the multivalent and multidimensional nature of perception in time, and the notion of a temporal continuity connecting the remembered past to a

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dynamic present. The full apprehension of la durée is possible only in memory wherein the past is accumulated in its fullness. Immediate sensory perception, then, is bound, for Bergson, with the creative forces of memory, where memory strengthens and enriches present perception. The interaction of no longer distinct “past” and “present” is defined as an indivisible movement and, as Gilles Deleuze has argued, as a simultaneity of differences marked by breaks; 49 moments or “instants” are markings abstracted from the flow of the plenum. According to Bergson, we mistakenly divide up the flow of real time into units of space, into “instants,” which are the extensions of these units. That is, we convert the simultaneity of duration into the abruptions of instants, and we do this because we have learned to “spatialize” time— this is the distinction between real, lived time and its “spatialization” or static conceptualization into objects, events, and activities of ordinary experience. This is not unlike the tendencies of our critics who seek stability and permanence in representation—the literal presence and reasoned articulacy of the depicted object, in the face of which duration appears “a deceptive and shifting image of immobile eternity.” 50 For Bergson, our conceptual thinking and its linguistic expression are “molded” upon a pre-prescribed world, a world “already made.” Our intellect, in reflecting or confirming this world—“in professing to reconstruct reality with percepts and concepts whose function is to make it stationary”—only serves to obscure reality itself, that is, the world in real time or duration. Our mind, which seeks for solid points of support, has for its main function in the ordinary course of life that of representing states and things. It takes, at long intervals, almost instantaneous views of the undivided mobility of the real. It thus obtains sensations and ideas. In this way, it substitutes for the continuous the discontinuous, for motion stability, for tendency in process of change, fixed points marking a direction of change and tendency. This substitution is necessary to common-sense, to language, to practical life, and even . . . to positive science . . . In that lies what we call exactitude and precision. 51

While thought-in-language, on this view, synthesizes the complex material of sensuous experience—its indeterminacy and ambiguity—into homogenous objective concepts, like standardized units adapted to social discourse, perception, by contrast, demands the wealth—the flexibility and extendability—of variable experience. Words “store up the stable, common and consequently impersonal element in the impressions of mankind,” and “overwhelm or at least cover over the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness.” 52 This inability of language to describe duration actually reveals, for Bergson, the very nature of the limitations of our linguistic apparatus; as part of our intelligence, language is essentially a set of abstract signs whose task is to immobilize the experience of time, making the expression of change impossible. While language may be able to express and communicate the content of my experience in an intelligible way, the quality of what is being experienced cannot be. To fix a name or word to something is to conceptualize experience and to lose sight of the deeper impression of innermost sensation. 53 Psychological duration is, rather, made up of unstable sensations which constitute our felt impressions of the world. the intuition of duration, when it is exposed to the rays of the understanding, in like manner quickly turns into fixed, distinct and immobile concepts. In the living mobility of things the understanding is bent on marking real or virtual stations, it notes departures and arrivals; for this is all that concerns the thought of man in so far as it is simply human. It is more than human to grasp what is happening in the interval. But philosophy can only be an effort to transcend the human condition. 54

Change is for Bergson a continuous process occurring within the conscious self in which “states” are not individually demarcated units, but mere points of greatest intensity trailing off indefinitely within the unbroken fabric of experience—a becoming, or poetic creation. It is helpful to read the following remarks from Creative Evolution (1907), in which Bergson specified the constantly

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changing state of consciousness in terms of the perception of external objects, while holding in mind Monet’s Cathedrals and the observations made about them thus far: I say that I change, but the change seems to me to reside in the passage from one state to the next: of each state, taken separately I am apt to think that it remains the same, during all the time that it prevails. Nevertheless, a slight effort to attention would reveal to me that there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow. Let us take the most stable of internal states, the visual perception of a motionless external object. The object may remain the same, I may look at it from the same side, at the same angle, in the same light; nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that which I have just had, even if only because the one is an instant older than the other. My memory is there which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing . . . Still more is this the case with states more deeply internal, such as sensations, feelings, desires, etc., which do not correspond, like a simple visual perception, to an unvarying external object. But it is expedient to disregard this uninterrupted change, and to notice it only when it becomes sufficient to impress a new attitude on the body, a new direction of the attention. Then, and then only, we find that our state has changed. The truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change. 55

While discursive intellect works in discontinuous phases, he argues, the creative operates by combining and relating “images,” past and present. This Bergsonian sense resonates through the criticism of Monet. Perception in Monet’s canvases in 1895 is just such an activity, one of continuous resolving, forgetting, recapturing, an interplay of echoes and anticipations, incompletions, and accretions within and across canvases. Georges Clemenceau spoke of these ever-changing “states” of the thing perceived: “One can feel the stone moving with the life that proceeds and the life that will follow. It is no longer as if immobilized for the spectator; it proceeds, one sees it proceeding.” 56 Monet, Clemenceau suggests, achieved the pictorial realization or equivalence of the temporal (and historical) character of reality as duration rather than as instantaneous succession—that is, our “instantaneous” visual experience is not the content of our perception in its completeness at a single instant. Memory, in this Bergsonian sense—and in the Proustian sense of reminiscences and resurrections—is not the remembering of past experiences but rather the past living on in the present in our perception, affecting our present behavior. 57 Monet’s pictures become more coherent when apprehended in this way, as rehearsing a process of unfolding, appearing, becoming—a durée in Bergson’s sense. One critic in 1895, commenting on the group of images as an ensemble, suggested this sense of the density of our perception, evoked by Monet’s facture, beyond the literal and singular presence of the object. The anonymous commentator remarked more speculatively and perceptively than most on the sense of a gradual or emergent appearance of aspects once unnoticed, and so, in that sense, absent from our ‘instantaneous’ view—absent in the sense that their (temporary) nonoccurrence lay outside or in the background (unnoticed) of the present of the moment of perception; this absence— this state of being momentarily unnoticed, or forgotten and then recognized or regained (in Proust’s sense of oubli)—is part of our experience, part of the object’s appearing. The anonymous critic writes: This representation, exacting and vibrating with life, encourages looking and thinking. We find ourselves searching for more, seeing effects formerly unnoticed. And in this attending that takes over you, you understand more, a better, more satisfying seeing that stirs you and removes you from the triteness of daily life . . . Multiple wonders in front of the twenty canvases of Rouen Cathedral. Here Monet has outdone himself . . . We want to know how this courageous painter was able to arrive at such meaning . . . [The cathedral] is unified, it melts, it dematerializes and speaks in these living bodies of grand sculpture. 58

As for Proust, so for this critic the object of perception—which is no longer the mere material and optical presence of an architectural structure—can only be fully comprehended by the imagination

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when it includes its own absence; that is, it is the power of memory to resurrect that which is absent and seemingly lost forever. Visual experience, then, is not registered in a single specious present; it includes a sense of possibilities unresolved at the moment as part of its character, not equivalent to a single manifestation. It contains, within the experience, contradictory or conflicting aspects. The “aspect” we sustain in our perception at any one moment has within it a sense of our coming to it and leaving it. And Monet finds a correspondence for this perceptual intricacy in the way the paint is negotiated. This, I think, is the force behind Georges Clemenceau’s remarking on “this multiple world” in our perception, the “unstable vibration . . . that animates . . . all of living nature and all of inert nature” in our visual experience of it, captured by Monet in “that cathedral with its manifold aspects,” emphasizing the permanence of change and continuous re-resolvability within our perceptual experience of the “eternal cathedral.” This is, in effect, Bergson’s thesis that the only thing that does not change is change itself. Clemenceau continues: these luminous waves that envelop it, that penetrate it, that make it radiate in the world, are in perpetual turbulence . . . This is in effect what the audacious Monet set out to do with his twenty paintings of the cathedral of Rouen . . . As long as the sun will shine on it, there will be as many manners of being of the cathedral of Rouen as the divisions man will be able to make of time. The perfect eye would distinguish all of them, because they summarize themselves in the perceptible vibrations, even for our present-day retina. Monet’s eye, a precursor, is ahead of us and guides us in the visual evolution that renders our perception of the world more penetrating and more subtle. 59

Gustave Geffroy, more lyrically, described the series as a continuous narrative occurring purely within the artist’s imaginative vision, capturing the poetic nature of the world and the permanence and stability in our perceptual experience: “The reality is present and becomes transfigured . . . it is both immutable and changing.” 60 Duration, as Bergson suggested, may be considered both as multiplicity—ever-changing perceptions—and unity—that which binds them together, that which marks or assures ceaseless continuity. Monet himself had insisted on the theme of permanence and change, moment and duration, in his own account of the mobility and layered density of our perception; he stressed the significance of comparison and accumulation in the course of contemplating the series as an integration into a coherent whole of mutually comparable and contingent parts. In a letter to Toulouse-Lautrec on April 24, 1894, during the period in which Monet would have been fully engaged in the reworking of the Cathedral canvases in the studio, the painter writes that he is “hard at work, absolutely absorbed in the difficulties of painting,” endlessly reestablishing a motif in the presence of which, he had claimed earlier “each day I discover things I had not seen the day before: I add and then I lose certain things . . . In a word, what I seek is the impossible.” 61 The painter’s letters written between his last excursion to Rouen, from which he returned in March 1893, until the exhibition in 1895, during which time he was continuously engaged in reworking the pictures, document an obsessive attention to this set of images. On February 23, 1893, he writes, “I am hard at work, thoroughly preoccupied with the cathedrals (what trouble it causes me).” 62 The maintenance of such a level of intense and recursive attention toward the motif, which for Monet involved near complete isolation and immersion with that motif, was a recurrent theme in his commentary on his practice as a painter. These letters of this period are revealing in that they reflect Monet’s sense of himself as thoroughly bound up with this series of pictures, and the motif’s forever escaping complete realization. And it is only toward the end of March during his second and last trip to Rouen that Monet feels confident enough to write, “Since I’ve been in Rouen, it’s only now that I am beginning to understand my subject . . . I am imprisoned by it and have to see it through to the end . . . it’s killing me but I am working feverishly.” 63 





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The central issue in this chapter has been the temporality of perception, and for Monet’s critics, the temporality that is involved in engaging visually with the layered surfaces and visual opacity of Monet’s canvases. This, however, has always been more than optical immediacy or presence; it has involved an awareness of the dense complexity of our presumed “momentary” perception and the extended and sustained attention we pay to the pictures. It is the idea that that attention is malleable, susceptible to dissolution, fusions, forgetting, and recalling—a compounding of anticipation, recollection, and immediate experience. This, we saw, has resonance in the philosophy of Bergson and his notion of la durée in perception and the multiplicity continually unfolding in the seamless flow of duration, incorporating the immanent past in the experiences of the present— what the philosopher referred to as memory. “Duration,” Gilles Deleuze has summed up Bergson, “is essentially memory . . . the conservation and preservation of the past in the present.” 64 He continues: The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist. One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass . . . each present goes back to itself as past. 65

This notion of memory as bound to/in perception allows the problem of perception to be more than a matter of visuality, as Jonathan Crary has recently argued; it involves a “suspension of perception, a hovering within a drawn-out moment.” 66 That drawn-out moment of perception takes account of the subjective experience of time, a kind of psychological duration which includes an awareness of absences that lie outside the momentary present. Now attentiveness—perception—encompasses a broader set of terms and positions that have to do with the persistence of memory embedded in the Gothic cathedral as the very enactment of historical continuity. This was a theme addressed, in multiple and varying ways, in the critical and literary writing of many of Monet’s friends, colleagues, and associates at this time. It is these writers and their descriptions of the Gothic that we explore in the next chapter.

4 Writing the Gothic The Cathedrals are France. As I contemplate them I feel our ancestry mounting and descending in me . . . —Auguste Rodin, The Cathedrals of France

NINETEENTH-CENTURY

ATTITUDES TO GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE WERE VARIOUS AND THE EXPRESSIVE

potential of the image of a cathedral wide open to artists. Yet, as Janine Dakyns has argued in her study of the various permutations that “rediscoveries” of the Middle Ages took on in French literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, those changing views had “little to do with the Middle Ages themselves, and everything to do with the preoccupations of the nineteenth century.” Each artist for whom it became a fascination “fashioned out of their hopes and fears for the modern world, a private vision of the medieval past.” 1 “Medievalism” is the subject of a recent study by Laura Morowitz and Elizabeth Emery entitled Consuming the Past: the Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France, a study which explores the complex discourses around the Middle Ages from the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) to the Separation of Church and State (1905), and both the elite interest in and public demand for things medieval. 2 The authors contend that it was an attempt to “regain the past” wherein the Middle Ages—most often signified by the Gothic cathedral—were perceived as a lost golden age, prompting the efforts of artists, writers, and churchmen to “sell” the Middle Ages as a time of French greatness. And this was often in response to contemporary fears about a seemingly fragmented modern social structure, a modernity which had uprooted individuals from community and tradition—thus the constructing of narratives of the medieval for contemporary political and artistic purposes. As Elizabeth Emery argues in her Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture: The cathedral appealed to contemporaries precisely because of its status as a unifying concept. It provided a comforting response to fears about the fragmentation and dispersion of society and the loss of tradition; it was a stable, still-functioning system of belief that organized and gave meaning to all of the disparate elements in and around it . . . The sheer variety of artwork and theology contained in the cathedral offered something for everyone; it provided a figure of social stability and community spirit that could simultaneously represent conflicting values: medieval Catholic spirituality and symbolism, secular artistic masterpieces, or the historical longevity of the French nation itself. 3

In this sense, then, the Gothic cathedral became a talisman to be appropriated as a deeply felt connection with the past and a projection of present anxieties and fantasies. Morowitz and Emery’s study brilliantly illuminates the multivalent impact of medievalism in France at the end of the century and the mutability of medieval imagery, both visual and literary. It is within this prevailing discourse on the Gothic as a system of meaning and multifaceted symbol of the French spirit and identity that Monet’s images need to be situated; it is a literature that extends well beyond, but includes, the critics of painting in 1895. It is necessary, then, to position the production of Monet’s “Gothic” in relation to that of his colleagues and contemporaries. 

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RODIN AND THE “STONES OF FRANCE” In 1914, an important collection of Auguste Rodin’s drawings, watercolors, and written reflections on French Gothic architecture was assembled and published in book form as Les Cathédrales de France, together with a lengthy introduction by the Symbolist poet, writer, and editor of the new journal Mercure de France, Charles Morice, tracing the evolution of medieval thought and its symbolic value from its historical origins to its revival in the modern world. 4 From the evidence of Rodin’s own accounts we know that his extensive and deeply personal study of medieval French architecture, in both written and graphic notes, had begun as early as 1865. 5 In an article entitled “The Gothic in the Cathedrals and Churches of France” published in North American Review in February 1905, Rodin wrote: When I had rid myself of the prejudice of my environment and dared to look with my own eyes, at about age twenty-five, although to some extent by the time I was twenty, only then did I begin to make a special study of Gothic art . . . Wherever I went I made it a rule to visit all the churches . . . and I remember that the . . . various parts of these gave me exquisite joy. 6

Les Cathédrales de France, wherein Rodin describes the cathedral as the epitome of French faith and genius, is the trace of that pilgrimage. While the sculptor’s accounts are largely about his experiences of the great Gothic structures of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims, the drawings, pen-and-ink, and watercolor sketches—scattered randomly throughout the pages of the published text and rarely corresponding to a particular descriptive passage—capture, in quiet detail, the smaller, more intimate churches of Avallon, Dijon, Houdan, Montjavoult, Auxerre, Sens, Toulouse, and Champeux, among others (see figures 5 and 6). And those surviving are considerable in number, evidence of the range and depth of the sculptor’s devotion. Elizabeth Chase Geissbuhler, translator of Rodin’s Cathedrals of France in 1965, 7 has undertaken a thorough critical examination of these drawings, now split between the collections of the Rodin Museums in Paris and Philadelphia. She notes that in 1921, the first curator of the Musée Rodin in Paris estimated the architectural drawings in the collection to total 800, and at least another 338 in Philadelphia add to this extraordinary number. 8 Yet despite their intimate scale and relative obscurity, we should not assume that these drawings had only the privacy of an artist’s sketchbook impressions. It seems certain that they, as well as the written notes and aphorisms, were well known within the sculptor’s circle of colleagues, critics, and admirers. In fact, on the occasion of Rodin’s 1889 retrospective with Monet at the Galeries Georges Petit, an important essay by Gustave Geffroy in the accompanying catalogue was intended to nominate Rodin publicly for artistic “modernity.” Yet in it the critic described Rodin as “the respectful brother of the great architects of the Middle Ages, the builders of cathedrals and the hewers of stone.” 9 The relevance here is the distinctive quality of Rodin’s written reflections on “the Gothic”— a category itself rather broadly understood by the artist—which rely on the evocative power of poetic language to describe the sorts of emotional, psychological and imaginative associations its architecture conjured for him. It is an affective language, one which aims to capture something of the experience of viewing architecture, as spontaneous, personal, and intense, that deliberately invokes, I want to argue, the critic-essayist-aesthete John Ruskin’s own writing on the subject. 10 This “harmony of effect”—the visual experience of an imaginary spectator—Ruskin called the “poetry of architecture.” 11 Rodin, in fact, referred to Ruskin in his 1905 essay as “One of the first among foreigners to understand the ancient cathedrals of France.” 12 Ruskin’s thoughts on art and architecture were known in France from around mid-century, well before Proust’s later translation—The Bible of Amiens and his various “Ruskinian pilgrimages” to Rouen and other cathedral cities of France 13—much of his work having been translated, commented on, and paraphrased in journals and critical studies. The first article in French on Ruskin’s aesthetics

Figure 5. Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, ca.1910–14; lithographic proof of drawing, retouched in graphite; 12 7/8 x 9 7/16 inches, F1929-7-211 (p.15); Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, Photo: Lynn Rosenthal, 2002.

Figure 6. Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, ca.1910–14; lithographic proof of drawing, retouched in graphite; 12 7/8 x 9 7/16 inches, F1929-7-211 (p.82); Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, Photo: Lynn Rosenthal, 2002.

