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Abstract
Claude Monet's thirty-eight paintings of Belle-Île's western coast (1886) were hailed by critics as signaling a groundbreaking shift whose serial conception, abstracted aesthetic, and “savage” tenor transcended Impressionist naturalism, announcing a new, antimodernist, and primitivizing manner. The period's evolving pantheistic and proto-phenomenological ontologies awash in notions of “wholeness” and “universality,” and the painter's friendship, initiated on Belle-Île, with the critic Gustave Geffroy, who shared such views, provide a context for understanding Monet's transformation, from the late 1880s on, from reportorial transcriber of ephemeral reality to dedicated seeker of its underlying essence, its perennial truth.
Notes
1. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, Croisset, October 14, 1846, in Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau and Yvan Leclerc, 6 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973–2007), vol. 1, 389: “L'unité, l'unité, tout est là… . L'ensemble, voilà ce qui manque à tous ceux d'aujourd'hui, aux grands comme aux petits.”
2. Émile Zola, L'oeuvre (Paris: Charpentier, 1886), 49
: “Ah! Que ce serait beau, si l'on donnait son existence entière à une oeuvre, où on tâcherait de mettre les choses, les bêtes, les hommes, l'arche immense! … en pleine coulée de la vie universelle, un monde où nous ne serions qu'un accident … enfin le grand tout, sans haut ni bas, ni sale, ni propre, tel qu'il fonctionne. …”3. Hippolyte Lecomte, “Des tendances de la peinture moderne,” L'Art Moderne 12 (February 21, 1892): 58.
4. The fullest study on the Belle-Île paintings is Denise Delouche, Monet à Belle-Île (Quimper: Éditions Palantines, 2010)
, which expands on the author's previous essay “Monet et Belle-Île en 1886,” Bulletin des Amis du Musée de Rennes 4 (1980): 27–99 . Interpetations vary. They include, more recently, readings of the paintings as evidence of Monet's efforts to breathe new life into Impressionism against the challenge of an emerging Postimpressionist vanguard (Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, and the Nabis in nearby Pont-Aven) and as responses to the decentralizing tendencies of an art market in search of larger audiences ( Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the '90s: The Series Paintings [Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1989], 14–37 ; and idem, Claude Monet: Life and Art [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], 127–31) ; as expressions of the painter's quest for renewal and self-discovery in contact with nature's Sublime (Steven Levine, “Belle-Île and the Oceanic Feeling, 1886–87,” in Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994], 61–73 ); and as nationalist allusions to France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War ( Ségolène Le Men, Monet [Paris: Citadelles-Mazenod, 2010], 260–68).5. Claude Monet–Auguste Rodin: Centenaire de l'exposition de 1889, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée Rodin, 1989)
. Monet had contributed a total of 145 paintings.6. Robert L. Herbert, Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867–1886 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), esp. 117–18
. For Monet's stay at Argenteuil, see Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).7. “There are no people in those pictures, no houses, no boats, or other traces of civilization.” Tucker, Monet in the '90s, 62.
8. Octave Mirbeau, “L'exposition internationale de la rue de Sèze,” Gil Blas, May 13, 1887, 2: “les mers de Belle-Île qui marquent dans la carrière du maître paysagiste une phase encore inconnue… .”
9. Octave Mirbeau to Auguste Rodin, dated November 9–26, 1886, archives of the Musée Rodin, Paris, quoted in Monet–Rodin: Rien que vous et moi (Paris: Skira-Flammarion, 2010), 20 and n. 22: “Ce sera une phase nouvelle de son talent. Un Monet terrible, formidable, qu'on ne connaissait pas encore.”
10. Gustave Geffroy, “Chronique: À Belle-Île-en-Mer; Notes de voyage, VIII,” La Justice, November 3, 1886
: “On a l'impression qu'il est apparu dans l'art quelque chose de nouveau et de grand.”11. Delouche, Monet à Belle-Île, 95.
