When you study impressionism in college, you’re drilled in Marxist interpretations of the social inequities these beloved pictures of everyday life are said to reveal (or repress).īut Monet and Renoir were out in the world, with their bodies, their backstories, their hunger, their senses. When you go to an impressionist exhibition, you tend to imbibe the hagiographical, gift shop version. But I’m trying to take you briefly away from received wisdom regarding Monet and impressionism. Maupassant’s passage reminded me of Grandmaster Flash’s description, in his 1982 masterpiece “ The Message,” of “the number-book takers/ Thugs, pimps and pushers and the big moneymakers/ Drivin’ big cars, spendin’ twenties and tens/ And you’ll wanna grow up to be just like them, huh/ Smugglers, scramblers, burglars, gamblers/ Pickpocket peddlers, even panhandlers.”Ī gratuitous comparison? Sure. He wrote that the place “reeked of vice and corruption and the dregs of Parisian society.” Those who congregated there were “cheats, con-men and cheap hacks” who, he said, “mingled with other small-time crooks and speculators, dabblers in dubious ventures, frauds, pimps and racketeers.” Maupassant noted the suffocating summer heat and slow-moving current in this “dead branch” of the Seine and the ambient smell of spilled drinks, cheap perfume and talc. In the adjacent park, he wrote, “busty women with peroxided hair and nipped-in waists could be seen, made up to the nines with blood red lips and black-kohled eyes.” The restaurant’s patrons kept an eye on the freshly hooked-up couples who cruised by in small, rented boats. Guy de Maupassant set his story “Femme Fatale” at La Grenouillère. It was actually a cesspool of sex and vice. To our eyes, the image looks reposeful, soothing, sedate, like the opening of a Merchant Ivory film. He’s staying nearby with his soon-to-be wife, Camille he comes to La Grenouillère to paint alongside his pal Pierre- Auguste Renoir. The scene is La Grenouillère (the Frog Pond), a bathing spot with a floating restaurant on the Seine near Chatou, just west of Paris. (His bigger, more resolved painting of the same subject went missing during World War II and is presumed destroyed.) And Monet himself talked down the canvas as a bad pochade - a hastily executed, unresolved work. With its rapid, broken brushstrokes (apparent especially in the water), and its rendering of the physical world as colored light rather than meticulously modeled space, this 1869 work is often celebrated as a turning point in the history of art: one of the very first identifiably “impressionist” paintings. One year before France’s Second Empire collapsed and Paris was besieged by Prussians, three years before he painted “ Impression, Sunrise” and five years before the first impressionist exhibition, Claude Monet painted “La Grenouillère,” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript.
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