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appeared as early as 1856 in the Revue Britannique, entitled “Les doctrines de M. Ruskin.” 14 From 1892, the year of Monet’s first campaign at Rouen, the Bulletin de l’Union pour l’Action Morale began publishing simple translations from the broad range of Ruskin’s writing, 15 including, between November 1893 and March 1903, short translated excerpts from The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture, among other works. Moreover, an entire chapter (“The Lamp of Memory”) from Seven Lamps appeared in the Revue générale in October 1895. And, as early as 1864, a study on Ruskin appeared, entitled L’Esthétique anglaise: étude sur M. John Ruskin, which presented to a French audience Ruskin’s overall aesthetic preoccupations about the moral and intellectual significance of architecture, and, more specifically, the superiority of the Gothic spirit and style over the tyrannies of Renaissance and modern science and philosophy. Of particular significance to the present study are Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (published in two volumes, 1851 and 1853) the primary purposes of which were less an objectively descriptive account of the structural features of Gothic style, and more to provide the reader with visual evocations of architecture—a concentration on the expressive qualities inherent in the Gothic’s external form which are in themselves not strictly architectural. Proust himself acknowledged, in a footnote to his La Bible d’Amiens, “The beauties of the cathedral of Amiens and of Ruskin’s book do not require the shadow of a notion of architecture in order to be felt.” 16 And a French publication of 1897 by Robert de la Sizeranne, entitled Ruskin et la religion de la beauté, emphasized precisely this aspect of Ruskin’s antirational aesthetics in quoting from Stones of Venice: what we want art to do for us, says Ruskin, is to stay what is fleeting, and to enlighten what is incomprehensible, to incorporate the things that have no measure, and immortalize the things which have no duration. 17

For Ruskin, architecture was more about ornament than abstract design, that is, about opulent carving in profuse decoration that takes its inspiration from a divinely wrought multiformity and variety—the “perpetual variety” of nature. 18 This is the primary theme of the chapter “On the Nature of Gothic” from The Stones of Venice that recurs, as we shall see, throughout Rodin’s commentary as well. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, the themes of temporality in perception and the historicality of Gothic architecture—in both cases, the inheritance of the past in the experience of the present— preoccupy Ruskin, who writes in the “Lamp of Memory”: [I]t is in becoming memorial . . . that a true perfection is attained . . . the greatest glory of a building is . . . in its age. We may live without her [architecture], and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. 19

These three themes—the Gothic as Nature, as Memory, and as History—permeate Rodin’s account as well. In both written and graphic form, the sculptor’s methods of observation and means of expression call to mind an unmistakably Ruskinian emphasis on direct experience and embodied imagination. And these themes, I am suggesting, reverberate, as we’ve seen, in the critical response to Monet’s Cathedrals.

GOTHIC AS NATURE Rodin’s two introductory chapters, “Initiation into the Art of the Middle Ages” and “The French Countryside,” describe the formal principles of ecclesiastical sculptural programs common to the building of all Gothic churches and how they are to be read within their natural context, the unique French countryside. “The art of the Middle Ages,” he writes, “in its ornamentation as well as in its constructions, derives from nature. It is therefore always to nature that one must go for an

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understanding of that art.” 20 And, on the significance of the landscape to the construction of the cathedral: Plain of such beauty, of an order so simple, so noble! . . . Three rows of linden trees. This is absolutely the triple nave of a cathedral [34] . . . The ribs of the ceiling are like the branches of trees. [48] . . . Because the church is a work of art derived from nature it is accessible to simple and true minds. (50)

Chateaubriand, much earlier in the century in his Le Génie du Christianisme (1802), had fueled a sentimental French obsession for the cathedral through this analogy with nature and its artistic and spiritual purity. The construction of the Gothic cathedral, he felt, was inspired by the forests in which the primitive Christians had worshipped—Gothic vaulting, for instance, echoed the lines of intertwined trees and branches. Ruskin’s “Lamp of Beauty” similarly established the theme of naturalism in Gothic form (a theme developed earlier in the essays of The Poetry of Architecture): “all most lovely forms and thoughts are directly taken from natural objects.” Ruskin describes the medieval craftsman’s “love of natural objects for their own sake and [his] effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistic laws.” 21 It is a theory of beauty in nature as divine order, the revealed presence of an immanent God. For Ruskin, deeply felt experiences of nature, like deeply felt experiences of beauty in art, were essential to the spiritual life of man. in the shapes which in the every-day world are familiar to the eyes of man, God has stamped those characters of beauty which He has made it man’s nature to love. 22

Rodin himself develops the theme in a later chapter: let us give ourselves to the joy of studying these flowers in nature, that we may have a just notion of the resources which the decorator of living stones required of them. He penetrated the life of flowers by contemplating their forms. (230–31)

We are reminded of Ruskin’s injunction to artists in Seven Lamps: go into nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remembering her instruction. 23

Rodin, too, advises the artist on the abundance of nature as inspiration: To be convinced go into the country and open your eyes. At each step you will have a lesson in architecture. Men of yore looked before us and understood. They sought the plant in the stone and now we find their immortal stones in the eternal flowers . . . What curious, varied, and innumerable expressions are available to an artist. [231–32] . . . All these flowers, and many others, indeed all others, have served as models for sculptors and stained-glass workers. As the painter-stained-glass worker took his hues from them, the sculptor took his harmonious joinings. (242)

Rodin is invoking, following Ruskin (though with less of the evangelical tone) the sense of multiformity and variety—or as Ruskin described it, the “irregularity”—of natural form. The Gothic is similarly prized for its sensitivity to nature in its asymmetry, in opposition to the rigid lines, stubborn geometry, and stark rationality of contemporary neoclassical art and architecture. Not incidental in this context, and confirming the appropriateness of a Ruskinian perspective on Rodin’s text, is a written proposal by the painter Auguste Renoir to Durand-Ruel in 1884— inspired by Ruskin’s and William Morris’s ideals of social-aesthetic reform—calling for a “Société des Irrégularistes,” a collaborative and harmonious fraternity of free and anonymous artisans and craftsmen, whose members would revive the lost spirit of medieval workmanship, for whom nature is the ultimate source of inspiration for design and decoration and “who have irregularity for an aesthetic.” 24 In a language reminiscent of Ruskin, Renoir wrote:

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the works of nature are infinitely varied, from the most important to the least . . . the leaves of a tree, the petals of a flower are never identical; it thus seems that every kind of beauty draws its charm from this diversity . . . Gothic churches . . . have not a single perfectly straight line, and that the round, square, or oval forms which are found there and which it would have been extremely easy to make exact, never are exact. One can thus state . . . that every truly artistic production has been conceived and executed according to the principle of irregularity; in short, to use a neologism which expresses our thought more completely, it is always the work of an irregularist. At a time when our French art, until the beginning of this century still so full of penetrating charm and exquisite imagination, is about to perish of regularity and dryness, when the mania for false perfection makes engineers diagram the ideal, we think that it is useful to react against the fatal doctrines which threaten to annihilate it, and that it is the duty of all men of sensitivity and taste to gather together without delay, no matter how repugnant they may otherwise find combat and protest. An association is therefore necessary. 25

Renoir’s debt to Ruskin is no less marked than Rodin’s in his admiration for what he regards as the honesty and dignity in the manual labor of craft, whose inspiration derives exclusively from nature, as opposed to the corruption and deceit of modern manufacture. “Among other conditions of admission,” Renoir proposed for this society: the rules stipulate precisely, as far as architecture is concerned: All ornaments must be derived from nature, with no motif—flower, leaf, figure, etc., etc.—being exactly repeated; even the least important outlines must be executed by hand without the aid of precision instruments. 26 Mechanization and the division of labor has transformed the simple task and killed the joy of work. Sadly, the factory has tethered man to machine, demanding nothing of his brain, leading to a monotony that results only in fatigue. The suppression of the intelligence in manual labor has had repercussions in the plastic arts. It is from the desire to escape this machinization that we have, doubtless, an abnormal number of painters and sculptors of general mediocrity . . . Many of them would have been, two centuries ago, skillful woodworkers, potters, ironworkers, if these professions offered to them the same attraction to men from that time . . . [where] the skilled hand was never more than the servant of the mind. 27

In “The Lamp of Truth,” Ruskin himself had rejected the modern tendency to substitute cast or machine work for that of the hand: “it is not the material, but the absence of the human labour, which makes the things worthless.” 28 Rodin, too, described the “nobility” that accrued to the “honest” craftsman, that “pilgrim of Work,” “possessed of the virtue of work,” who in the physical manipulations of his material, is “consumed by the passion to create.” 29 those artisans and workmen . . . they were children in the School of Truth . . . Ah, those workmen! That we should not even know how to pronounce the names of those humble and sublime men who had such knowledge! . . . How I should love to sit at table with such stone carvers . . . these men are in constant relationship with nature; and they are strong and sound. They have the sobriety, constancy, and energy of great noble animals who keep their natural functions in order. (55–56)

In his novel of 1898, La Cathédrale, about which there will be more to say later, J.-K. Huysmans echoed these romantic sentiments about this “brotherhood of holy workers”: “what souls these artists had! For this we know; they laboured only in a state of grace. To raise this glorious temple, purity was required even of the workmen.” 30 Rodin describes this Gothic craftsman as speaking in “the language of stone,” and that “to understand cathedrals one must be sensitive to the moving language of their lines, amplified by shadows” (17). For the sculptor, this worked materiality of carved stone, its articulation of planes, shapes, masses, and voids, is inextricably bound up with our perpetually varied perception of them through what he calls the “declension” of light and shadow. The distribution and movement of natural light and shade across the visual irregularities of handcrafted stone necessarily affects the appearance of the object which in turn affects the experience of the perceiving subject. This sense of

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the cadence of light and shadow and its effect on the beholder is precisely what we described in our earlier detailed analysis of Monet’s Gothic façade. This afternoon the sun is playing in this church. It escapes; it returns. Here the light inscribes many things. Very often it attenuates Gothic hardness by its alliance with shadow. (115) Light and shadow play freely and strongly in these arches whose curves are so noble and so delicate! . . . After the artists have finished, life pursues her action on their masterpieces . . . These capitals that burst with power, brutalized by light and shadow: only the genius of an old sculptor, a seer of yore, could bring about this miraculous result. The habit of working in the open air, at evening and at morning, with long patience and an immense love, made him all powerful. (151–54)

That visual and visionary experience is the result of a thoughtful and controlled handling of the material, along with an awareness on the part of the maker of the activity of light and shade. it is always by light and shade that a sculptor as well as an architect shapes and models [7] . . . The soul of Gothic art is in this voluptuous declension of light and shadow which gives rhythm to the entire structure and makes it live. Here is a knowledge now lost, a deliberate ardor, controlled, patient, and strong, which our greedy and restless century is incapable of understanding. (19)

This sense of the real and imagined properties of the cadence of light and shadow in architecture and its manipulation by the craftsman had been similarly addressed by Ruskin, who wrote in “The Lamp of Power:” light, with the architect, is nearly always liable to become full and untempered sunshine seen upon solid surface, his only rests, and his chief means of sublimity, are definite shades. So that, after size and weight, the Power of architecture may be said to depend on the quantity . . . of its shadow. 31

Thus, the qualitative experience of the natural phenomena of light is for Rodin, as it was for Ruskin, describable as an “element” of pure form, part of the working repertoire of the Gothic builderpainter with its own set of expressive possibilities. Here again is Rodin: Daybreaks. Light foregathers; it reaches the Cathedral by wide strokes, splatters the master columns, the small openwork columns, the lost profiles of light . . . Brief half hour of delights. [159] . . . the sun stretched its rays to infinity, and all at once the Cathedral allowed itself to be seen! (194)

But it is more than a description of purely sensuous experience; there is a sense of the very immateriality of light as approximation to the revelations of the sublime, the ineffable—divine irradiance through the fusion of light and stone. Light is the active agent, penetrating, permeating, and transfiguring hard stone—analogue of another kind of transcendence. The marvel of marvels had waited for me to brim my heart, my soul, and brain with its splendor, to strike me with its divine lightning and its magnificent thunder. I was alone before this colossus. Moments at once of annihilation and of extraordinary life! Sublime apotheosis! Sacred terror! Unexpectedly, light reveals the unexpected. Things appeared to me more lofty, purified. They faded to nothing, transformed by glory. Lights that emphasized the first planes were interrupted to take more power in following the ascendant lines, leaving the porches to fill with mist, to be dissolved in shadow, while beyond, the Cathedral thrust its audacious framework to heaven. (194)

Through the corporeal sense of light and shadow that illuminates and darkens the protruduing masses and voluminous spaces of the massive stone facade, a more ungraspable—symbolic—reality is described as gradually becoming intelligible to, if not the soul, then certainly the imagination. And, again, this is the manner in which many of Monet’s more astute commentators in 1895 found it appropriate to talk about his Cathedrals. Consider again Georges Clemenceau’s epiphanic rhetoric, similar in tone to Rodin’s:

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Light explodes, it invades the being, it imposes itself as conqueror, it dominates the world, which is a support to its glory, an instrument of its triumph . . . The dark object in itself receives all life from the sun, all power to visually impress. But these luminous waves that envelop it, that penetrate it, that make it radiate in the world, are in perpetual turbulence, affected by high blades, sprays, or tempests of light . . . The marvel in Monet’s sensation is to see the stone vibrate and to give it to us, vibrating, bathed in luminous waves that collide in splashing sparks . . . now, even stone lives. One can feel the stone moving with the life that precedes and the life that will follow. 32

We should also be reminded here of the commentator in Gil Blas: it is the historic and enflowered cathedral that Monet has wanted to beatify in his recent years of work, because cathedrals have a soul, and one could believe that, after centuries of embodying the mystical aspirations of the multitudes, they have become human, they have become flesh and flower . . . Silence! the smoky monument, where light carves out allegories, seems surrounded by transparent veils; but the sun is seductive and attracts us to the pinnacles, like so many congealed jets of water, and then it is like the assumption of the cathedral. 33

A century later Umberto Eco illuminates what is at issue here, and that is the notion of the “anagogical” function of sensuous experience and pleasure, the ability of sensuous beauty to lead the mind from the world of appearances to contemplation of the divine, and the very necessity of the former (the sensuous) for aspiration to the latter (the spiritual or mystical). And this is accomplished through color and light: it was the Middle Ages which developed an art form in which, to an unsurpassed degree, the brilliance of simple colors is married to the brilliance of light . . . philosophers and mystics alike were enthralled by luminosity in general, and by the sun’s light. A basic structural principle of Gothic cathedrals was that they should give the effect of light erupting through an open fretwork . . . the medievals often conceived of God in terms of light and regarded light as the original metaphor for spiritual realities . . . Light was thus the principle of all beauty . . . because it is through light that all the variations in colour and luminosity, both in heaven and on earth, come into being. 34

Returning to Rodin, elsewhere in Les Cathédrales, using a provocative analogy with painting, the sculptor elaborates the visual and imaginative properties of light: the Gothics were great painters because they were great architects . . . The colors in which these painters dipped their brushes are the light and shadow of day, and of the two twilights. (4)

There is an equivalence, I am suggesting, between Rodin’s text and Monet’s images: contemporaneous with the painter’s desire to find a subject that would have, as he put it, “more serious qualities,” a close friend and colleague writes about Gothic cathedrals, and does so in a way which emphasizes the visibility of surface and the way it takes light, the way it measures and controls the use of shadow, and the way this shapes our perceptual experience. Rodin elaborates: Rembrandt . . . is intensely Gothic. Rembrandt’s genius is also life in shadow. But take care to notice that shadow does not exist in itself. It is a garment that attaches to the form. If the form is good, the shadow, which is its manifestation, will be expressive. Give me beautiful forms, and I shall have beautiful shadows. That which makes the variety of styles is the declension of those same shadows with different details. (74)

And again later: This dust of light, this scintillation of shadow, that Rembrandt taught us to admire, did he not borrow it from you, Cathedrals? He alone knew by another art how to express, how to define the miracle by transposing, the inexhaustible opulence of these modeled shadows. (213)

In the “Lamp of Memory,” Ruskin had in a similar context described “Rembrandtian” shadow: “by Rembrandt . . . the features are used for the sake of the shadows; and the attention is directed, and

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the power of the painter addressed, to characters of accidental light and shade across or around those features.” 35 And he draws the analogy with architecture: Rembrandtism is a noble manner in architecture . . . And among the first habits that a young architect should learn, is that of thinking in shadow, not looking at a design in its miserably liny skeleton; but conceiving it as it will be when the dawn lights it, and the dusk leaves it; when its stones will be hot, and its crannies cool . . . Let him design with the sense of cold and heat upon him; let him cut out the shadows. 36

GOTHIC AS MEMORY For Rodin this “declension” of shadow and light had to do with the variability and extendability of perception, the kind of perceptual duration we attributed to Monet’s Cathedrals: first, a matter of shifting perceptions and alterations of focus elicited by the subject; and second, an accumulation and slow accretion of multiple sensations becoming available only through extended visual experience. As the day develops, the aspects change. My meditation, but slightly interrupted, is resumed. I am faced by a scene which is not the one I had before me awhile ago and which I no longer recognize. (29) Study these magnificent fragments and, if you wish to understand, go to see them at different hours of the day. These works made in the open air change their beauty as the hours change, and their variation is upon a constant theme. Evening will reveal to you what morning did not allow you to see. (72) Countless simultaneous sensations! And this impression once acquired, I shall retain; source of enthusiasm for tomorrow, for always. (151)

Again, as with Monet’s canvases, this is a description of the process of beholding—the gradual or emergent appearance of features initially absent from the “moment” of perception, but always available within the background of the present in our transitory view. And this state of being momentarily unobserved is part of our experience, part of the object’s appearing. It is about the temporality of perception; and perception is a matter of adjusting, shifting attention, calling into focus, recalling and forgetting—never being in possession of the object of experience in its entirety. Rodin goes on: As new profiles appear when one moves, so a masterpiece is transformed in us according to the movement it has provoked in our mind; this movement, which is not isolated in our life, adds to all our feelings the impression of the masterpiece we keep, and this impression lives by our life, is colored according to other impressions that life brings us, and thanks to which we discover, between two expressions very distant from one another, secret but real analogies. (224)