12. The terms “sublime” and “picturesque” were frequently used to refer to the Belle-Île views. See, among others, Levine, Monet, Narcissus and Self-Reflection, 61–73; Tucker, Monet in the '90s, 41, 42; Robert L. Herbert, “Monet's Neo-Romantic Seascapes, 1881–86,” in Monet and French Landscape: Vétheuil and Normandy, ed. Frances Fowle (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2006), 71–79
; and Richard Thomson, “Emotive Naturalism” and “Belle-Ile and the Creuse 1886 and 1889,” in Claude Monet 1840–1926, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2010), 33–34, 206–17. With regard to the notion of “primitivism,” the term has been previously used as a merely descriptive qualifier devoid of sustained theoretical and cultural analysis, in Joel Isaacson, Claude Monet: Observation and Reflexion (Oxford: Phaidon, 1978); and Fowle, “Paysage sauvage, paysage moderne, paysage pittoresque: Monet et Guillaumin dans la vallée de la Creuse,” in L'impressionnisme: Du plein air au territoire, ed. Frédéric Cousinié (Mont-St-Aignan: Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2013), 187–97. Fowle suggests that one of the reasons Monet might have been attracted to Belle-Île (and the Creuse River valley) was the promise of a “primitive region” spared by progress and technology. But she proceeds to conflate notions of the “primitive” and the “picturesque,” as if they were coterminous. In the opposite vein, Delouche, Monet à Belle-Île, 29, writes that thoughts of “primitivism” never crossed Monet's mind in relation to Belle-Île, which—as she argues—represented for him merely a new workplace.13. On the rapid modernization of Brittany, see the classic essay by Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, “Les données bretonnantes: La prairie de représentation,” Art History 3 (September 1980): 314–44
; also Catherine Bertho, “L'invention de la Bretagne: Genèse sociale d'un stéréotype,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 35 (November 1980): 45–62 ; and Denise Delouche, “De l'image au mythe, la caractérisation d'une province: La Bretagne,”in Festival d'histoire de Montbrison: Du provincialisme au régionalisme XVIII–XX siècles (Montbrison: Association du Centre Culturel de la Ville de Montbrison, 1989), 35–50 . Regarding Belle-Île's admittedly less rapid modernization, travelers mention the existence of a “bathing resort [station balnéaire]” and that the island's “savagery” was beginning to attract tourist curiosity. Anatole-Joseph Verrier, Belle-Île en Mer: Guide pratique du voyageur, en vente dans les gares de chemins-de-fer (Palais, Belle-Île: Maison d'Anglande au Palais, 1891), 25–78.14. Léon Trebuchet, Belle-Isle-en-Mer: Étape d'un touriste en France (Paris: A. Hennuyer, 1887; reprint, Monein: Édition des Régionalismes, 2010), 89: “Je ne m'adresse pas … aux personnes qui recherchent les plaisirs des villes d'eau, les distractions des casinos de bains de mer. … Belle-Isle ne ressemble, sous aucun rapport, aux plages de la Normandie, vers lesquelles les élégants accourent de tous côtés. Là, point de ces toilettes excentriques comme Dieppe, Trouville, Dinard ou Pornichet.”
15. Léon Trebuchet, Promenades à Belle-Isle-en-Mer en 1880 (n.p.: La Découvrance-Éditions, 2007), 56. “Les moeurs des habitants … sont des plus primitives: chacun semble vouloir rester en arrière de toute civilisation et conserver, aussi longtemps que possible, les us et coutumes de ses anciens.”
