A History of European Art

(Steven Felgate) #1

imaginative leap: In the past, he had painted the waterlily garden from the
bank or from a boat, but always it was a pond surrounded by land. Now
he inverted the situation, and we are, when in the galleries, standing on a
magical island in the middle, with the waterlily garden surrounding us.


We see the left section of Waterlilies: The Morning (c. 1917–1925). The light
seems to emerge from the water, and we see the sky through the surface of
the water. There is something deeper here than the study and recording of
colored light on objects, something as deep as the reÀ ection of sky on water,
as deep as memory. In the ¿ nal analysis, Monet was looking for a deeper
reality below the surface, and as far as he could probe, as much as he could
discover, he shared it with us.


Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was born in Paris of a wealthy family. His respect
for past masters of art was balanced by his passion for the contemporary
world that Paris offered him. He began work on a number of history paintings
but was soon drawn to the painting of everyday life. From the beginning,
Degas was a great portrait artist, but he never painted portraits for a living,
and most of his portraits remained unseen in his private collection. They
were mostly of himself and his family, friends, and fellow artists. We see
an example here, The Bellelli Family (1858–1862). Degas’ father was born
in Naples, and his Aunt Laura, to whom the artist felt very close, married a
minor Italian nobleman, Baron Bellelli, but the marriage was unhappy.


Our next example is The Dancing Class (1871–1872). This is a tiny jewel
of a painting showing Monet’s love of the ballet, but what kind of ballet
pictures did he make? He rarely painted the ballet on stage in performance.
Instead, he painted dancers in rehearsal rooms, waiting in the wings, and
taking bows. He wanted to capture the unobserved world of the ballet. Degas
loved all kinds of entertainment, as we see in Miss La La at the Cirque
Fernando (1879). The subject here is swinging by her teeth. Monet catches
her movement in the upper left quarter of the painting, aligned with the ribs
of this domed space.


Miss La La is a dramatic painting ¿ lled with movement, quite in contrast to
L’Absinthe (At the Café) (c. 1876). This painting has the sense of a world
observed or captured, but it was actually painted in the studio with models.

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