Proust, too, is sensitive to the function of architecture in preserving the past in our experience of the present, and to the simplest act of perception as having a temporal (historical) structure. Speaking specifically of Monet, he writes: When you see the western façade . . . for the first time, blue in the mist, dazzling in the morning, sundrenched and liberally gilded in the afternoon, pink and already coolly nocturnal at sunset, no matter at what hour its bells ring in the sky, as Claude Monet captured it in his sublime canvases in which the life of this thing reveals itself—made by man but reclaimed by nature and submerged in it—a cathedral, whose life . . . unwinds through the centuries while renewing itself and completing itself daily—at that moment, if you clear it from the changing colors of nature’s envelope, you feel in front of this façade a confused but powerful impression. 37

In the same sense, the textural complexity of Monet’s painted surfaces, accumulated in repeated reformulations—onsite and in the studio—wherein the insistent, lingering presence of earlier

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phases of painting are fused with later stages, chronicle the painter’s response to the motif’s presence sustaining itself within a combination of different views, thoughts, and possible configurations. Consequently, the endlessly shifting delineations within the marks and colors built up one against the next, passing over and under each other, effect an optical-perceptual indeterminacy which urges the beholder to adjust between fixations—literally, illusionistically, and metaphorically. In a letter to Alice from Rouen on April 3, 1892, Monet writes, “On the whole, I’ve had some excellent days recently; each day surprising me with something I had not seen before.” 38 And one year later, again in a letter to Alice from Rouen, “Everything changes, even stone.” 39 Moreover, in presenting his subject in a series of painted reformulations, which require of the spectator a series of readjustments and reverberations between perceptions, Monet is concentrating on building up a dense understanding of his subject, beyond depiction. Of the significance of establishing this “familiarity” with his subject, Monet writes from Rouen: “Fourteen canvases today, none the same. If I remain in Rouen, it is because now I am beginning to understand my subject.” 40 Earlier the painter admits, “it is as necessary to understand as it is to see things well.” 41 This is a knowing familiarity with the subject that Bergson defined as “the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it.” 42 It is an awareness of the subtlety with which things change in our extended attention to them that Ruskin had defined as the intellectual, conceptual act of comprehension: monotony in certain measure, used in order to give value to change, and, above all, that transparent monotony which, like the shadows of a great painter, suffers all manner of dimly suggested form to be seen through the body of it, is as essential in architecture as in all other composition; . . . a great mind will accept, or even delight in, monotony which would be wearisome to an inferior intellect, because it has more patience and power of expectation, and is ready to pay the full price for the great future pleasure of change . . . [T]hose who will not submit to temporary sameness, but rush from one change to another, gradually dull the edge of change itself, and bring a shadow and weariness over the whole world from which there is no escape. 43

In this same way, in recursively attending to and painting the same subject, Monet presents to the beholder the deliberateness with which things are never really altered dramatically from one picture to the next, but how in their combination, they effect a perceptual cohesiveness of “temporary sameness” (or a sameness in their reappearing—like memory) which captures the subtlety of transience in our perception. It is a matter of the past living on in the present in our perception, affecting our present—visual and mental—behavior, and the power of memory—in the Proustian sense—to resurrect what is absent, and the power of the imagination—in the Bergsonian—to anticipate what is yet to come.

GOTHIC AS HISTORY There is a second and closely related sense in which the notion of temporality is invoked in Rodin’s written reflections and in the critical commentary on Monet’s Cathedrals: that is, temporality understood in terms of the real historical character of the subject itself. As Victor Hugo had put it in Nôtre-Dame de Paris: Time has given to the church more perhaps than it has taken away; for it is Time that has imparted to the façade that somber hue of antiquity which makes the old ages of buildings the period of their greatest beauty . . . the accumulations formed by ages; the residuum of the successive evaporations of human society . . . Every wave of time super-induces its alluvium, every generation deposits its stratum upon the structure, every individual brings his stone . . . Time is the architect, the nation is the mason. 44

Perhaps nowhere is the theme of Gothic architecture as historical testimony more emphatic than in Ruskin’s “Lamp of Memory,” where he draws the analogy between our real phenomenological

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experience of the building and its auratic historical presence, allowing the sensible experience of it to stand in for its more evocative referent: It is one of the advantages of Gothic architecture . . . that it admits of a richness of record altogether unlimited. Its minute and multitudinous sculptural decorations afford means of expressing, either symbolically or literally, all that need be known of national feeling or achievement . . . it is an exponent of age, of that which . . . the greatest glory of the building consists; and, therefore, the external signs of this glory, having power and purpose greater than . . . mere sensible beauty, may be considered as taking rank among pure and essential characters. 45

Ruskin’s “Lamp of Memory” is motivated, as is Rodin’s own thought, by the notion that in architecture especially there obtains an essential relation between the past and the present which hinges on an appropriate perception of that past: “To bind the present with the past,” Rodin maintained, is the task of architecture (92). Ruskin had put it this way: if indeed there be any profit in our knowledge of the past, or any joy in the thought of being remembered hereafter, which can give . . . patience to present endurance, there are two duties respecting national architecture whose importance it is impossible to overrate: the first, to render the architecture of the day, historical; and, the second, to preserve, as the most precious of inheritances, that of past ages. 46

For both Ruskin and Rodin, the Gothic cathedral could awaken sensibilities to the significance of history and its enduring vitality as a symbol of moral excellence and national character. Ruskin goes on: It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strength which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of the earth . . . maintains its sculptured shapliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations: it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture. 47

This theme of the persistence of memory in Gothic building—and particularly French medieval heritage—runs throughout the whole of Rodin’s text. For Rodin, the cathedral is the ultimate symbol of nation and faith. Gothic art is the conscious, tangible soul of France; it is the religion of the French atmosphere! (61) The Cathedrals ought to give us so much pride! They have engendered the force whose last manifestations still enliven us. (75) Gothic style is the history of France. It is the tree of all our genealogies. It presides over our formation as it lives in our transformations. (100) In these beautiful masses of shadow, these beautiful masses of light, these beautiful bodies of half light, what energy! Gothic genius models all that. And in my veins I feel the Gothic sap moving like the earth’s juices flowing through the plants. This is the blood of our fathers, who were such great artists! (137)

There is a mode of interpretive retrieval of the Middle Ages in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century in France that had much to do with the turbulent and disastrous political events around 1870 and its aftermath. Humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, followed by the Paris Commune and the Prussian occupation—all still very much alive in the minds of patriotic Frenchmen toward the close of the century—delivered a crushing blow to national pride and forced a new focus of attention on the Middle Ages. There, it was thought, a sense of reassurance and stability could be found in the ancient monuments that epitomized national tradition, pride, and

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obligation. 48 In addition, the then-current Dreyfus affair, which reached its highest point of anguish in 1898, and Zola’s politically charged and polarizing defense of the accused, the confusion and turnover in government ministries, and the socialist-anarchist bombs that rocked Paris in the late ’80s and early ’90s, augmented the perceived threat to la France. The Gothic cathedral, now more than ever, stood as the appropriate symbol for French history and identity. And for Rodin such reverence and respect for medieval architecture precipitated a call to artists for this veneration of the Gothic. Making such a plea, Rodin writes: What the historian has not seen, the artist must be witness to. [37] Let us make haste to save their souls within ourselves. Artists, is this not our duty? Is it not in our own interest and the only means of defending ourselves against barbarism? Let us love, let us admire! Let us make sure that those about us love and admire. If the work of the giants who constructed these venerable buildings must disappear, let us make haste to hear the lesson of those great masters. Let us read it in this work and strive to understand so that neither we, nor those whom we love better than ourselves, our children, may be reduced to despair when this work shall indeed be lost. (202)

Sharing this sentiment was Rodin’s and Monet’s colleague, Camille Pissarro, who, as we saw earlier, in a series of letters to his son Lucien from the medieval city of Rouen in the 1880s and 1890s, lamented the drastic changes this “beautiful city, so old and artistic,” 49 was now suffering in the rapid transformations of booming industry. This feeling, we noted, incited action against the municipal destruction of historical identity and prompted the organized preservation of its ancient buildings. 50 Rodin shared this attitude, complaining that “Science and industry have emptied Paris” (21). He censured contemporary artists and architects who have “renounced building God’s temple, since they undertook to raise the temple of human vanity. And for this new temple they want more precious materials, lavished with more ornaments than were ever seen before. But vanity confesses the spiritual poverty of the vain” (76–77). Again, the debt is to Ruskin, who had written: The portion of the national income sacrificed in mere bad building, in the perpetual repairs, and swift condemnation and pulling down of ill-built shells of houses, passes all calculation. And the weight of the penalty is not yet felt; it will tell upon our children some fifty years hence, when the cheap work, and contract work, and stucco and plaster work, and bad iron work, and all the other expedients of modern rivalry, vanity and dishonesty, begin to show themselves for what they are. 51

And Victor Hugo had cautioned: The fashions have in fact done more mischief than revolutions. They have cut into the quick; they have attacked the very bones of the art; they have hacked, hewn, mangled, murdered, the building, in the form as in the symbol, in its logic not less than in its beauty . . . mutilations, amputations, dislocations of members, restorations . . . Thus the historical signification of [Paris’s] architecture is daily becoming obliterated. The monuments of past times are becoming more and more rare . . . Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our children will have a Paris of plaster. 52

Consequently, the work of architectural restorers was viewed with great opposition. Symbolist poet Charles Morice, who wrote the lengthy introduction to Rodin’s Cathédrales, spoke of the “hypocritical outrages” of “destruction” brought by the restorers. 53 Many who took this view considered the renowned architect Viollet-le-Duc, for instance, whose restoration of Notre-Dame in Paris was completed in 1864, as the disrespectful enemy of the Middle Ages for his desire to restore medieval ruins beyond all trace of their history, and who advocated the imitation of Gothic architecture as the best way to renew French architectural tradition. “Day by day,” Rodin lamented, “time steals a bit of life, and restorers, by making a mockery of it, plunder its immortality.” “Evil days,” he believes, “have come” with the restorer (15). He continues: No one defends our Cathedrals. The burden of old age crushes them, and under the pretext of curing them, of “restoring” them, what he should only uphold, the architect changes their features. (13)

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The true enemies of architecture and sculpture are the bad architects and sculptors, the great, fashionable surgeons who claim to “remake,” artificially, the limbs that the patient has lost. (97) 54

Ruskin himself had inveighed at length against the false work of restoration which he saw as the worst conceivable manner of historical annihilation: Neither by the public, nor by those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word restoration understood. It means the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed. 55

Proust, too, expressed his sadness over the destruction of medieval churches. In the Recherche, 56 the character Charlus, making a pilgrimage to the ruins of his ancestral home at Combray, laments the loss of his church as the embodiment of the passion and faith of his ancestors: “All that mixture of art and still-living history that was France is being destroyed, and we have not seen the end of the process yet.” 57 It is a shared view about historical fidelity, one which seems to want to inhabit a (fictive) past forgetful of the present—a voice of protest, in some sense, against a modern sensibility which was threatening the destruction of its ancient heritage and the disappearance of France’s history, art, and faith that was felt to inhere in its architecture. And, it should be stated clearly here, while I do not intend to suggest a direct connection between Monet’s canvases and the literary examples this chapter examines, this constellation of meanings that circulated around “the Gothic” is indeed relevant to the reception of his painting in 1895.

ZOLA’S “GOTHIC NOVEL” Zola’s own fantasy novel Le Rêve of 1888, cast as its central player a twelfth-century Gothic cathedral around which the lives of the main characters revolve. 58 The anti-clerical naturalist author had only a few years earlier rejected the Romantic notion of medieval irrationality and mystical superstition. In 1875, in a scathing review of Chateaubriand’s brand of medievalizing mysticism, Zola had written, “the romantics of 1830, in sweeping away ancient rhetoric, ushered in another, just as ridiculous; they did nothing but replace slavish imitation of Antiquity by an excessive fondness for the Middle Ages.” 59 Le Rêve, however, published only thirteen years after these remarks, adopts an altogether different view of the Gothic cathedral: it is now the site, suspended in time, of both the fantasy and real-life affairs of its main characters. The novel’s main characters—Angélique, an orphan who seeks refuge on the steps of a Gothic cathedral, and is raised and trained to become a weaver and embroiderer of liturgical cloths and vestments; and Félicien, a restorer of medieval stained glass—flee from modern reality and imaginatively inhabit a dream-world of the past amidst the spatially and temporally ambiguous confines of the cathedral and parish grounds, completely enthralled with and re-creating a private medieval fantasy. Zola describes the cathedral in the opening pages: The Cathedral explains everything, has given birth to and preserved everything. It is the mother, the queen, as it rises in all its majesty in the center of, and above, the little collection of low houses, which, like shivering birds, are sheltered under her wings of stone. One lives there simply for it, and only by it . . . The church dominates all; each street is one of its veins; the town has no other breath than its own. On that account, this spirit of another age, this religious torpor from the past, makes the cloistered city which surrounds it redolent with a savoury perfume of peace and of faith. 60

While the Middle Ages had been disparaged by the writer earlier as “an age of terror and agony,” now, through the voice of Hubert, Angélique’s adoptive father, who in instructing his ward in his special craft teaches her its history and their medieval legacy, Zola’s tone has changed markedly: “Those ancient days, they were magnificent!” Angélique is sequestered in this medieval milieu,

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sheltered from modern life (“as if in a cloister, far away from the world”). The Huberts live amongst the cluster of old parish houses and workshops which up until the modern era surrounded cathedral churches—those we can still see in Monet’s early versions of Rouen Cathedral (for instance, Plate 6). Angélique, in this seclusion, turns away from the mundane, ordinary relations of everyday life through a passion for—an obsession with—the lives of the saints and martyrs as told in the Golden Legend, on whom she models her own piety. She entered, as it were, into a celestial splendour . . . The Legend alone interested her. She bent over it, with her forehead resting on her hands, studying it so intently, that she no longer lived in real life, but, unconscious of time, she seemed to see, mounting from the depths of the unknown, the broad expansion of a dream. 61

While she goes about her routine chores and activities, her attention is constantly diverted from the present to the past by thoughts relating to the “histories” she reads; if her outward demeanor and behavior conform to conventional time, her thought processes testify to an inner life that resists the advance of “regular” time. Throughout the novel, passages in a third-person narration of events and circumstances in the lives of its “real” characters fuse with Angélique’s first-person imaginative reverie, in lengthy and vivid descriptions of those saints and martyrs; it is a vision of events and personalities which “occurs” only in the imaginative world of the principle character, but one which assumes a “real” substantial significance for Angélique who makes little or no distinction between the dream-world of the legendary past and contemporary events around her. It is Angélique’s dream rather than her conscious thought that provides the interpretive key to Zola’s text. In several instances, the particular ancient stories which Angélique especially favors take on a peculiar resonance in her own life as it unfolds in the “real” story (and as she desires to see it unfold). Holding in her gaze the stained-glass depiction of the legend of Saint George and the dragon, Angélique imagines: From the moment of the coming on of twilight, this historic representation came out from the shade, lighted up as if it were an apparition, and that was why Angelique was fascinated, and loved this particular point, as she gazed at it with her dreamy eyes. 62

Angélique falls in love with Félicien d’Hautecoeur, a marquis and the son of the cathedral’s bishop and last descendant of a prominent medieval family who appears to her as the ideal Saint George, resembling the figure portrayed in the cathedral window. Angélique and Félicien enclose themselves within the spatially and temporally ambiguous confines of the cathedral and parish grounds in complete thrall of an imagined medieval past. While Angélique becomes a master embroiderer of liturgical vestments, Félicien, rejecting his father’s clerical profession, sets himself up as an artist and restorer of stained glass: “He had re-found the ancient methods of the thirteenth century, so that he could fancy himself as being one of the primitive glass-workers, producing masterpieces with the poor, unfinished means of the older time.” 63 Yet the elements of “fantasy,” of an ideal, medieval past, are, throughout the novel, continually tempered with the sensibilities and attitudes of contemporary life. Angélique’s immersion in medieval mystery and legend, for instance, bears direct resemblance to the events and circumstances which affect her “real” life; her inherited working-class (an illegitimate member of the RougonMacquart clan) livelihood as an embroiderer under commission to the church has a “real” ancient history; and Félicien’s family lineage, by contrast, retains the imprint of feudal class relations. Zola, himself captivated by a fin de siècle medievalism while working on the novel and immersing himself in the study of Viollet-le-Duc’s writings about Gothic architecture, 64 accounted for this elision of past and present in Angélique’s vision of the Gothic: My thought . . . was that the otherworldly environment be a reflex of the imagination, of Angélique’s own reverie . . . the unknown force that we don’t fully comprehend. It was necessary, then, to show

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how Angélique, subconsciously, her imagination nourished by the legends, her youth flowering in dream, creates her environment herself, an invisible one that, in response, acts upon her. 65

These characters are trapped, in many respects, not so much between the past and the present, but between the past and the future, between the no longer accessible—or accessible only in reverie— and the still inaccessible, the refusal of their marriage by Félicien’s noble father, which would fulfill the dream. Thus the lives of the characters are structured around nostalgia and anticipation, or a combination of the two. When the characters are not reflecting on the past, they are projecting themselves into the future. For Angélique, the cathedral is more than carved masonry; rather, “the stones of the cathedral speak to her.” She relies on the “advice” of the cathedral: “Then, again, this great, sovereign voice, it is that of my old friend, the Cathedral, who, eternally awake, both day and night, has taught me many important things. Each one of the stones in the immense building, the little columns in the windows, the bell-towers of its piers, the flying buttresses of its apse, all have a murmur which I can distinguish, a language which I understand. Listen to what they say . . . Listen, listen!” 66 Each morning she seemed to see it for the first time; she made constant discoveries in it, and was delighted to think that these old stones lived and had lived like herself. She did not reason at all on the subject, she had very little knowledge, but she gave herself up to the mystic flight of the giant, whose coming into existence had demanded three centuries of time, and where were placed one above the other the faith and the belief of generations. 67

