Harmon Siegel, ‘Painting with Monet’, 2024:
“…At the end of the nineteenth century, Maupassant’s phrase, “side by side, but alone,” inspired a commentary by a critic named Wladimir Karénine, who lucidly traced the failure of modern intimacy to its skeptical roots, showing how moments of disappointment derive, in philosophical terms, from the world’s bifurcation into subjective experience and objective reality. Her analysis opens with the following scenario: “We are at a table, a glass of wine before us. We both look at it, but we perceive it very differently.” The instant our eyes encounter the object, our minds transform what we see into diverse “sensations” and “impressions” that we can never compare or reconcile. We cannot know what we think we know, for our perception never lifts the veil of experience to reach the thing itself, which fractures into as many kaleidoscopic impressions as there are perceiving eyes.
Reading this passage with Monet in mind, I find it speaks to something I have long found mysterious about the most powerful definition of impressionism, the one offered by critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary at the first impressionist exhibition in response to Monet’s Impression, Sunrise: “They are impressionists in the sense that they render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape.” Okay, but we do not ordinarily mean something different by “That is a picture of a landscape” versus “That is a picture of the way a landscape looks.” The latter sounds strange and redundant. After all, is not any picture a picture of how something looks? How could it possibly be otherwise? By what criteria could we distinguish a picture of a thing from a picture of the sensation that thing makes? Under what circumstances would we want these two phrases to mean two different things?
The image of the glass offers an answer. We need “impression” and “sensation” to explain how a single object fractures among multiple perceivers. By defining impressionism as a turn from the landscape to the sensation produced by the landscape, Castagnary prioritized the diversity of perception among its various artists, building this feature into its rationale. For the concepts “impression” and “sensation” to be so much as intelligible, they must designate the idiosyncrasies of personal perception. And yet, the critic warned, if we resign ourselves to accepting these varying impressions, foregoing any assessment of their relative correctness or ambition to capture the truest among them, we are left defenseless, “powerless to formulate anything except personal fantasies, subjective, with no echo in general reason, because they are without guardrails or any possible verification in reality.”…”
१९७० च्या दशकात मी सुट्टीच्या दिवसात खूप बोअर होत असे कारण सगळे जवळचे मित्र गावाला गेले असत आणि आंम्ही बहुतेक वेळा मिरजेतच असायचो ...
त्यावेळी माझी सर्वात आवडती फिरायला जायची जागा म्हणजे मिरज रेल्वे स्टेशन होते ... त्या काळात मिरजेत ब्रॉड , मीटर आणि नॅरो असे तिन्ही रेल्वेचे गेज होते ... वाफेची आणि डिझेल अशी दोन्ही इंजिने दिसायची ... हे फिरायला जाणे मी ज्या वर्षी मिरज सोडले , १९८१, तो पर्यंत चालू होते ...
रेल्वेचे येणेजाणे , इंजिनांचे यार्डातले शंटिंग , टर्नटेबल , हमाल , तिकीटाची खिडकी , लेवल क्रॉसिंग , अश्विनी उत्तम इडलीवडा मिळणारे दुकान , न्यूजपेपर स्टॅन्ड , सिग्नल्स, कुटुंबनियोजनाची (लाल त्रिकोण) केलेली मोठी आणि आकर्षक जाहिरात,आणि सगळी कडे पसरलेले रुळांचे जाळे या सगळ्याची माझ्या मनावर मोहिनी होती ...मी माझ्या नेहमीच्या बोरिंग जीवनापासून काही किलोमीटर वर येऊन एखाद्या सिनेमा थेटर मध्ये जात असे, जिथे लक्ष देऊन बघितल्यास रोज नवीन सिनेमा चालू असे...
पण मी ना कधी त्यावेळचा फोटो काढला, ना चित्र , ना त्यावरती निबंध लिहला ...
मोनेट यांनी गॅर सेंट-लाझार या पॅरिस मधल्या स्टेशन ची जगप्रसिद्ध बारा चित्रे १८७०च्या दशकात काढली , म्हणजे मी मिरज स्टेशन मध्ये घिरट्या घालत होतो त्या काळाच्या शंभर वर्षें आधी ....
कलेच्या प्रांतात गॅर सेंट-लाझार हे स्टेशन भाग्यवान ठरले आणि मिरज कमनशिबी , पण माझ्या भावविश्वात मिरजेचे स्थान वरचे आहे... आपल्या समोर भूतकाळातील जे जग येते ते इतके सापेक्ष असते ... कोण कोणत्या वेळी कुठे होता त्यावर अवलंबून ...
Claude Monet, The Gare St-Lazare, 1877
Jackie Wullschlager writes in ‘Monet: THE RESTLESS VISION’, 2023:
“… He threw himself into life and painting in Paris, frantically completing a dozen Gare Saint-Lazare paintings in as many weeks.
Renoir left an imaginative account of their genesis. Aiming ‘to capture the play of sunlight on the steam rising from the locomotives … with smoke from the engines so thick you can hardly see a thing … a dream world’, Monet, according to him, ‘put on his best clothes, ruffled the lace at his wrists, and twirling his gold-headed cane presented himself to the director of the Western Railway.
The head of the company knew nothing about painting, but did not quite dare to admit it. Monet allowed his host to flounder about for a moment, then deigned to announce the purpose of his visit. ‘I have decided to paint your station. For some time I’ve been hesitating between your station and the Gare du Nord, but I think yours has more character.’ He was given permission. The trains were halted; the platforms were cleared; the engines were crammed with coal so as to give out all the smoke Monet desired. Monet established himself in the station as a tyrant and painted amid respectful awe. He finally departed with a half-dozen or so pictures, while the entire personnel, the director of the company at their head, bowed him out.
Actually, in a letter of 7 January 1877 Monet demurely requested help to obtain permission not yet granted to paint at the station. Renoir was celebrating the originality of Monet’s venture, and the strange ‘dream world’ of illuminated steam – another play of light on water – that resulted from this forthright engagement with motifs of modernity. The railway, which had transformed France in Monet’s lifetime, was the emblem of industrial materialism. Monet dematerialized that brute fact into phantasmagoria, weightlessness, indefinable smoky effects, while also depicting might and movement with an intensity of mark-making, a graphic brilliance of streaked, scribbled strokes, open brushwork, and blue-grey arabesques rising from the massive engines.
The Saint-Lazares are his first exploration of a single subject across several paintings, at different perspectives, times of day and season, levels of sharpness and blur. Together the paintings create a sense of the station as a place of incessant action and stimulation. Monet began in wan winter light, in January with Interior View of the Gare Saint-Lazare, and concluded in April with Outside the Gare Saint-Lazare: View of the Batignolles Tunnels in Sunshine. The works range from the architectonic, with an emphasis on the iron and glass roof and the hefty interlocking diagonals of the Pont de l’Europe, to the much freer Gare Saint-Lazare: The Signal, 1877, dominated by two huge dark discs and rising smoke as almost abstract swirling marks, and a frenzied sketch pulled off in a single session, Gare Saint-Lazare: Tracks and a Signal in Front of the Station Roofs. Their vigour reflected Monet’s energy and restlessness in 1877, unleashed in Paris after years of calm in Argenteuil….”
आता हे वाचा "The trains were halted; the platforms were cleared; the engines were crammed with coal so as to give out all the smoke Monet desired."... म्हणजे ते काही प्रमाणात staged होते !