16. The Musée de Préhistoire at Carnac houses the collections of the amateur Scottish paleontologist James Miln (1818–1881), who had been excavating at Carnac since the 1860s with the help of a local man, Zacharie Le Rouzic (1864–1939). After Miln's death, Le Rouzic became the first director of the museum. Z. Le Rouzic, Carnac: Légendes, traditions, coutumes et contes du pays (Vannes: La Folye, 1924)
. Brittany's megalithic monuments had attracted antiquarians' interest since at least the eighteenth century, including the art collector Christophe-Paul de Robien (1698–1756), member of the Parliament of Brittany, and the engineer and amateur archaeologist Félix-François Le Royer d'Artezet de la Sauvagère (1707–1781). De Robien is the author of Antiquités gauloises (Locmariaquer, ca. 1734–36) ; La Sauvagère wrote Receuil d'antiquités romaines dans les Gaules, 1770. Generally on the European fascination with prehistoric remains, see Alain Schnapp, Le conquête du passé: Aux origines de l'archéologie (Paris: Carré, 1993) , chap. 4 and passim. Tourists were also attracted to the mysterious ruins. Prosper Mérimée, Notes d'un voyage dans l'Ouest de la France (1836; Paris: Adam Biro, 1989), 126 , relates that he crawled under a dolmen on the island of Gavrinis in the Gulf of Morbihan and found it strewn with empty wine bottles left there by English tourists.17. Théodore-Gaston-Joseph Chasle de La Touche, Histoire de Belle-Île-en-Mer (Nantes: Vincent Forest, 1852), 100. The two menhirs near Sauzon stood facing one another across a dirt road (one eventually collapsed to the ground, much to La Touche's distress; it has now been restored to its former erect position). As local legend had it, they were thought to be the petrified effigies of two star-crossed lovers, Jean and Jeanne de Runélo.
18. Almire Le Pelletier de la Sarthe, Voyage en Bretagne illustré de vues prises sur les lieux avec un résumé des fastes de cette province. … (Paris: Plon, 1853), 28: “Nous avons examiné la nature et le grain des pierres de ce dolmen, nous les avons trouvé identiques à ceux des roches voisines, qui s'élèvent assez nombreuses, et d'un grand volume, au dessus de la surface du sol.”
19. F. Pitre-Chevalier, La Bretagne ancienne et moderne (Paris: Coquebert, 1844), 3: “effroyable nature et race effroyable.”
20. Monet to Frédéric Bazille, Étretat, December 1868, in Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, 5 vols. (Paris: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1974–91), vol. 1, no. 44, 425
(hereafter W.): “Je ne vous envie pas d'être à Paris et les réunions [du café Guerbois] ne me manquent guère … mais franchement je ne crois que bien mauvais [ce] que l'on peut bien faire dans un pareil milieu: ne croyez-vous pas qu'à même la nature seul on fasse mieux? Moi j'en suis sûr… . On est trop préoccupé de ce que l'on voit et de ce que l'on entend à Paris, si fort que l'on soit, et ce que je ferai ici a au moins le mérite de ne ressembler à personne, du moins je le crois, parce que ce sera simplement l'expression de ce que j'aurai ressenti, moi personnellement.”21. Monet to Alice Hoschedé, Dieppe, February 8, 1882, in W., vol. 2, no. 236, 214: “j'aime mieux rester dans ma solitude.”
22. Monet to Alice, Étretat, October 21, 1885, in W., vol. 2, no. 593, 262: “je ne vis pas comme d'ordinaire dans la solitude.”
23. Monet to Alice, Étretat, November 1, 1885, in W., vol. 2, no. 605, 264: “Puis me voilà enfin seul” and “Je suis enchanté d'être seul. …”
24. Monet to Alice, Étretat, November 2, 1885, in W., vol. 2, no. 606, 264: “Il n'y a pas un chat ici … .”
25. Gustave Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp, Par les champs et par les grèves (voyage en Bretagne) (1886; Paris: Louis Conard, 1927)
. Monet owned the 1886 edition of Flaubert's book, now part of the holdings of his library at Giverny. Ségolène Le Men et al., La bibliothèque de Monet (Paris: Citadelles-Mazenod, 2013), 244 ; and Paul Hayes Tucker, “Monet's Library,” in Claude Monet: Late Work, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2010), 188ff. For Delouche, Monet à Belle-Île, 28–29, the dry descriptions of the guidebooks and their small black-and-white engravings were hardly likely to capture Monet's pictorial imagination. According to Le Men et al., La bibliothèque de Monet, none of these guidebooks is preserved in Monet's library at Giverny.26. In his letters to Alice, Monet complained about the rats and mice, whose noise at night prevented him from sleeping; about a pig on the floor below, whose smell rose to his room; and about the lone candle he was given as means of illumination in the evenings.