Direct, lived experience is transcended before the cathedral, to the point where Angélique reflects on the possibility that the true object of her devotion is the immaterial but resonant shadow as she waits for Félicien to appear from its obscurity and looks onto the cathedral. As the day waned she grew more excited . . . and as soon as the hour arrived she hurried to her balcony, and waited for the shadow to appear. During all the first quarters of the moon she found it exact at each rendezvous, erect and silent. But that was all. What was the cause of it? Why was it there? Was it, indeed, only a shadow? Was it not, perhaps, the saint who had left his window . . . and who had now come to love her in her turn? Although she was not vain, these thoughts made her proud, and were as sweet to her as an invisible caress. Then she grew impatient to know more, and her watching recommenced. 68

At the end, she dies in the shadow of the cathedral, immersed in the realm of the visionary; at the moment when Angélique and Félicien emerge, newly wed, from the cathedral doors, where her real and imaginary odyssey began, she expires: “The exquisite vision that came from the Invisible had returned to the Invisible.” 69 Zola’s elaborate description of the cathedral in the opening pages makes the point most eloquently in a language that echoes that of many of Monet’s critics. When Angélique contemplates the cathedral from her balcony, her view is affected by changes in light, weather, and time. It begins with vivid visual description of the building, its real physical presence in the real time of perception, while at the same time sustaining a sense of its historical character, a presence through time which precedes and extends the time of momentary encounter with it. It is a descriptive prose that captures the mobility of light and shadow in our perception, a literary model of visual experience the aim of which is to keep the mind moving by constantly adjusting the viewpoint we adopt and the appearance we receive, and which is meant ultimately to leave the reader-viewer with an infinitely revisable impression. the Cathedral was alive . . . These old stones themselves were animated . . . The sun . . . filled it with life from the changing play of its rays; from the early morning, which rejuvenated it with a delicate gaiety, even to the evening, when, under the slightly lengthened-out shadows, it basked in the unknown . . . Now, as

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the days grew longer, Angelique passed more and more time in the morning and evening with her elbows on the balustrade of the balcony, side by side with her great friend, the Cathedral. She loved it the best at night, when she saw the enormous mass detach itself like a huge block on the starry skies. The form of the building was lost. It was with difficulty that she could even distinguish the flying buttresses, which were thrown like bridges into the empty space. It was, nevertheless, awake in the darkness, filled with a dream of seven centuries, made grand by the multitudes who had hoped or despaired before its altars. It was a continual watch, coming from the infinite of the past, going to the eternity of the future. 70

This, ultimately, seems to be the very experience to which Rodin wanted to give voice: Accumulation of thoughts over this facade . . . Thousands of years, centuries have their portrait here. This is a visage of human infinity. (187)

Let’s once again look, in this context, at the account of the Rouen Cathedrals by one of Monet’s critics in 1895: it is the historic and enflowered cathedral that Monet has wanted to beatify in his recent years of work, because cathedrals have a soul, and one could believe that, after centuries of embodying the mystical aspirations of the multitudes, they have become human. 71

In the final chapter of Les Cathédrales de France, a eulogy entitled “Last Testament,” Rodin utters, much like Zola’s Angélique at her balcony: “The sublime is at my window: indecipherable.” And it is with this notion of the sublime—that aesthetic attitude wherein the imagination is launched into the pleasurable but futile effort to comprehend the manifold in perception in a way that leads the mind to intimation of the indefinite, that which can be conceived but neither seen nor made visible—that Rodin acknowledges not so much a debt to, but rather a shared mission with, Ruskin: For my contemporaries I am a bridge connecting two banks, the past to the present. Often I have seen crowds hesitate before enormous Gothic piles, asking themselves if they are truly beautiful. May they deign to accept me as guarantee, with Ruskin . . . when we affirm that this architecture is of sublime beauty. 72

5 The Poetry of Architecture It is toward the enormous and delicate Middle Ages That my wounded heart must navigate Away from our days of carnal spirit and sorry flesh . . . High theology and solid morals Guided by the unique folly of the Cross On you wings of stone, oh wild Cathedral! —Verlaine, Sagesse (1880)

COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY AS EMBODIED IN THE CATHEDRALS OF FRANCE AND THE history and spirituality of the Middle Ages in general, was—beyond the “vandalism” of restoration, beyond the depravities of modern architecture and the wounds of war—further threatened by the rising tide of fin de siècle anticlericalism, a political and social reality that, at its conclusion, resulted in the separation of church and state and the nationalization of all ecclesiastical property. Until 1905, the government had provided the Church with the financial support for the upkeep of churches and the performance of religious services. Learning of the plan for a law that would end such state subsidy, Marcel Proust published “La Mort des Cathédrales,” in Le Figaro on August 16, 1904, wherein he defended religious ceremonies as the soul of French churches and of the French tradition. He was concerned with the consequences of this struggle between church and state, emphasizing the effect it had even on those with little or no religious belief but who, as George Heard Hamilton has argued, “were concerned with the preservation of cathedrals as national monuments and with the continuance of religious services at least for their aesthetic character.” 1 Hamilton continues: During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the expressive possibilities of the image of a cathedral were greater than they have been since and at the same time more susceptible to contrary and often extrapictorial interpretations. Our attitudes toward religion and religious history, toward religious architecture and architecture of the Middle Ages in particular, are so complex that it would seem as if Monet’s “Cathedrals” must have some reference to the dominant religious problems of the day, that he must have expected them to evoke some sort of passionate response as images of a religious structure. 2

The sculpted cathedral porch was, even in Proust’s fiction, “the true opus francigenum.” 3 And as the Symbolist poet Charles Morice put it in his “Introduction” to Rodin’s Cathédrales de France: “Let this be understood: it is the French cathedral only with which we are concerned. In its origin and in its originality, the cathedral is French.” 4 And again, even more stridently: “This is France . . . in practice and in theory this is the genius of the race.” 5 In equally chauvinist rhetoric, Proust argued in his 1904 essay that “these cathedrals that are the most original expression of French genius” would become arid and lifeless museums, “empty shells,” without the liturgical ceremonies for which they were constructed. As if confirming this sentiment in 1914, Morice echoed, “Museums are cemeteries [ . . . ] where works, diverted from their initial destination, lose the best of their sense and their splendor.” 6 Without the “forêt de 80

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symbols” of the Gothic cathedral, Proust argued, the manifest form of French heritage would be rendered meaningless: One can say that thanks to the persistence of the Catholic Church, its rituals, and Catholic faith in the very heart of the French, the cathedrals are not only the most beautiful monuments of our art, but the one that still lives and breathes the life for which it was created . . . The Catholic liturgy lives in the symbolic architecture and sculpture of our cathedrals. 7

At a time of increased secularization and a weakening of Church power, a time of diminishing faith and vanishing traditions, the cathedral was an ancient structure still struggling to function according to the beliefs in the service of which it was created, a belief in the superiority of the French nation as consecrated with a divine mission that was central to Catholic thought. “Never was such a spectacle,” Proust continued of the Gothic cathedral in 1904, “such a giant mirror of science, soul, and history, offered to the sight and the intelligence of man.” Here Proust is implicitly invoking the art historian Emile Mâle, 8 who, in his L’Art réligieux du XIII siècle published in 1898, conceived of the Gothic cathedral as the equivalent of the Speculum majus, or great Mirror— the Mirror of Nature, the Mirror of Instruction, the Mirror of Morals, and the Mirror of History 9 (a model also surely not lost on Ruskin and, consequently, Rodin). The Gothic monument is understood, in this sense, to be a great text or encyclopedia of the medieval mind that could, through attentive scrutiny, be deciphered, “a kind of open book,” Proust argues, making direct reference to the “stone Bible” that Victor Hugo had described—“written in a language no longer understood.” 10 Mâle’s study, based on his doctoral dissertation, had traced the medieval theological science of symbolism, describing the Gothic structure as a “stone book.” And, as Elizabeth Emery has recently argued, “Mâle. . . . blurred the distinction between book, cathedral, and theology by presenting Gothic architecture to his readers as a visual representation of the theologian’s invisible “intellectual cathedral.” 11 These were the years in fin de siècle France which saw, as Hamilton claimed, “a revival of mystical speculation and a renewed interest in the significance of the Church both as a system of thought and as a social institution.” 12 Thus, in the Gothic cathedral spiritualism and nationalism were inscribed and intimately linked with the Church as the guardian of order, tradition, and the spirit of France, and Catholicism as the religion of national ancestral tradition. Many contemporary artists and writers—feeling themselves alienated from the materialism and rationalist authority of modern bourgeois society—now sided against an anticlerical government and turned away in rejection of the contemporary world and toward (neo-)Catholic mysticism and the faith of a medieval past. For others, it was more of a reappropriation of tradition, finding sustenance in that tradition and applying it creatively to present realities. We have already had indication of this in Zola’s novel Le Rêve. More overtly, the novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans, a critic and admirer of Monet—from A rebours (1884), to La Bas (1891), to the path toward conversion (including Huysmans’s own) described in En Route, and ultimately to La Cathédrale (1898)—follow the spiritual odyssey of their main characters who seek a form of satisfaction far from contemporary society and its ordinary interests in the world and, instead, in the isolated activities of the mind and the imagination, a reverie concentrated, significantly, on the ecclesiastical forms and rituals of a visionary medieval past, and on the symbolism of Catholic liturgy and art. 13 By century’s end, the Gothic cathedral had developed into a literary topos for the multifaceted symbol of French spirit. 14 And, again, it was this discourse that diffused through the reception—if not the production—of Monet’s Cathedrals in 1895. J.-K. Huysmans’s La Cathédrale, published with great public success in the same year (1898) 15 as Emile Mâle’s extensive study of the symbolism of medieval sculpture, 16 is a shapeless and sprawling narrative of the vast encyclopedia of Christian faith and scriptural exegesis Huysmans found in the iconography of Chartres. 17 The novel culminates with its main character, Durtal, along with a clergyman who serves as his guide, penetrating the codes of representation in sustained meditation

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on the cathedral, on the mystical intensity of its complex network of symbols that establishes, in the vision of the mind, the essential link between past and present. In addition to his fiction, the novelist had published several articles about medieval art and architecture. For Huysmans, the “soul” of the medieval church constituted the spiritual history of the French nation that transcended contemporary social and political reality, where the cathedral is viewed not as purely religious edifice but rather as memorial embodiment of French history. Proust, who read and critiqued the work of Huysmans and who considered the novelist as much an expert as Viollet-le-Duc, Ruskin, and Mâle, specifically remarked on La Cathédrale in his translation of Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens (where he also made the connection to Monet’s Rouens) and adopted Huysmans’s ideas generally in his articles about Ruskin and Gothic architecture published in Le Figaro and Le Mercure de France between 1898 and 1906. The author’s fictional painter in the Recherche, Elstir, transfixed in contemplation of Balbec church, remarks, like Durtal in Huysmans’s novel, on the “huge theological and symbolic poem.” 18 And Proust himself argues in The Bible of Amiens: “But a cathedral is not simply a beauty to be felt. Even if it is no longer for you a lesson to be followed, it is, at least still a book to be understood.” 19

FROM MEMORY IN PERCEPTION TO SYMBOLIST POETICS: A FURTHER CONTEXT FOR MONET’S CATHEDRALS The Gothic cathedral, for Huysmans, is a symbol of theology and of history; it serves as an image of the unity of things material and things spiritual, things sensuous and things of the mind, or more properly, the movement from one to the other. 20 As such, it demands to be deciphered, not merely seen. In their concentration on the symbolic aspects of the Catholic faith, writers like Huysmans felt themselves to be returning to the allegorical and anagogical traditions of scriptural and liturgical exegesis of the Middle Ages. Adopting a linguistic-cum-literary analogy and citing French lexicographer and philosopher Emile Littré (1801–81), Huysmans’s characters remark: Thanks to the science of symbolism a pile of stones may be a microcosm . . . Notre Dame of Chartres is the most colossal dispository existing of heaven and earth, of God and man. Each of its images is a word; all those groups are phrases—the difficulty is to read them. “But can it be done?” “Undoubtedly. That there may be some contradictions in our interpretations I admit, but still the palimpsest can be deciphered. The key needed is a knowledge of symbolism . . .” What is a symbol? According to Littré it is a “figure or image used as a sign of something else;” and we Catholics narrow the definition by saying . . . that a symbol is an allegorical representation of a Christian principle under a tangible image. 21

Then, linking a practice of medieval allegorizing in word and image, via the mystical speculations of Saint Augustine, with Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s use of language, Huysmans puts emphasis on the pleasure and satisfaction of the mind in this deciphering. In this Symbolist middle ages, the poetic or visual image and its allegorical significance are connected in the mind of the reader, hearer, or beholder. Vision is conceived of as an intellectual, conceptual act of comprehension, that which pleases when meaning is intuited, not without mental effort—a pleasure in knowledge achieved and sustained through the effort of the mind. Symbols, then, have a divine origin; it may be added that from the human point of view this form of teaching answers to one of the least disputable cravings of the human mind. Man feels a certain enjoyment in giving proof of his intelligence, in guessing the riddle thus presented to him, and likewise in preserving the hidden truth summed up in a visible formula, a perdurable form. Saint Augustine expressly says: “Anything that is set forth in an allegory is certainly more emphatic, more pleasing, more impressive, than when it is formulated in technical words.” “That is Mallarmé’s idea too,” thought Durtal, “and this coincidence in the views of the saint and the poet, on grounds at once analogous and different, is whimsical, to say the least.” 22

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The Middle Ages, knowing that everything on earth is a sign and a figure, that the only value of things visible is in so far as they correspond to things invisible—the Middle Ages, when consequently men were not, as we are, the dupes of appearances—made a profound study of this science, and made it the nursing mother and the handmaid of mysticism. 23

There is a recurring analogy with poetry used by critics in 1895 to describe Monet’s Rouen Cathedrals. And it is significant that this mode of critical analysis, more interpretive than the purely descriptive accounts of newspaper journalism, appeared in the more progressive literary magazines of the day, where Monet was increasingly incorporated into a sophisticated discourse that was generally unavailable for public and conventional usage. Pissarro’s sense of exclusion is good testimony: “The yap of La Revue Blanche,” he complained, “seems hostile to me, it is the organ of the new generation.” 24 Albert Aurier, in his essay of 1891, “Symbolism in Painting,” defined a mode of painting which, like its literary counterpart, rejected a world of “material externals” 25 in favor of a purely conceptual or “ideistic” realm transcending mere appearance. He describes the painter as “writing his thought, his poem.” It is a reality of the intellect given objective or “externalized” form, in the terminology of Symbolist poet Gustave Kahn’s characterization: “the essential goal of our art is to objectify the subjective (the exteriorization of the Idea) instead of subjectifying the objective (nature seen through a temperament).” 26 And in his “Literature: Manifesto of Symbolism” of 1886, Jean Moréas first used the term “Symbolism” as descriptive of a kind of poetry which, “enemy of . . . objective description . . . seeks to clothe the idea in sensible form.” 27 The problem for painting, of course, has always been whether this definition of Symbolism—the primacy of suggestion over depiction, of the intelligible over the merely sensible—can indeed be extended beyond the literary to the visual without focusing purely on thematic correspondences between poetry and painting—a “Symbolist” visual art, in other words, based solely upon a work’s literary content, defined in terms of the iconographic and hence discursive meanings that literary subject matter attaches to visual form through the use of conventional signs and symbols (the Symbolist painting of Odilon Redon, for instance). In cases like these, the meaning of an image can be said to be exhausted at the level of communication or symbolical significance—that is, at the level of meaning consciously intended and publicly consumed. Yet significantly, in 1891, the Symbolist writer Camille Mauclair, one of Monet’s critics, claiming to speak for others of his generation like Aurier and Kahn, designated the Impressionist painter as a leader of Symbolism; and in that same year, Charles Morice, editor of the new journal Mercure de France and author of the “Introduction” to Rodin’s Cathédrales, included Monet along with Gauguin under the rubric of Symbolism. It is this nomination of later Impressionist painting as Symbolist, and the terms in which the attribution is made, that permit us, I think, to theorize a “symbolist visual poetics.” 28 Symbolist literary magazines like La Revue Blanche among others were saturated with this kind of analogy making. From the level of sophistication in its use, it seems likely that the analogy with poetry is not intended as mere lyrical embellishment to visual description. It is, in most cases, a sophisticated analytical tool. Charles Frémine, writing in Le Rappel, we remember, had described Monet’s Rouen pictures as evoking historical, emotional, and mystical associations through an analogy between painted surfaces and stone-sculpted facades, describing the series as “A poem . . . this ensemble of studies that all address the same object and where each is a verse of light and color” 29 And Georges Lecomte, in La Nouvelle revue, also seeing Monet’s densely pigmented surfaces as an equivalent for the visual irregularities of masonry and the suggestiveness of both, had this to say: Twenty canvases that express the poetry of stone, the audacious majesty of Gothic architecture and the charm of dream, of softness or of joy that the subtle and varied atmosphere gives to things . . . All is complete, harmonious, and this grandiose stone poem is rendered in its majesty and its true meaning. 30

Both critics invoke the analogy with poetic language, that is, the uncommon use of ordinary language, to describe an unusual painting procedure. Ary Renan in La Chronique des arts, accounting

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for Monet’s facture as transforming the real visual spectacle of his subject into a “parable” or system of allegory, referred to the series as “a long poem of light in many verses inspired by the portal of the old Gothic wonder.” 31 And Henry Eon, whose perhaps most eloquent account of “optical experience” and “imaginative vision,” elicited by the subject and captured by a very deliberate manner of painting, in La Plume called the group of pictures a “culmination of poetic inspiration and a powerful art.” 32 Similarly, Hippolyte Fiereus-Gavaert, writing in the Indépendence belge, remarked, “The magnificent poem that Claude Monet devotes to the Cathedral of Rouen, sheds light on our mysterious relationships with the ‘infinite detail of things’ . . . the large sculpted portals of the church probably open on the Unknown. Nobody enters here.” 33 Still another reviewer in 1895 actually composed his critical remarks as a poem: Beautiful with a mystic beauty suggesting the hours of forgiveness and of foregone memory at the threshold of impregnable church squares. Magnificent in their dazzling splendour and their dazzling metamorphoses Triumphant, untameable in the august dignity of their sacred pillars, Temples of faith! Basilicas of Love! Disturbing apparitions, in the heavenly clouds, Only true shelters of our ancient sorrows and of our joys to come. Glowing symbols of our destinies. Radiant poem! Mysterious teaching from eternal sorrows and from promised redemptions Magical apotheosis of religion and dream. 34

