IMMERSIVE MONET & THE IMPRESSIONISTS

 

IMMERSIVE MONET & THE IMPRESSIONISTS

On the 1st of September 2022, I found myself submerged, not in the water, but in the paintings of Monet and the Impressionists at the Lighthouse Artspace Chicago. The Show was  ‘Immersive Monet & The Impressionists’. As I stood in the center of the hall and proceeded to walk from room to room, I literally walked through the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Degas, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Pissaro, and a few other Impressionists. When I stood on the upper floor and watched the paintings come to life on all the walls, the floor below, and the ceiling, it was magical, to say the least. In fact, when Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’was on display, I could see the water in the pond and the lilies on the floor, making me want to touch it. The highlight for me was looking at Monet’s ‘Impression Sunrise’ with the changing hues as one watched them on the walls. Monet’s ‘Woman with a Parasol’ most probably depicts Madame Monet and her  son, and ‘La Gare St.Lazare’ is a depiction of the Paris station, which Emile Zola described, “One could hear the hum of the trains and see the smoke overflowing into the galleries.” And that’s exactly what I felt- the train moving and the smoke coming out seemed to overwhelm the gallery. There were many great paintings of the other Impressionists, some of whom I could identify- Degas’s ‘Ballet Dancers’, Manet’s ‘Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe’, and Renoir’s classic ‘Bal du Moulin de la Galette’ which is a simple slice of life of the working class Paris. The use of light and color in all these paintings creates a movement in our minds which stay forever.

I had a similar feeling when in Paris I was at the Musee d’Orsay and as I stood there in the halls surrounded by the paintings of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Cezanne, and other impressionists and Van Gogh it was a pilgrimage fulfilled for me.

There is so much to be said of Impressionism, but I would rather start with the words of Claude Monet, “It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”

if you take the paintings of Claude Monet, he lays emphasis on the changing effect of light on the subject and visible brush strokes. This is very much seen in a series of paintings he made of the sunset called ‘Impression Sunrise’. It is from this painting that the word for the movement, Impressionism evolved. 

But perhaps the forerunner of Impressionism and the Expressionist movement in art is Turner (Joseph Mallard William Turner 1775-1851), Though he and John Constable (1776-1837) were exact contemporaries, their approach to depicting nature deferred. While Turner sought to capture emotion, perpetually aiming to be extraordinary, Constable sought to capture the grass, the skies, and the British countryside as it was, with its farms, churches, and bridges as they were. Turner was referred to as the Philosopher while Constable was the scientist. Turner preferred to paint outdoors and was so obsessed with natural illumination that his final words were, "The sun is God.”

If we look at the impressionistic painters such as Claude Monet we see the effect of Turner in the way they depicted nature. But you find their tones are much softer, but the similarity in style can be seen. The powerful and overwhelming nature of Turner, can be seen in the expressionists like Van Gogh.

The Impressionists like the Romantic landscape painters did not seek to control nature, they sought to capture the fascinating, ever-changing, and unpredictable moods of it through scale and treatment of space, brushstroke, and new relations of color to tone. They often sought to capture the sublime, with a strong emphasis on sensation ”.  The impressionist painter is concerned more with the visual impression of the moment, especially in terms of the shifting effects of light and color.

So it was, as I stood in the midst of all these moving paintings capturing the moments as seen through the eyes of the painter, I was transported to the sublime world of the artist having the quality of such greatness, magnitude, or intensity, that our ability to perceive or comprehend it is temporarily suspended.  To understand Sublime, I have not found a better painting than the painting ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ by Casper David Friedrich, the German Romantic artist. The painting draws attention to the smallness and insignificance of an individual in comparison to the untamed and possibly hostile natural setting. In it, one can even sense the immensity of the mysteries before us. When we stand on the shores and look across the oceans, we are struck with wonderment and also a sense of fear at the immensity before us. The awe is beyond definition. The same sense prevails when we look at the night sky, the stars, and the world beyond. One would want to merge with this immenseness. This is exactly how I felt. It was a sublime feeling standing in the midst and being transported into each of the paintings that were on display.