The point here is that critics of painting seem to have found poetry an appropriate analogue for the sense it carried of the unusual use of language in description, suggestive of a certain kind of content they found in the pictures, which, as in poetry, was less immediately and concretely available to perception and only more gradually and evocatively suggested through its presentation in the description. Unlike prose, poetic language is not limited by a sense of mimetic adequacy to external “reality;” rather, it dispenses with precise descriptions and employs allusion and suggestion. Whereas prose, in ordinary communication, legislates syntactical order and hierarchizes its linguistic components to effect precision and clarity—and here we might think about conventional academic theories of pictorial unity based upon grammatical categories and linguistic models of cohesion effecting greater lucidity in perception—poetry, geared discourse not toward logical sequence and narrative order but rather toward disjunction and connotative obscurity. The implication of the analogy seems to be that poetry could somehow reveal the nature of things with an intensity and comprehensiveness lacking in ordinary language—that is, poetic uses of language could discover some aspects or layers of meaning in things beneath our everyday experience of them. Certainly Louis Lumet, writing of Monet in L’Enclos, seems to be using the metaphor that way: Under the cool caress of the morning light, there is the portal in the subtle air, the stone turned pink, moved by an awakening of life; then the sun arises, the colored tones swell in a crescendo scale until they reach the radiant and noisy shining of noon . . . Acute observation becomes interpretation of the Dream . . . the harmonies in which Time bathes the Cathedral in sumptuous crimsons and golds, dims it in the ghostly blue of fog, and engulfs it in the languid purple of twilight. These twenty canvases, a simple and complex poem, real and unreal. 35

The analogy with literary language, then, has two important and interrelated concerns: the contrived unusual use of language in description, and our engagement with that distinguished use which might reveal a content not immediately available to linguistic or visual perception. This, of course, has an immediate context in the 1890s in the aesthetic ideas advanced in the work of a number of Symbolist poets, including Huysmans, Morice, Verlaine, Kahn, Moréas, Aurier, and Mallarmé. Stéphane Mallarmé, Monet’s link with the younger literary critics and writers—

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both were in regular attendance, along with Geffroy, Mirbeau, and others at Berthe Morisot’s “Thursdays” 36—was concerned that poetry not engage in the ordinary use of language typical of journalistic writing, reportage as he referred to it; the exclusive function and purpose of this undistinguished use of language, to his mind, was the conveying of information in the clearest and most unobtrusive manner possible—everyday language. Poetry, on the other hand, the business of which goes beyond the mere description and presentation of objects in the world, has the distinctive feature of being absolutely self-conscious about language as its medium, employing that language in such a way that turns the hearer’s attention back onto it, not merely describing but evaluating the subject it addresses by forcing the hearer to engage with that subject through a heightened concentration on the self-imposing language in description, and even to enjoy that artistry. The central character in Huysmans’s A Rebours, in fact, relishing the hermetic, rampantly imprecise language of Mallarmé, describes it as “a dense, furtive and solitary language, full of retracted sentences, and elliptic turns.” It is a thickening of the verbal medium which involves the manipulation of words, phrases, and syntax wherein enumeration, sequence, and the uniform pattern of description—the “rational” form of language—are eliminated in favor of unfamiliar inversions of words, neologisms, broken phrases, ellipses, and deviations from and disruptions of the connectiveness of syntax, which reinforce the idea of form—materiality—in language. It is a matter of altering traditional usage, forcing obscurity and disrupting immediate access to the subject, yet generating fresh senses beyond the range of other uses of language and thereby forcing our uncommon attentiveness to the language in description, an uncommon sensitivity to the depicted subject because of the very disruption of our habitual attention to it, because of the language in which it is formulated, and restoring to the reader the experience of language as a signifying medium. 37 For Mallarmé, our interest in the subject of depiction should in some measure be defined by our following the formal structure of that language in use, and partly in the special interpretive behavior involved in our exploration of it, a behavior that is not a part of our hearing or reading of ordinary language. The poet’s views on language are most clearly expressed in the often-quoted interview with Jules Huret, published in 1891 as Enquête sur l’évolution littèraire. Criticizing the Parnassian poets for the direct presentation of their ideas in their work, in a way which disallows the involvement of the reader/listener in the imaginative supplementation of description, Mallarmé asserts: I think that there should only be allusion. The contemplation of objects, the image emanating from the dreams that the objects excite, this is poetry. The Parnassian poets take a thing whole and reveal it; through this they lack mystery; they deny the human spirit the delicious joy of believing that it is creating. To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which is created by the pleasure of gradually apprehending it. To suggest it, that is the dream. 38

Not insignificantly, it was the very “ambiguity” and “mystery” of Monet’s painting that Mallarmé admired. 39 To name something is to conceptualize and thereby to blunt deeply felt experience of innermost being. Bergson himself had argued that language “stores up the stable, common and consequently impersonal element in the impressions of mankind . . . overwhelms or at least covers over the delicate, the fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness.” 40 And again later, in his “The Perception of Change:” “What is the aim of art if not to show us, in nature and in the mind, outside of us and within us, things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness?” 41 In a conversation in 1913, Bergson acknowledged the affinities between his philosophy and literary Symbolism: “Some discover affinities between [my ideas] and Symbolist poetry. That is quite possible, but that is how I am accused of favoring literary anarchy, of taking a position against the classical aesthetic, of introducing into art some subversive doctrines.” 42 Poetic language, for Bergson, could overcome to some extent the limitations of ordinary uses of language and open a path to another, more intuitive understanding of reality. Language itself,

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the language of Symbolist poetry, in suspending its referent could attain to mystery, to a world beyond the world of the ordinary. The analogy with poetic discourse to describe Monet’s painting in 1895 can, I suggest, be thought of in similar terms: Monet is eliciting and drawing attention to the insistent materiality of his paint surfaces where the purely pictorial (nonsemantic) qualities of color, touch, and pattern become a crucial part of our awareness in our resolving them into a pictorial world, and where that resolving is dependent upon, as Mallarmé described it, a gradual “series of decipherments;” in this way the spontaneous activity of the mind is led to draw conclusions, analogies, and continuities between the structure of the painting procedure and the fiction of the image, beyond simple resolution of the form and presentation of the depicted object.

CONTEMPORARY VIEWS ON A SYMBOLIST LANGUAGE Literary theorist David Scott, in his analysis of the relation between linguistic composition and models of perception in nineteenth-century poetry, Pictorialist Poetics, has argued in this context that “a radical change in the structure or ordering of syntax implies a corresponding shift in perspective in viewing the world. This is because the relationship between the order of syntax in language and the order of perception of phenomena in reality, as expressed in description, are closely bound up.” 43 And this reordering of perceptual experience occurs along the axis of temporality, effecting a violation of the usual temporal build-up of linguistic sense—the defining characteristic of the verbal as distinct from the visual in conventional aesthetics. Wendy Steiner has similarly argued that Symbolist poetry, “in part created by the demarcation of temporal units through syntax and versification and ordered semantic ‘sense’ ”—which sets up patterns of reading and formal composition radically opposed to those operative in conventional prose—“manages to prevent such demarcation from functioning fully.” 44 The interruption of immediate access to discursive meaning, therefore, is achieved through the disruption of the reader-hearer’s conventional orientation. It is this very subverting of the conventional signifying systems of verbal discourse that Julia Kristeva, in her Revolution of Poetic Language, assigns to Symbolist poetry, ascribing to it the category of the “semiotic,” a sort of fluid, pleasurable excess over precise, univocal meaning, which takes delight in destroying or negating the rigid signifying systems of the social-symbolic order. 45 In poetic language, she argues, semantic nonclosure and the heterogeneity of multiple sounds and fractured meanings prevail. It is a kind of ecstatic instability, liberated from language, from logic. Rupture in language (the term is hers) occurs in the modernist text by pushing linguistic signification to its extreme limit—through, for instance, rhythm, intonation, sound-play, repetition—subverting stability, precision, and clarity in meaning, rendering it mobile, plural, and open to potentially new forms and disrupting fixed reader-subject positions. It is Mallarmé in particular, she argues, who took language back from its classical rhetorical basis to its “semiotically” more complex origins. Indifferent to language . . . this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation . . . What is more, when poetic language—especially modern poetic language—transgresses grammatical rules, the positing of the symbolic finds itself subverted . . . as a possessor of meaning . . . only certain literary texts of the avant garde (Mallarmé, Joyce) manage to cover the infinity of the process . . . reach the semiotic which modifies linguistic structures. 46

We might also draw the comparison here with Proust’s poetic diction—its unbroken sentences side by side, without transitions and connectives—wherein time, and therefore meaning, is extended and dilated as in the ceaseless continuity of la durée, a language which mimes the rhythms of consciousness itself and the production of it through multidirectional strategies of “reading.” Paul de Man has argued convincingly that one of the greatest contributions of Bergsonian thinking is the “poetics” of Symbolism—the unity of memory, imagination, and intuition. For de Man, it is a matter of multiplicity, difference, and movement—a “decentering” that is the ultimate manifestation

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of Bergson’s concept of “flux.” Similarly, Gilles Deleuze claims to find in Bergson a poststructuralist sense of temporality in opposition to the linear narrative tradition. And Bergson himself appealed to literary writing’s capacity to escape language’s limits and realize a “virtuality,” an interiority of consciousness always in a state of movement. 47 But not only is the conventional temporality of language unsettled in the Symbolist (Mallarméan) poetic utterance, through infractions of the order of grammar and rules of syntax, the abandonment of punctuation, and the directing of attention to rhythm, meter and cadence; in addition, the spatial potential of linguistic structure, conventionally the dimension exclusive to visual figuration, is enhanced. David Scott cites, for instance, Mallarmé’s restoring of visual activity to comprehension in poetry in his radical introduction of the page as visual field (for instance, Un coup de des, 1897), wherein, “poetic text tends to be grasped as a spatial complex, a simultaneously perceived whole rather than a unidirectional continuum as in conventional prose.” 48 The result of lending corporeal presence to language, of locking it into spatial form, is comprehension of meaning in language as spatial simultaneity rather than temporal successivity. A spatialized, nonhierarchical poetic text, Scott argues, which in its meandering graphic utterances refuses the syntagmatic and consecutive logic of discursivity, claims the surface of representation itself (the page) as a symbolic field, and denies the transparency of language. Moreover, the blank spaces, or breaks between the spatialized, atomistic units of words, symbolize the lacunae of sequential thinking, and serve as testament to the creative force of absence, of silence, and Proustian forgetting. 49 Scott argues: In inviting the page back into the text, the poem enhances its own profile and visual impact, but at the cost of a certain dislocation of language’s intrinsic functions, especially those associated with linear advance: syntax and the logic of proposition. The page thus asserts itself both as an ironic denial of language’s positive, rational gestures and as a potentially symbolic field, capable, silently, of reverberating, extending or enlarging the irrational or unconscious implications of the text. 50

This kind of “visual poetics” for painting, I am suggesting for Monet’s Cathedrals, may be thought of in the terms I have been outlining here: first, where the insistent materiality of paint surfaces become a crucial part of our perceptual awareness (and interpretive behavior) in resolving them into a pictorial world; and second, where painting disrupts our logical and coherent relationship with the world by opening up the possibility of ambiguity, fluidity, and extendability of perception along the axes of temporality and spatiality. The extended temporal dimension to visual experience, beyond the “instant” to a horizon of possibilities immanent within the procedure of painting, involves a disruption of spatial coherence as well. For example, in the densely layered, successively painted surfaces, earlier stages of configuration are retained, while distinct but less emphatic reworking across those previous layers is also perceptible, so that the visual effect of the earlier stages is just as present to our awareness as the final surface marks. The underlying rough textures are in such strong relief against the later, thinner, smoother and less obtrusive surface strokes that a sense of simultaneous nearness and farness is conveyed in the very texture of the paint itself, adding to the ambiguity of spatial definition and creating an impression of simultaneity within sequence. “Poetry,” I suggest, is invoked by critics to account for an extended dimension to visual experience, beyond the spatially and temporally confined “instant” of pictorial seeing. For Mallarmé, for Bergson, and for Monet and his critics, the notion of “instantaneity” now is modified, it is enriched; it is extended beyond the specious present to include Husserl’s “horizon” of experiences within the “instant.” For Bergson, the question of memory in perception involved the idea of latency; what we have once seen, heard, or experienced is not lost, but survives since we can recall it, evoking the absent in the exhibition of presence. The moment of our perception is now pregnant with a horizon of possibilities, such that, as Monet put it, “one might live for longer” with his canvases; “instantaneity” is a concept which comes to accommodate in momentariness a sense of infinity. This I think is the force of our critics’ analogy with poetry to account for a certain kind of painting.

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In describing Monet’s Grainstacks and Poplars series, Gustave Geffroy himself adopts the tone, rhythm, and even at times the syntax of poetic discourse. First in 1891: [Monet] conveys the sensation of the ephemeral instant that comes into existence and departs and never again returns, and at the same time, he constantly evokes in each of his canvases—through the weight, the power that comes out from within the curve of the horizon, the roundness of the terrestrial globe— the course of the earth through space. He unmasks changing portraits, the faces of the landscape, the manifestations of joy and despair, of mystery and fate so that we invest everything around us with our own image. He anxiously observes the differences that occur from minute to minute, and he is the artist who sums up meteors and elements in a synthesis. He tells tales of mornings, noondays, twilights; rain, snow, cold, sunshine. He hears the voices of the evening and he makes us hear them. Pieces of the planet take shape on his canvas. He is a subtle, strong, instinctive, varied painter, and a great pantheistic poet. 51

And a year later in 1892: A flat plain,—a bend in the narrow of the river,—a trio of trees in the foreground,—and their continuation behind, a frail, sinuous colonnade of these crowned poplars . . . Never before has the pantheistic poem been written in as strong and moving a manner. The fainted hour is set up, the charm of fleeting life blooms again. Eternal nature radiates . . . — and all is glimpsed through the transparencies of the atmosphere, through the quick phenomena of meteors, all is illuminated and shivering under the waves of lights in space. 52

The analogy has special resonance in the context of the Gothic cathedral in 1895: These works will give all the same sensation of the eternal beauty of life, present at every hour, at every moment. The reality is present and becomes transfigured. These pinnacles, these portals, these buttresses, these Rouen sculptures, all that stone seen at every hour of the day, in the softness of the morning, in the illumination of noon, seen under the aspects of the atmosphere, under the caress of the sun, through the opacity of the fog or the air loaded with rain . . . He sets up his bright dream of clarity in front of himself through these Rouen stones, whereupon he fixes all the wandering poetry summarized in these greenish shadows, in these luminous glitters, in these pink embers and these pure flames of gold. 53

It is telling that the language of critical description itself, in seeking to echo the sense of temporal process and the continuous movement of change in our extended and multi-valent perceptual experience of the depicted subject, reaches for a literary equivalent, not only in its evocative prose, but also in its use of syntactical structures which, abandoning conventional patterns of linear description, promote greater fluidity of movement between the “phrases” of the description and so between the “images” described, miming the modifications of our perceptual procedures in our picture-beholding. What is at issue here is a perceptual-imaginative freedom elicited and determined by the procedure of painting itself, by the analogies, connections, and associations that that procedure of painting elicits in the mind of the viewer with respect to the subject it depicts—in other words, the mind’s capacity, through the way it attends to the opacity of the medium, to find the appropriate analogies and rhythms between depiction and its subject. 





To sum up the argument, then, in Monet’s Rouen Cathedral canvases, it is their optical density, their assertive, obtrusive, densely woven layers of paint, their loaded, embedded and overlapping impasto, that may be described as “poetic.” Each canvas is a palimpsest that can be deciphered only in the fullness of time, time then extended in the unity of the series and its own interplay of echoes, anticipations, and accretions. The procedure of painting addresses a gradual or emergent appearance of features in the Mallarméan sense—features once left unnoticed and so, in that sense, absent from our “momentary” view—that is, absent in the sense that their temporary nonoccurence lay outside, but always included within the background of the present of that moment. And this state of being

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momentarily unnoticed is part of our experience, part of the object’s appearing. It operates like Mallarmé’s “suggestion” in Symbolist poetry where the reader-hearer is called upon by the very self-conscious opacity of its language to engage with the object of depiction such that, unlike with ordinary prose, its “content” is less immediately and concretely available to perception and only more evocatively registered. And this extended and dense complexity of visual perception is, like Bergson’s durée, a ceaseless and seamless flow of thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and memories. “[T]here is no consciousness without memory,” Bergson wrote: and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present . . . Without this survival of the past into the present, there would be no duration, but only instantaneity. 54

Memory here is not the remembering of past episodes, but rather the past living on in the present in our perception, 55 affecting our visual and mental behavior, wherein successive and interpenetrative states of consciousness merge into one another, each retaining something of what has just passed and each giving intimation of what is to come—a fusion of the past with the present and the anticipated future. And in the Rouen Cathedrals Monet has achieved this sense of perceptual duration through a particular procedure of painting, and has done so, most significantly and fittingly, with a subject that is itself about the passage of time. The one stands as metaphor for the other. So, just as we do not engage with poetic description purely for what it describes, we do not engage with certain modes of depiction simply for what is depicted. As in poetry, the “language” of description presents itself to be explored, and by the very delicacy and complexity of attention it demands, illuminates its subject more completely. Ruskin had argued in the “Lamp of Memory:” “there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture, and the latter in some sort includes the former.” 56 “Cathedrals,” Rodin concludes, “are vast poems.” 57

Afterword While you seek the world-in-itself in philosophy, I simply turn my energies to the greatest number of phenomena possible, since these are in strict correlation with the unknown realities . . . —Monet to Georges Clemenceau

THIS STUDY HAS TRACED A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE RECEPTION OF MONET’S PAINTING OF ROUEN Cathedral, examining the assumptions, methods, and theoretical premises that underpin what was said about the pictures. But it has proposed more than a historical reading of the critical responses to them. I have used the history of reception to establish a new and, I think, more appropriate way of seeing and thinking about Monet’s project. Of his very earliest pictures, I suggested that we were made to conceive of an “unfinished” manner of painting as calling upon the complexity of our visual experience. Here the content of our perception always includes not only the view we presently hold at any one “moment” but also a sense of other possible views, other possible aspects on which we could fixate, other features we could make focal. While the inachevé of Monet’s painting may have had to do explicitly with the appearance of its procedure, implicitly it prompted us to become aware of our always “incomplete” perception of the visible world. And within the rhetorical strategies available to contemporary critics, sketchiness in painting was seen as like verbal incoherence, and so Monet’s painting as like instances of failure in language to communicate effectively and unambiguously. Yet the incompleteness in that “language of the sketch”—its nonsense—was seen as appropriately analogous to our destabilized perceptions. Early on, Monet found an equivalent in paint for perceptual instability where an indeterminate depicting procedure was able to register the mobility of our perceptions of the visible world of nature. A further sense of the extendedness to our perceptual experience was argued with respect to the disruptive and recondite “poetic” language of the later images. In the Rouen Cathedrals, there is, I suggested, a certain continuity with the earlier production of pictures. However, now the surfaces of Monet’s canvases are densely and emphatically compacted, each canvas sustaining the appearance, not of indeterminate sketchiness, but of long and calculated efforts of painting and repainting, and their textural richness is presented as such so as to suggest the layered complexity of our “momentary” perception. Perception here is a matter of continuous resolving, adjusting, shifting attention, losing and calling back into focus, echoes and anticipations; it is the procedure of painting which addresses the gradual or emergent appearance of aspects once left unnoticed, but always included in our “instantaneous” view, in the background of the “moment” of perception. Now, beyond the Baudelairean privileging of the transitory and the ephemeral, and in opposition to that epochal consciousness of “modernity,” the Gothic cathedral as subject matter itself evoked a sense of time, time as unbroken historical continuity, as stratified memory. Vision and imagination in Monet’s painting have both retrospective and prospective dimension; the continuity of duration is the union of the past metamorphosing into the present “moment” and the present including anticipations of the future. This flexibility of perception is possible in representation precisely when the procedure of painting itself allows for a lack of complete resolvability and full articulation of the world in painting. The specious present in our perception takes on the horizon of experiences 90

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included in the “instant” of that perception; and that perception is constituted in consciousness in a way that depends upon the kind of retention and recollection available in memory. In Matter and Memory Bergson noted that these two acts, perception and recollection, “always interpenetrate each other, are always exchanging something of their substance as by a process of endosmosis.” 1 And in his most fully developed statement on temporality, Duration and Simultaneity, originally published in 1922, Bergson argued: [Duration] is memory . . . a memory that prolongs the before into the after . . . it is impossible to imagine or conceive a connecting link between the before and after without an element of memory and, consequently, of consciousness . . . There is no doubt that our consciousness feels itself enduring, that our perception plays a part in our consciousness, and that something of our body and environing matter enters into our perception. 2







On the day after Armistice, on November 12, 1918, Monet, in a letter to Georges Clemenceau in his new role as prime minister, offered to France as a token of his own “participation in the day of Victory” his Grande Décorations, a commemorative lieu de mémoire (realm of memory) in paint that would eventually take the form of twenty-two enormous panels to be permanently installed in the Orangerie of the Tuileries in Paris in 1927. 3 “Imagine,” wrote the critic Arsène Alexandre in Le Figaro on October 21, 1920, “that each of the stanzas of this poem . . . is composed of 2, 3, 4 or 6 large canvases which dovetail to form a spectacle of uninterrupted water, reflected sky and vegetation . . . [in] commemoration of our victory spontaneously offered to France by Monet.” 4 Here, just as in his immensely popular Nymphéas canvases which preceded this massive project (Plate 16), the process of perceptual verification of an external spatially and temporally coherent world is finally and irreversibly disrupted, and the beholder enters into the ceaseless movements of liquid destabilization. We are presented with a single, unbroken visual field of a vast expanse of water surface, without visual-spatial coordinates and without trace of human presence, where “the whole world is cut loose from anthropomorphic or conceptual points of reference,” as Leo Steinberg put it in 1956, 5 and painting no longer attempts to hold onto the presence of a recognizable world. Water lilies float on the surface of the pond on which are also reflected the passing clouds in an unseen sky overhead; above and below, horizontal and vertical, proximate and distant are interwoven and indistinguishable. Our efforts to make sense of an elaborately painted surface, a surface marked by real, reflected, contradictory and endlessly shifting images are refused in a vertiginous and disengaging look down into/onto the surface of representation, which pushes beyond the conventional limits of the frame and subverts it for a new paradigm, an all-over, nonhierarchical distribution of visual attention, thereby disallowing any vestigial sense of the single, unified, and momentary view. As Jonathan Crary has recently argued about the dissolution of unity in perception, a mode of representation is possible which “open(s) up onto flux, dispersion and even as attention seem(s) to join the eye and body to the world it also und(oes) the very immediacy of the world and displace(s) the body into a stream of change, of time.” 6 Monet’s panoramic canvases, it can be argued, are an icon of this “decentering” project of modernism, a new and precarious grammar or “poetics” of movement. These canvases are truly inachevé, in the sense of provisional and contingent. Their very subject is incomplete, and it offered the painter, over and over again, the ultimate in perceptual variation and flux—an infinite array of color, constantly changing reflections, continuous tensions between surface and depth, near and far, stability and mobility, presence and absence. This is the domain of the phenomenological par excellence, a realm of pure consciousness, containing both subject and object, and what Octave Mirbeau, writing about Monet in 1891, referred to as “the illumination of states of consciousness of the planet, and the supersensible forms

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of our thoughts.” 7 Roger Marx, in a review of Monet’s much anticipated exhibition at DurandRuel’s in 1909, Les Nymphéas: Séries de paysages d’eau, captured this “perceptual revolution” in Monet’s evocations of the inverted natural world: No more earth, no more sky, no limits now; the dormant and fertile waters completely cover the field of the canvas; light overflows . . . The nature of what is fixed, immutable, appears to him to contradict the very essence of fluidity . . . Through the incense of soft vapors, under a light veil of silvery mist, “the indecisive meets the precise.” Certainty becomes conjecture and the enigma of the mystery opens the mind to the world of illusion and the infinity of dreams. 8

In certain types of painting and poetry, meaning is not only distorted and fragmented, but multiple and fluid, open to a dizzying blur of potential and often contradictory meanings and unfixed readerviewer positions, yet, while indeterminate in this way, giving the mind the opportunity to elude cozy legibility and continually to seek new combinations in the movement of reading and viewing and the continuous deferment of finality. Perception, in other words, takes the form of the process of its own formation and involves the beholder’s inhabiting the very instability of perception itself. French writers of the nouveau roman, following the narrative advances of Proust, similarly dealt with extending the fragment of felt time. Michel Butor’s novels, for instance, in questioning our conventional way of seeing reality, are concerned with the infrastructures of consciousness and with the preverbal gyrations of the psychic life—what Julia Kristeva called the “pre-linguistic semiotic pulsions” of Symbolist poetry. Butor characterized Monet’s world as “le monde renversé,” a world turned upside down. In a brilliantly perceptive series of short “responses” to a number of Monet’s paintings, Butor remarked in contemplating the Orangerie Nymphéas: “Then we fall gently into the sky, and the waters of the sky stream down on us.” 9 Just as the world is not “there” to be reproduced by language, painting is not a painting of reality, there is no “neutral” looking. Painting attaches itself to different aspects of the visible world which is not “there” in advance but only comes into our mental process by virtue of our perceptual and imaginative activity. Monet’s painting disturbs our univocal relationship with the world by opening up the possibility of ambiguity, contradiction, and fluidity, stimulating our imaginative and visual interpretation. The instability of our perception is possible in representation—in word and image— when “language” itself disrupts unity, coherence and resolution: the visual and the verbal registering not simply the “look” or “sense” of the world, but its very relation to us as precarious, provisional, incomplete, and so continually open to re-vision.

Notes Abbreviations: The upper-case “W” refers to picture identification number in D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, Lausanne and Paris, I (1840–1881), 1974; II (1882–1886); III (1887–1898), 1979; IV (1899–1926), 1985; V, “Supplément aux peintures, dessins, pastels, index.” The lower case “w” refers to correspondence identification number in the relevant volume number of W. Translations from the French throughout the text, except where indicated, are my own.

INTRODUCTION 1. There are notable exceptions. See, for instance, chapter 6 in Paul Hayes Tucker’s Monet in the ’90s: the Series Paintings (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1989); Robert L. Herbert’s “The Decorative and the Natural in Monet’s Cathedrals,” in J. Rewald and Frances Weitzenhoffer, eds., Aspects of Monet: a Symposium on the Artist’s Life and Times (New York, 1984); and Joachim Pissarro’s Monet’s Cathedrals (London, 1990). 2. For a thorough and engaging study of the complexity of the fin de siècle fascination with the Middle Ages, from pilgrimages to popular festivals to the novels of Zola, see Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: the Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot, UK, 2003). For a study of a Catholic revival among writers in this period see Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic revival in French literature, 1870–1914 (1966). 3. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, “Cathédrale,” in Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du Xie au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1866); cited in “The Cathedral,” André Vauchez in Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory (1996). 4. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols., trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Columbia University Press, 1996; see also Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–23. 5. Ibid., 3 6. Grace Seiberling, Monet’s Series (New York and London, 1981), 329, note 78. 7. Quoted in Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (New York, 2001), 168. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 159–60. Just as Reims was restored from 1918 to 1938 after the damage of WWI, the Cathedral of Rouen required the same after 1945. 10. Auguste Rodin, The Cathedrals of France (1914), 1965, 1981, Elizabeth Chase Geissbuhler (Richmond, VA) preface, vii. 11. Cited in Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century (Boston, 1998), 66. 12. Georges Clemenceau, “The Cathedrals Revolution,” La Justice, May 20, 1895; quoted in Charles Stuckey, Monet: A Retrospective (New York, 1985), 13. W1319 14. Steven Z. Levine, “The ‘Instant’ of Criticism and Monet’s Critical Instant,” Arts Magazine (March 1981): 115. 15. George Heard Hamilton, Claude Monet’s Paintings of Rouen Cathedral (Oxford, 1960), 18–19. 16. The topic of Monet’s critics has received considerable attention, in most detail by Steven Levine’s seminal 1976 study, Monet’s Critics. While Levine’s work continues to be a valuable resource for present and future Monet scholarship, its interpretive scope, for the purposes of this study, is limited (although my own work on Monet is deeply indebted to it). Levine’s study orders the range of critical response to Monet to follow the order of public presentation of his pictures; he is not, however, overly concerned to speculate on the different and distinguishable modes of relationship between the pictures and their reception over the years. The work of another major Monet scholar, John House, has also informed the present study, concerned as it is with the procedures of painting, with technique. House’s Monet: Nature into Art (1986) is

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significant for its detailed account of Monet’s painting based on very close analyses of the surfaces of canvases. While this monograph rightly avoids excursions into personal biography of the painter, each chapter assumes its own biographical structure and purpose by tracing a chronological evolution, from the early pictures of the late 1860s to the later series ensembles, in terms of an isolable technical feature. While the results of this detailed inspection are quite useful, they are left unassessed. Or rather, it is the formal descriptions of shifts in technique themselves that are presented as explanatory of stylistic change. Another useful study of painterly technique that must be acknowledged here is Robert Herbert’s Art in America essay of 1979, “Method and Meaning in Monet.” Here the complexities of Monet’s painting techniques are scrupulously examined, demonstrated, and used to prompt critical reassessments of meaning in Monet’s art—that is, depicting procedure as it is related to the subject it depicts. It is this brilliant essay which first prompted my thinking about this relation. It continues to do so. 17. The inverted commas are meant to signal the constellation of meanings that will, throughout the course of this book, orbit the material evidence of the canvases.

CHAPTER 1. THE STRUCTURE OF SPONTANEITY 1. This chapter revisits the theme of an earlier article, “The Subject and Painting: Monet’s ‘Language of the Sketch,’ ” which appeared in Art History (September 1989): 298–321. 2. Steven Levine’s extensive and invaluable study, Monet and His Critics (New York, 1976), traces a more detailed analysis of terms like these and the changes in their usage and connotation in the critical jargon. 3. Charles Bigot, “Causerie artistique: L’exposition des ‘intransigeants,’ ” La revue politique et littéraire (April 8, 1876): 349–52; quoted in San Francisco, 1986, 152. 4. L. Leroy, “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes,” Le Charivari, April 25, 1874; quoted in Linda Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism 1874–1904, in Sources & Documents in the History of Art (New Jersey, 1966), 12. 5. E. Cardon, “L’Exposition des révoltés,” La Press (April 29, 1874). 6. J.-A. Castagnary, “L’Exposition du boulevard des Capucines: Les impressionnistes,” Le Siècle (April 29, 1874). 7. H. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History 7th ed. (New York, 1950), 21. 8. M. Schapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” Semiotica, 1 (1969): 223–42, 223. 9. E. Chesneau, “A côté du Salon: II- Le Plein Air, Exposition du boulevard des Capucines,” Paris-Journal (May 7, 1874). 10. Ibid. 11. Louis Enault, Le Constitutionnel (April 10, 1876). 12. Paul Mantz, “L’Exposition des peintres impressionnistes,” Le Temps (April 22, 1877). 13. R. Ballu, “L’Exposition des peintres impressionnistes,” La Chronique des arts (April 14, 1877). 14. Cited in Gustave Geffroy, Claude Monet, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris 1922, 1924), reprint Macula edition (Paris, 1980), 81. 15. M. de Montifaud, “Salon de 1877,” L’Artiste (May 1, 1877). 16. W469 and W470 respectively. For a discussion of the significance of the first national holiday organized by the Third Republic, the subject matter addressed in these canvases, and in contemporaneous pictures by Manet, see Jane Mayo Roos’s “Within the ‘Zone of Silence:’ Monet and Manet in 1878,” Art History, 11, no. 3 (September 1988): 374–407. See also Robert Herbert’s Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (Yale, 1988), 30–2. 17. A. Silvestre, “Les Indépenants,” La Vie moderne (April 24, 1879). 18. Ibid. 19. C. Dargenty, “Exposition des oeuvres de M. Monet,” Courier de l’art (March 15, 1883): 126. 20. See in this context Michel Foucault, “Orders of Discourse” (inaugural lecture delivered at the Collège de France on December 2, 1970). Original French text, L’Ordre du discours (Paris, 1971); translation by Rupert Sawyer published in Social Science Information, 10, no. 2 (April 1971): 7–30. 21. Dargenty, “Exposition,” 126. 22. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (1956; New Haven and London, 1966). See in this context Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450 (Oxford, 1971), chap. 3, “Alberti and the Humanities”. 23. For a thorough discussion of the relevance of Aristotelian “unity” for painting in general and its theoretical impact on the French Academy in particular, see Thomas Puttfarken’s Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art (New Haven, 1985), esp. chap. 1, “Félibien and the Early Academy: Unité de Sujet and Convenance,” and the same author’s “David’s Brutus and Theories of Pictorial Unity in France,” Art History, 4, no. 3 (September 1981): 291–304. 24. A. Wolff, “Les Exposition des peintres impressionnistes,” La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, April 14, 1877. 25. R. Ballu, “L’Exposition des peintres impressionnistes,” La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, April 14, 1877.

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26. C. Bigot, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” La Revue politique et littéraire (April 28, 1877): 1046–47. 27. P. Mantz, “L’Exposition des peintre impressionnistes,” Le Temps (April 22, 1877). 28. Language, viewed in this way, falsifies experience by suggesting that it is static and determinate. 29. Roger de Piles, Conversations sur la Connoissance de la Peinture (1677); quoted in translation in Puttfarken, Roger de Piles, 61. 30. Dominic Bouhours, Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671); quoted and translated in Puttfarken, Roger de Piles, 61. 31. Bouhour, Manière de bien penser (1687); Puttfarken, Roger de Piles, 61, footnote no. 15; my translation. 32. Bernard Lamy, La Rhétorique, ou l’art de parler (1675); quoted and translated in Puttfarken, Roger de Piles, 61. 33. F. Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. and intro. Julias A. Elias (New York, 1966), 98. 34. Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” Art in Paris, 1845–1862 (London, 1965), 159. 35. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, ed. Hubert Wellington and trans. Lucy Norton (Oxford, 1980) October 26, 1853, 102–3. 36. Diderot, “Salon of 1767,” in Diderot Salons, ed. J. Seznac, II, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1979); my emphasis. 37. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man letter 22. For a much fuller explication of Schiller’s theory of art, see Michael Podro’s The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand, chap. 3 and 4 (Oxford, 1972); and Podro’s Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, 1982), 11–16. See also L. Augudin’s “Art and Value in Kant and Schiller” (M.A. diss., Essex University, 1980). 38. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1956), rev. 2nd ed. (London, 1972), 182–83. 39. Ibid., part 3, 181–287. 40. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London, 1976), 141–42. 41. Ibid, 137–38. 42. Ibid., 138.

CHAPTER 2. CANVASES AND CAREERS 1. Monet’s first period of work in Rouen was from February to April 1892. 2. w1140, March 18, 1892. 3. w1141, March 22, 1892. 4. Monet’s familiarity with the town developed largely from his frequent visits there during his childhood on travels to Paris from his home at Le Havre. The painter’s letters and other witness accounts document his journeys there in the 1880s, when Monet often visited his brother Michel who was a practicing chemist in the city. Early in his career, while a student of Boudin’s, the two painters had exhibited their works together in the window of a framer’s shop there. See George Heard Hamilton’s Monet’s Cathedrals, 1960, esp. p.16. 5. Christopher Lloyd, “Camille Pissarro and Rouen, “ in Studies on Camille Pissarro, ed. C. Lloyd (New York, 1986), 79. 6. W217. 7. Pissarro, who visited the exhibition and who would likely have read the review, produced an etching in 1883, Vue de Rouen (Cour la Reine), compositionally quite similar to Monet’s drawing (British Museum, London); for a discussion of this print and a comparative analysis with Monet’s early Rouen, see Joachim Pissarro, Monet’s Cathedral: Rouen 1892–1894 (London, 1990), 9ff. 8. W1314 and W1315. 9. Lloyd, “Camille,” 76ff. 10. Pissarro, Letters to Lucien (November 20, 1883), 46. 11. Ibid. (August 19, 1892), 202. 12. Pissarro, February 25, 1900, quoted in Janine Bailly-Herzberg, “Camille Pissarro et Rouen,” L’Oeil (July-August 1981): 57, my translation. 13. Pissarro, Letters to Lucien (November 20, 1883), 46. 14. Pissarro in Bailly-Herzberg, 58, my translation. 15. For a thorough discussion of this medieval revivalism in the spirit of preservation, see Morowitz and Emery, Consuming the Past, 190. 16. See Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, 17. 17. Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) (New York, 1996), 93. 18. Pissarro, Letters to Lucien (January 3, 1896), 280. 19. Quoted in Lloyd (p.76) from Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliographical Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany (London, 1821).

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20. See Lloyd, esp. 85–90, for an account of industrial development and suburban building in Rouen. Where not otherwise indicated, dates, figures, and specific demographic information are taken from his study. 21. See Ludovic Rodo Pissarro and Lionello Venturi, Camille Pissarro, son art, son oeuvre, a catalogue raisonné in two volumes, Paul Rosenberg (Paris, 1939), no.719. Subsequent Pissarro images will be given the abbreviation PV from this catalogue raisonné, followed by their number. The recently developed suburban area Saint-Sever on the other side of the Seine is recorded in canvases dating from 1896: Quai Saint-Sever à Rouen (PV 970) and Le Pont Saint-Sever à Rouen, brouillard (PV 971) and again, during his final campaign there in 1898, in Saint-Sever, Rouen, matin 5 heurs (PV 1048); Rouen, Saint-Sever, le matin (PV 1049) and Rouen, Saint-Sever, après midi (PV 1050). 22. Pont de Pierre à Rouen, Brume et Matin (PV 961); Le Pont Corneille à Rouen, effet du matin (PV 962) and Le Pont de Pierre à Rouen, temps gris (PV 963). 23. See Le Grand Pont, Rouen, effet de pluie (PV 950); Le Pont Boieldieu à Rouen, Soileil Couchant (PV 952); Le Pont Boildieu a Rouen, Soleil Couchant, temps brumeux (PV 953). 24. PV948 and PV956, respectively. 25. Pissarro, Letters to Lucien, 281. 26. Pissarro, Letters to Lucien (February 26, 1896), 282–83. 27. See, for instance, Les toits de vieux Rouen, soleil, 1896 (PV947) and Les toits du vieux Rouen, temps gris (La Cathédrale), 1896 (PV973). 28. PV1036. See also La Rue de l’Epicerie à Rouen, matin, temps gris (PV1037), and La rue de l’Epicerie à Rouen (PV1038). 29. Quoted in Bailly-Herzberg, 59, my translation. 30. Pissarro, Letters to Lucien (May 11, 1895), 268. 31. Pissarro, Letters to Lucien (April 22, and May 9, 1894), 238–39. 32. Ibid. (May 26, 1895), 269. 33. Ibid. (June 1, 1895), 270. 34. Ibid. 35. Quoted in Bailly-Herzberg, 54–55. 36. See Bailly-Herzberg (May 13, 1896), 58; my translation. 37. Pissarro, Letters to Lucien (April 16, 1896), 286. 38. Ibid. (March 7, 1896), 283. 39. Ibid., 284. 40. Ibid., 286. Alfred Sisley, equally fascinated and inspired by Monet’s series, undertook his own cathedral suite in 1893–95. Sisley’s subject, the west flank of the Gothic church at Moret, like Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, takes an elevated, asymetrical viewing position from the southwest, compositionally situating the motif obliquely to the picture plane. Emulating Monet’s approach and, perhaps, what he took to be the principle subject of Monet’s painting, Sisley presented his motif as a series of images transcribing the changing meteorological conditions witnessed over time. In contrast to Monet’s, it is a far more faithful reproduction of the historical monument, with details of architectonic structure and topographical location. See Oscar Reutersward’s “Sisley’s Cathedrals,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 39 (1952). 41. See W1386-W1391. Monet had also painted the church of Vétheuil between 1878 and 1880, and again in 1901, and the church of Varangeville in the 1880s. The subject matter clearly had significance for the painter. 42. W1314 and W1315. 43. W1316. 44. W217. 45. G. H. Hamilton’s 1960 essay traces this focus in an iconographical history of the cathedral in engravings, lithographs, and woodcuts, citing in particular a schematic drawing of the west facade seen directly face-on which served as the frontispiece to a guide book to the cathedral that first appeared in 1816, A. P. M. Gilbert’s Description historique de la cathédrale de Rouen (Hamilton, p.20, figure 5). Another version, closer to Monet’s own, was a wood engraving published in 1890, in A. Robida’s La Vielle France, Normandie (Hamilton, p.22, figure 6). Still another, this one not cited by Hamilton, was to be found in La Normandie illustré: monuments, sites et costumes (1852–55), which shows the cathedral façade from an oblique view, incorporating the north tower and the old houses and shops clustered around it. 46. W1317. 47. W1318. 48. Joel Isaacson has pointed out that in the 1895 exhibition catalogue several titles referred to the “tour d’Albane” (see also W1368, W1345, and W1346), borrowing the name from the flanking Cour d’Albane. That misnomer, according to Isaacson, has stuck in titles of certain canvases today. See Isaacson, Observation and Reflection (1978), p.223, cat. entry 108. 49. w1142, March 26, 1892. 50. W1319. 51. W1324. 52. Wildenstein, vol. 3, 156.

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53. W1325. 54. In the unfinished version at the Marmottan Museum (W1327), the cathedral is seen in the light of late afternoon: the long shadows cast by the houses at the opposite end of the Place de la Cathédrale, behind which the sun is setting, are silhouetted against the base of the cathedral facade, leaving its upper two-thirds still in light. Another version (not exhibited in 1895,W1329) would seem to verify this sense of temporal unity in these paintings from 1892, as the entire face of the cathedral is cast in darkness; the individual architectural features are indistinguishable, suggesting the dying light of nightfall. 55. This second campaign lasted again until April of that year. 56. The building was serving at the time as a milliner’s boutique well-known from the story about how Monet was required to construct a small enclosed space in which to paint due, so the story goes, to the unease his presence caused the ladies trying on hats. 57. W1346. 58. This subgrouping of images includes: Le Portail et la Tour d’Albane, temps gris, W1345, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen; Le Portail et la Tour d’Albane (effet du matin), W1346, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Le Portail (effet du matin), W1347, Norton Simon Foundation, Los Angeles; Le Portail et la Tour d’Albane à l’Aube, W1348, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and La Cathédrale dans le brouillard, W1349, private collection. 59. W1348. 60. W1351. 61. W1358. 62. W1356. 63. W1355. 64. Unlike the Clark Institute picture (Plate 13), where the strongest light from the sun on the facade, just above and in front of it, flattens its layered surface, obscuring most transitions of light and shadow normally animating the surface (as in the National Gallery, Washington version of that year, figure 16, and in the 1892 Metropolitan Museum picture, figure 13), the Boston version, Cathédrale de Rouen, effet de soleil (figure 18) seems to have been painted at the approaching end (falling light) of the afternoon. 65. Grace Seiberling, Monet’ Series (New York and London, 1976), 161. 66. I am indebted here to Robert Herbert’s immensely detailed inspection of Monet’s most characteristic brushwork and its relation to the kinds of subjects it depicts, which provides a useful vocabulary for talking about that distinctive manipulation of procedure. See his “Method and Meaning in Monet,” Art in America, September 1979. 67. Hamilton, 1960, 18–19. 68. w1141, March 22, 1982. 69. w1182, February 28, 1893. 70. w1153, April 13, 1892. 71. w1177, February 20, 1893. 72. w1186, March 9, 1893. 73. Theodore Robinson, MS Diary, December 26, 1893; referred to in Seiberling, Monet’s Series (New York, 1981), 165. 74. w1232, February 20, 1894. 75. w1236, April 12, 1894. 76. w1239, April 26, 1894. 77. w1241, May 7, 1894. 78. Pissarro, Letters to Lucien, January 9, 1887, 92. 79. Ibid., February 19, 1895, 260. See also Monet correspondence w1250, w1253, w1257, w1293, w1302 which refer to the intricate negotiations of this sale. These three pictures are among the five Cathedrals from the Camondo collection now at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 80. w1240, May 2, 1894. 81. w1241, May 7, 1894. 82. w1243, May 21, 1894. 83. w1245, August 7, 1894. 84. w1246, August 16, 1894. 85. See letters w1248–1250, August-September 1894. 86. w1251, September 10, 1894. 87. w1252, September 12, 1894. 88. w1253, September 16, 1894. 89. w1320, November 23, 1895. 90. Paul Durand-Ruel to Monet, November 24, 1895; “Pièces Justicatives,” Wildenstein, vol. 5: 299, no. 122. 91. w1259, December 25, 1894.

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92. w1282, March 10, 1895. 93. w1281, March 10, 1895. 94. w1292, April 21, 1895. 95. w1294, May 5, 1895. 96. w1296, May 19, 1895.

CHAPTER 3. DEPICTION, PERCEPTION, MEMORY 1. Adolphe Brisson, “Claude Monet,” La République Française, May 28, 1895. 2. Henri Pellier, “Claude Monet” (unmarked clipping in Durand-Ruel press book, May 29 or 30, 1895), quoted in the original French in Seiberling, 176; my translation. 3. Francois Thiebault-Sisson, “L’Exposition Claude Monet,” Le Temps, May 12, 1895. 4. Georges Clemenceau, “Révolution des Cathédrales,” La Justice, May 20, 1895; reproduced in Charles F. Stuckey, ed. Monet: A Retrospective (New York, 1985). 5. André Michel, Notes sur l’art moderne (peinture) (Paris, 1896). 6. Ibid., 261. 7. Ibid., 261–62. 8. Ibid., 292. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Thadée Natanson, “Expositions I: M. Claude Monet,” La Revue Blanche (June 1, 1895): 521–22. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 522–523, my emphasis. 14. w1076, quoted in Richard Kendell (ed.), Monet by Himself (Boston, 1988), 172. 15. Camille Mauclair, “Chose d’Art,” Mercure de France, NS 14 (June 1895): 357. 16. Ibid., quoted in Joachim Pissarro, Monet’s Cathedrals (1990), 29. 17. Ibid., my translation. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XI au XVI, (France, 1854–68), 5:509. 21. Ibid., 4:196. 22. Ibid., 4:347. 23. Ibid., 7:550. 24. Anon., “Claude Monet: chez Durand-Ruel—le maître impressionniste—un doué,” Le Matin, May 10, 1895. 25. Georges Lecomte, “Les Cathédrales de Claude Monet,” La Nouvelle revue 94 (June 1, 1895): 672. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ary Renan, “Cinquante Tableaux de M. Claude Monet,” La Chronique des arts, May 18, 1895, 186. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Charles Fremine, “Claude Monet,” Le Rappel June 3, 1895. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. A. F., “Les petits salons: Claude Monet,” Gil Blas, May 12, 1895; quoted in Robert Herbert in Rewald and Weitzenhoffer (eds.), Aspects of Monet (New York, 1984), 170–71. 37. Monet himself became captivated by a certain spiritual-mystical affect of Gothic color and light, particularly by the effects of colored glass and refracted light and by the translucence of structural features, once he had, after some time, finally penetrated the exterior façade: “It was simply of marvelous beauty and I saw some splendid things to render from the interior that I regret not having seen before” (w1196, March 23, 1893). It was also around this time that Monet wrote to his friend the painter Paul Helleu (1859–1927) to say that he would be “very curious to see your cathedral interior” (w1212, April 19, 1893). Grace Seiberling has identified the picture Monet refers to as Interior of Notre Dame de Paris (Seiberling, 331, note 11). Helleu’s Interior of the Abbey Church of S. Denis at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was a source of fascination for Monet as well. 38. Henry Eon, “Les Cathedrales de Claude Monet,” La Plume, June 1, 1895. 39. Ibid.

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40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., quoted in J. Pissarro (1990), 30. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Bergson’s ideas had been in print from 1889 onward and his lectures, first at the École Normale from 1897 to 1900 and later at the Collège de France, brought them to prominence. 45. Henri Bergson, Essai sur les donneé immédiates de la conscience (1889, Paris, 1924). 46. I owe this observation to Charles M. Sherover’s discussion of Bergson in his The Human Experience of Time (New York, 1975), 170–71. 47. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903; New York, 1912), 9–10. 48. Ibid., 38. 49. See Joseph N. Riddel, “Modern times: Stein, Bergson, and the ellipses of ‘American’ writing,” in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 330–67. See also in this volume, Paul Douglas’s “Deleuze’s Bergson: Bergson redux,” 368–88. 50. Bergson, Metaphysics, 56. 51. Ibid., 65. 52. Bergson, Essai sur les donn´ees, 132. 53. The application of Bergson’s theories to Symbolist literary techniques will be addressed in chapter 5. 54. Bergson, Metaphysics, 65. 55. Bergson, L’Evolution creatrice (1906; Paris 1923), my emphasis; quoted in G. H. Hamilton, “Cézanne, Bergson and the Image of Time,” College Art Journal, 16 (Fall 1956): 11. 56. Clemenceau, “R´evolution.” 57. Deleuze, in fact, makes the comparison with Proust. See Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York, 1988). Proustian memory includes and presupposes forgetfulness. Memory, for Proust, does not so much preserve as resurrect. 58. Anon., “Choses d’art,” La Cocarde, May 12, 1895. 59. Clemenceau, in Stuckey (1895). 60. Geffroy (1895), in Claude Monet (1924), 1980, 336. 61. w1151. 62. w1180. 63. w1203. 64. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 51. 65. Ibid., 59 66. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 281.

CHAPTER 4. WRITING THE GOTHIC 1. Janine Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature, 1851–1900 (Oxford, 1973), 291. For many this was a response to the state of contemporary society, a distaste for an overly optimistic confidence in scientific progress, utilitarianism, and materialism from which redemption might be sought through an inward turn toward spirituality (however variously that might be conceived). Richard Griffiths has traced this “spiritualist turn” in the creative writers of the period of the 1880s up to the First World War, specifically as a revival of Catholicism among the literary elite who became attached to a strongly anti-intellectual protest against society. These writers, he argues, not only reacted violently against the materialism of the age, but returned to what they conceived to be a medieval form of Christianity. See Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution, London, 1966. Elizabeth Emery, in Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Si`ecle French Culture (2001), also traces the late nineteenth-century French obsession with the Gothic cathedral in the works of such writers and artists as Emile Zola, J.-K. Huysmans, and Marcel Proust, among others, exploring the ways these artists responded and contributed to a discourse on the Gothic. 2. Morowitz and Emery, Consuming the Past (2003). 3. Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, 163. 4. Auguste Rodin, Les Cathédrales de France, “Introduction par Charles Morice” (1914) (Paris, 1983). I have presented this material in a paper entitled “Rodin, Ruskin and the Gothic,” in the symposium, New Studies on Rodin at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, in October 2002, a revised version of which appears in the Journal of the Iris & B.Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University , vol. 3, 2002–2003 (2005), 141–50. 5. With Morice’s help, Rodin began in earnest assembling his notes for publication in 1910, the year after the exhibition of his sculpture, La Cathédrale, at the 1909 Paris Exposition. 6. Rodin, “The Gothic in the Cathedrals and Churches of France,” North American Review, trans. Frederic Lawton,

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February 1905, 220. See Elizabeth Chase Geissbuhler, “Preliminary Notes on Rodin’s Architectural Drawings,” in The Drawings of Rodin, ed. A. Elsen and J. K. T. Varnedoe (New York, 1971), 141–48. 7. Elizabeth Chase Geissbuhler, trans., Cathedrals of France (Richmond, VA, 1965). 8. Geissbuhler, “Preliminary Notes,” 154. 9. Gustave Geffroy, “Auguste Rodin,” Exposition Claude Monet—Auguste Rodin: Galerie Georges Petit 1889; reprinted in Modern Art in Paris, 1885–1900, “Miscellaneous Group Exhibitions,” ed. T. Reff (New York, 1981), 82–83. 10. I shall not be addressing Rodin’s drawings in any detail here. However, it is worth noting that the transparent washes and atmospheric veils in which the artist bathes his architectural fragments are reminiscent of Ruskin’s drawings and sketches that accompany his own writing, particularly in the 1840s. (See, for instance, his watercolor, Corner of St. Mark’s after Rain, 1846, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, among others.) It should also be noted here that the subtitle to this chapter section, “The Stones of France,” refers to a remark made by Marcel Proust in his 1903–04 translation of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens, where he states, “Does not this unity of Christian art of the Middle Ages constantly appear in the viewpoint of those pages where [Ruskin’s] imagination illuminates here and there the stones of France.” See Marcel Proust, On Reading Ruskin trans. and ed. Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven, CT, 1987), 38. 11. The Poetry of Architecture was actually a series of articles on cottage and village architecture, published in Architectural Magazine, between November 1837 and December 1838, while Ruskin was still an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. See Charles T. Dougherty’s “A Study of The Poetry of Architecture,” in Studies in Rodin, ed. Robert E. Rhodes and Del Ivan Janik (Athens, OH, 1982), 16–31. 12. Rodin, “Gothic in the Cathedrals,” 219. 13. Proust, “Pélerinages ruskiniens en France,” Le Figaro (February 13, 1900). 14. See Jean Autret’s Ruskin and the French before Marcel Proust (Geneva, 1965), 12. See Autret’s appendix for a detailed catalogue of all the fragmented extracts available in translation in various publications from 1860. Another article introducing the views of the English writer was published in 1859 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, written by Paul Mantz, one of Monet’s earliest official critics. 15. Autret, Ruskin, 37. 16. On Reading Ruskin, 65, note 6. 17. Robert de la Sizeranne, as quoted in Autret, Ruskin, 34–35. 18. Ruskin’s own evangelical beliefs, which directed close, exegetical reading of scripture, formed his ways of interpreting beauty and works of art; for Ruskin, the beautiful itself is grounded in divine nature—beauty was the presence of an immanent God. 19. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1904) vol. 8, Stones. 20. Rodin, Cathedrals of France, 230. Subsequent references to the Rodin text will be made from this edition, in page number citations, within the body of the text. 21. Ruskin, vol. 10, “Nature of Gothic.” 22. Ruskin, Lamps, 142–143. 23. Ibid., 155. 24. See also R. Herbert’s essay in Rewald and Weitzenhoffer, Aspects of Monet. 25. Auguste Renoir, “La société des irrégularistes,” letter to Durand-Ruel, May 1884; quoted in Nochlin, Impressionism, 46. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., my translation. 28. Ruskin, Lamps, 54–55. 29. Rodin, Cathedrals of France, 130. 30. Huysmans, The Cathedral, 177. 31. Ruskin, Lamps, 116. 32. Clemenceau, 1895, translated in Charles Stuckey, Monet: A retrospective (New York, 1985), 176–79. 33. A. F., Gil Blas, 1895, quoted in translation in R. Herbert in Rewald and Weitzenhoffer, Aspects pf Monet, 170– 71. We might also be put in mind here of Eon’s comments which began as a description of real optical sensations, the visual experience of the thing itself, then subtly shifted to abstract analogies of a typically symbolist sort, a description of imaginative vision derived from the consciousness of the perceiving individual. 34. Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT, 1986), 45–50. 35. Ruskin, Lamps, 237. 36. Ibid., 117. 37. Proust, “Preface to La Bible d’Amiens,” in On Reading Ruskin, 19. 38. w1146. 39. w1208. 40. w1203. 41. w1270.

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42. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics (1903); cited in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Space and Time, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 25. 43. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (New York, 1872), 196–97. 44. Victor Hugo, The Hutchback of Notre Dame (1831), 1996, 91–96. 45. Ruskin, Lamps, 229–30; 241. 46. Ibid., 224–25. 47. Ibid., 234. 48. Two recent studies, referred to earlier, which explore this phenomenon in thorough detail are: Elizabeth Emery’s Romancing the Cathedral and Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past. Richard Griffiths has also discussed the tendency among creative writers of the period—poets, novelists, and playwrights—to side with an antimodernist traditional Catholicism and against the positivist philosophy, materialism, and liberal Catholicism of the modern era. 49. August 19, 1892, in John Rewald, ed., Camille Pissarro: Letters to his son Lucien (London, 1980). 50. Ibid., February 25, 1900. 51. Ruskin, Stones, 244–45. 52. Hugo, The Hutchback of Notre Dame, 93 and 115. 53. Morice, “Introduction,” 10. 54. In Seven Lamps, Ruskin refers to the scaffolding used in architectural restoration work: “do not care about the unsightliness of the aid: better a crutch than a lost limb.” Ruskin, Lamps, 245. 55. Ibid., 242–43. 56. Proust in fact compared his massive literary project to a Gothic cathedral; see Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, 154. 57. Cited in William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven, CT, 2000), 665, note 35. 58. In addition, in his later cycle of novels, Les Trois Villes, set in 1890s France, Zola’s protagonist is a priest who, having lost his faith, seeks to rekindle it by making a pilgrimage to the major architectural sites of Catholicism—Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), and Paris (1898). 59. Emile Zola, Le Messager de l’Europe (October 1875), in Oeuvres completes, 12:295–96. 60. Emile Zola, The Dream, trans. Eliza E. Chase (London, 1907), 18–19. 61. Ibid., 27. 62. Ibid., 80–81. 63. Ibid., 197–198. 64. See Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, 57ff. 65. Zola, Oeuvres complètes, 1266, my translation. 66. Zola, The Dream, 267. 67. Ibid., 77. 68. Ibid., 93. 69. Ibid., 309. 70. Ibid., 78–79. 71. A. F., Gil Blas, 1895, quoted in translation in R. Herbert in Rewald and Weitzenhoffer, 170–71. 72. Rodin, Cathedrals of France, 96.

CHAPTER 5. THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTURE 1. Hamilton, Paintings, 24. 2. Ibid., 23–24. Hamilton is in the end too literal in wanting to speculate on the distinctly religious (or antireligious) nature of the series. We cannot, however, discount Hamilton’s suspicions about the pictures. Why this particular subject matter, after a three-year public absence, at this particular historical moment, one fraught with the political and emotional tenor of anticlericalism? Grace Seiberling also remarks (in passing) on the importance of the subject to Monet (while she discounts its relevance to the critics). And Robert Herbert in his 1984 essay, “The Decorative and the Natural in Monet’s Cathedrals,” speculates on the theme of the Gothic and marshals some important supporting evidence, much of which prompted my own thinking about the images. 3. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (New York, 2004), 405. 4. Charles Morice, “Introduction,” Rodin: les Cathédrales de France (1914; Paris, 1983), 14. 5. Ibid., 84–5. 6. Ibid., 109. 7. Marcel Proust, “La Mort des Cathédrales” (1904), in Pastiches et Mélanges (Paris, 1921), 200–01, my translation. As mentioned in the introduction to this study, in a footnote to the 1921 reprint of the essay, Proust laments their actual physical destruction in WWI. Proust’s fascination with cathedrals, in fact, began some two decades before the earliest

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publication of the Recherche, when he first read Ruskin in translation in the Bulletin de l’union pour l’action morale, which published extracts from 1893 to 1903. He first mentions Ruskin’s Poetry of Architecture and his own “Ruskinian pilgrimage” in his correspondence around 1899–1900, when, at age twenty-eight, his apprenticeship to the English aesthetician began, culminating with his translation of The Bible of Amiens (the introductory essay of which appeared serially during 1903 and as a book in 1904) and of Sesame and Lilies (serially during 1905 and the book in 1906). See On Reading Ruskin, trans. and ed. Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven, CT, 1987). 8. Mâle was himself calling upon the interpretive model of thirteenth-century theologian Vincent of Beauvais. 9. Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century (1958; New York, 1972). 10. Proust, preface to La Bible d’Amiens, in On Reading Ruskin, 27. 11. Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, 42. 12. Hamilton, Paintings, 24. 13. In marked contrast to his earlier writing about art—the essays collected in L’Art moderne where he had championed a kind of painting which examined directly and described with precision the conditions of “modern life,” as well as a kind of architecture that embraced modern techniques—six years later, in the articles collected in Certaines (1889), Huysmans favored a symbolist art that rejected that present for a visionary past. 14. Elizabeth Emery has argued that Zola, Huysmans, and Proust began composing Les Trois Villes, the Durtal cycle, and La Recherche, respectively, at roughly the same time, sharing striking formal and thematic similarities. 15. Excerpts were published in L’Echo de Paris in October 1897. 16. Mâle defended his doctoral thesis in 1898. It was published at the end of the year and Huysmans was invited to review it. See Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, 207, note 118. 17. Huysmans, in fact, published an index to accompany La Cathédrale. 18. Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve, (New York, 2002), 421. 19. Quoted in Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, 135. 20. In 1898, Léon Bazalgette published L’Esprit Nouveau dans la vie Artistique, Social et Religieuse, in which he devoted an entire chapter, entitled “Les Deux Cathédrales, Claude Monet et J.K. Huysmans,” to an attack on Huysmans’s novel by comparing it to Monet’s Rouen series. Huysmans gets it wrong, Bazalgette argues, in holding to a notion of traditional spiritual faith in an era concerned essentially with secular naturalism, which he takes, wrongly in my view, to be Monet’s project in the Rouen pictures. See L. Bazalgette, L’Esprit Nouveau (Paris, 1898), 373–93. See also Robert Herbert’s discussion of Bazalgette’s text in the context of a naturalist impulse in decorative art that Herbert ascribes to Monet’s series. See Rewald and Weitzenhoffer, Aspects of Monet (New York, 1984). 21. J.-K. Huysmans, The Cathedral, trans. Clara Bell (1898; London, 1989), 80. 22. Ibid., 80–81. 23. Ibid., 330. 24. John Rewald, Camille Pissarro: Letters to his son Lucien (New York, 1943), 237, April 1896. 25. Albert Aurier, “Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin,” Mercure de France (March 1891). 26. Gustave Kahn, “Réponse aux symbolists,” L’Evénement (September 28, 1886). 27. Moréas quoted in translation in Robert Goldwater, Symbolism (New York, 1979), 145. 28. Richard Shiff, in a different context, has convincingly challenged the assumption that Impressionism and Symbolism were, stylistically and conceptually, distinct categories. See his Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago, 1984). It is significant to note in this context that, while many of these same writers and critics, as proponents of a symbolist aesthetic, rejected Impressionism as materialist because of its apparent concern with pure sensory response to the external environment, most exempted Monet from this censure. 29. Frémine, “Claude Monet.” n.p. 30. Lecomte, “Les Cath´edrales,” n.p. 31. Renan, “Cinquante Tableaux,” 186. 32. Eon, “Les Cath´edrales,” 259. 33. Hippolyte Fiereus-Gavaert, “Chronique artistique de Paris. Expositions des oeuvres de Corot et de Claude Monet,” in Indépendence Belge, June 20, 1895, quoted in Joachim Pissarro (1990), 31–32. 34. Georges Demoinville, “Les Salons, les cathédrales (de Claude Monet),” Journal des Artistes (May 19, 1895), quoted in Joachim Pissarro (1990), 31. 35. Louis Lumet, “Sensations d’art: Claude Monet,” L’Enclos (1895): 45; quoted in Seiberling, 177. 36. Seiberling, Monet’s Series, 106. 37. In this context see David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1988). Scott argues: “Mallarmé was well aware of the arbitrariness of syntax, its tendency to create a linear sense of logic which was not necessarily true to all thinking, especially poetic or imaginative thought.” See also Malcolm Bowie’s Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge, 1978). 38. Stéphane Mallarmé in J. Huret, Enquete sur l’évolution litteraire (1891), quoted in translation in P. H. Tucker (Boston, 1998), 9–10.

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39. Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin (Paris, 1969), III (June 18, 1888), 212. 40. Bergson, The Introduction to Metaphysics, 213. 41. Bergson, The Perception of Change, 159. 42. Bergson in conversation with Gilbert Maire, quoted in Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, 1993), 135. 43. Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 32. 44. Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago, 1982), 46. 45. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York, 1984). Kristeva contrasts the “semiotic,” an uncoded flow of “pulsions” within the prelinguistic unconscious, a prelanguage not yet meaningful, with the Lacanian Symbolic Order, which registers communicable meaning in stable terms and syntactic constructions. The “semiotic” is “a process, which tends to articulate structures that are ephemeral . . . unstable . . . and non-signifying.” Once the speaking subject has entered into the Lacanian Symbolic Order, according to Kristeva, the “semiotic” can still be perceived, however, as a kind of “indeterminate articulacy” and undecidability exerting pressure on symbolic language and negating its signifying systems: it can appear as disruption, meaningless, contradiction, and the suggestion of absence. 46. Kristeva, cited in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (New York, 1986), 97–132. 47. See Paul de Man, “Modern Poetics in France and Germany,” Critical Writings, 1953–1978, ed. and intro. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis, 1989). See also Giles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York, 1991). 48. Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 32. 49. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 140–42. 50. Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 139. 51. Geffroy, “Les Meules” (1891), in Claude Monet (1924), 1980, p.318, quoted in translation in Stuckey, Monet: A Retrospective. 52. Geffroy, “Les Peupliers” (1892), in Claude Monet (1924, 1980 reprint), 322; my translation. 53. Ibid., 336–37; my translation. 54. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics (1903; New York, 1912), 38. 55. See in this context Julia Kristeva’s discussion of Proust’s exploration of time and the operations of memory in her Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann (New York, 1993). 56. Ruskin, Lamps, 224. 57. Rodin, “Gothic in the Cathedrals,” 218.

AFTERWORD 1. Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), quoted and translated in Deleuze, Bergsonism, 26. 2. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity (1922); quoted in Charles M. Sherover, The Human Experience of Time (New York, 1975), 219–22. 3. W2287. See Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century, 58–85. 4. Arsène Alexandre, “L’Epopée des Nymphéas,” Le Figaro (October 21, 1920): 1; quoted in Robert Gordon and Charles F. Stuckey, “Blossoms and Blunders: Monet and the State,” Art in America (January/February 1979): 115. 5. Quoted in Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century, 108. 6. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 298. Crary here is referring specifically to Cézanne. 7. Octave Mirbeau, “Claude Monet,” L’Art dans les deux mondes, March 1891. 8. Roger Marx quoted in Tucker, Monet in the 20th Century, 50. 9. Michel Butor, “Claude Monet ou le monde renversé,” Répetroire III (Paris, 1968): 258.

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Index Alexandre, A., 38, 91 allegory, 14, 54, 82, 84 Amiens, 16, 64, 67, 82 anticlericalism, 80 Aurier, A., 83–84 Ballu, R., 21–25 Baudelaire, C., 13, 27–28, 90 beholder’s share, 28 Bergson, H., 14, 57–62, 73, 85–89 Bigot, C., 18, 25 Bulletin de l’Union pour l’Action Morale, 67 Butor, M., 92 Cardon, E., 19 Castagnary, J., 19 Cezanne, P., 37 Charivari, Le, 19 Chartres, 14, 64, 81–82 Chartroule, M.-A., 22 Chateaubriand, F. R., 34, 68, 76 Chesneau, E., 20 Chronique des arts, La, 25, 53, 83 Clemenceau, G., 16, 49, 60–61, 70, 90–92 Corot, C., 21 Crary, J., 62, 91 Dakyns, J., 63 Dargenty, C., 23–24 De Man, P., 86 Degas, E., 37 Delacroix, E., 27 Deleuze, G., 59, 62, 87 Diderot, D., 27–28 Durand-Ruel, P., 32, 37–38, 44–47, 68, 92 duration, 14, 43, 49, 57–62, 67, 72, 89–91 duree, la, 14, 59–30, 62, 86 Eco, U., 71, 100, 106 Emery, E., 63, 81, 93 Enault, L., 21 Eon, H., 56–57, 84

facture, 13, 19–21, 42, 48–57, 60, 84 Fiereus-Gavaert, 84 Figaro, Le, 80, 82, 91 finish, 16, 18, 19–22, 33, 43–44, 47, 51, 58, 70 Gauguin, P., 83 Gazette des Beaux Arts, 15, 32 Geffroy, G., 18, 51, 61, 64, 85, 88 Geissbuhler, E., 64 Gil Blas, 55, 71 Giverny, 39, 42, 44–47 Golden Legend, The, 77 Gombrich, E., 28 Grainstacks, 13, 38, 54, 88 Hamilton, G. H., 17, 33, 43, 80–81 Heritage, 13, 74, 76, 81 Hoschédé, A., 39 Hugo, V., 13, 34, 52, 73, 75, 81 Huret, J., 85 Husserl, E., 30–31, 87 Huysmans, J.-K., 14, 69, 81–85 inachevé, 18, 21–22, 27, 29, 31, 90–91 incompleteness, 16, 19, 22–24, 27, 90 Indepéndence belge, 84 instantaneity, 13–14, 17–18, 20, 29–30, 48, 51, 58, 87, 89 irrationality, 14, 34, 76 irregularity, 34, 52, 53, 55, 68–69 Kahn, G., 83–84 Kristeva, J., 86, 92, 103, 107 Lamy, B., 26 Lecomte, G., 53, 83 L’Enclos, 84, 102, 107 Leroy, L., 19, 20 lieu de mémoire, 15, 91 Littré, E., 82 Lloyd, C., 32–33 Lumet, L., 84 Male, ˜ E., 15, 81–82 Mallarmé, S., 14, 82, 84–89

111

112

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Mantz, P., 21, 25–27 Marx, R., 92 Matin, Le, 53 Mauclair, C., 51–53, 83 medievalism, 14, 63, 77 Mercure de France, 51, 64, 82–83 Michel, A., 49–50, 92 mimesis, 28 Mirbeau, O., 85, 91 Modernity, 34, 63–64, 90 Montifaud, M., 22 Moréas, J., 83–84 Morice, C., 64, 75, 80, 83–84 Morisot, B., 85 Morowitz, L., 63 Morris, W., 68 Natanson, T., 50 non-fini, 27 Nora, P., 15 North American Review, 64 Notre Dame de Paris, 13, 34, 73 nouveau roman, 92 Nouvelle Revue, 53, 83 Nymphéas, 91–92 Parnassian poets, 85 Pellier, H., 44, 98 Petit, Georges, 47, 64 phenomenology, 27, 30, 31 Piles, R. de, 26, 79 Pissarro, C., 7, 32–38, 45, 75 Pissarro, L., 33–35, 37, 45, 75 Plume, La, 56, 84 poetic language, 27, 64, 83–86, 90 Poplars, 13, 54, 88 Proust, M., 15, 43, 48, 58, 60, 64, 67, 72–73, 76, 80–82, 86–87, 92 Rappel, Le, 54, 83 Read, H., 15, 16 Redon, O., 83 Reims, 15–16, 64 Rembrandt, 71–72

Renaissance, 24, 67 Renan, A., 53–54, 83 Renoir, A., 14, 37, 68–69 repainting, 42, 51, 90 restoration, 34, 40, 75–76, 80 Rêve, Le, 14, 76, 81 revival, 14, 63–64, 81 Revue Blanche, La, 50, 83 Revue Britannique, La, 67 Revue générale, La, 67 Robinson, T., 32, 39, 44 Rodin, A., 7, 14–16, 63–75, 79–81, 83, 89 Romanticism, 20, 52 Rougon-Macquart, 77 Ruskin, J., 64, 67–71, 73–76, 79, 81–82, 89 Schapiro, M., 20 Schiller, F., 27–29 Scott, D., 86–87 Seiberling, G., 42 Silvestre, A., 22 Sizeranne, R., 67 sketch, 16, 18, 20, 22–23, 27, 30, 32, 34, 49, 64, 90 Soissons, 16 spontaneity, 18, 31 Steiner, W., 86 sublime, 14, 54, 69–72, 79 Symbolism, 14, 63, 81–86 tableau, 18, 21 tache, 18, 20–21, 25, 48 temporality, 13–17, 30–31, 48, 56, 62, 67, 72–73, 86–87 Thiébault-Sisson, F., 49 verisimilitude, 17, 20, 23, 48 Verlaine, P., 80, 84 Vie moderne, La, 22 Viollet-le-Duc, E., 15, 52, 75, 77, 82 Wolff, A., 25 Wolfflin, H., 20 Zola, E., 14, 75–79, 81