27. Gustave Geffroy, Pays d'Ouest (Paris: Charpentier, 1897), 261
. See also the description of the painter at work in a local newspaper article, “Morbihan,” Le Phare de la Loire, November 6, 1886.28. Monet to Alice, Belle-Île, September 24, 1886, in W., vol. 2, no. 692, 278.
29. Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel, Belle-Île, no date (1886), in W., vol. 2, no. 694, 277: “L'endroit est très beau mais très sauvage … rochers fantastiques”; Monet, quoted in Denise Delouche, “La Bretagne et ses peintres au XIXe siècle,” Mémoires de la Société d'Histoire et d'Archéologie de Bretagne 54 (1977): 27
: “je suis enthousiasmé par ce pays sinistre. …”30. Monet to Gustave Caillebotte, Belle-Île, October 11, 1886, in W., vol. 2, no. 709, 280: “Je suis dans un pays superbe de sauvagerie, un amoncellement de rochers terrible et une mer invraissemblable de couleur.”
31. Monet to Alice, Belle-Île, September 14, 1886, in W., vol 2, no. 686, 276: “Pas un arbre à dix kilomètres à la ronde, des rochers, des grottes admirables: c'est sinistre, diabolique, mais superbe.”
32. Monet to Alice, Belle-Île, September 18, 1886, in W., vol. 2, no. 688, 276: “Quant aux rochers, c'est un amas de grottes, de pointes d'aiguilles extraordinaires.”
33. Monet to Caillebotte, Belle-Île, October 11, 1886, in W., vol. 2. no. 709, 280: “L'Océan est tout autre chose.”
34. Monet to Durand-Ruel.
35. Octave Mirbeau also spoke of Belle-Île's “formidable” sea, “more terrible than in any other savage location of savage Brittany.” Mirbeau, “Chronique parisienne: Kervilahouen,” La Revue Indépendante 2 (January 3, 1887): 25.
36. Monet to Alice, Belle-Île, October 30, 1886, in W., vol. 2, no. 730, 285: “la mer me donne un mal terrible”; “La gueuse, et certes ce nom lui va bien car elle est terrible, elle vous a de ces tons d'un vert glauque et des aspects absolument terribles (je me répète). Bref j'en suis fou.”
37. Ibid. (my emphasis): “Mais je sais bien que pour peindre vraiment la mer, il faut la voir tous les jours, à toute heure et au même endroit, pour en connaître la vie à cette endroit-là. Ainsi je refais les mêmes motifs jusqu'à quatre et six fois même.”
38. Geffroy's book was L'enfermé (Paris: Charpentier, 1897).
39. Gustave Geffroy, À Belle-Île-en-Mer: Notes de voyage; Suivi de Trois lettres de Belle-Île, ed. Jean-François Nivet (Rezé: Séquences, 1996), 34
: “se transplanter … dans un sol inabordable qui est comme en arrière de nous et vers lequel il est impossible de revenir”; “qui ont l'air d'avoir vécu déjà dans des temps autres que celui-ci.” Geffroy further alludes to modern man's, and his own, yearning “to be elsewhere [d'être ailleurs]” and “to relive those centuries that have already lived [de revivre les siècles qui ont été déjà vécus].”40. Geffroy, “Chronique: À Belle-Île en Mer; Notes de voyage, VII,” La Justice, October 31, 1886: “Aucun changement ne s'est fait sur cette côte déchiquetée pendant les siècles écoulés depuis ces jours. C'est la même herbe qui toujours pousse, fleurit et s'égrène sur les retranchements élevés au sommet de la falaise à pic. Pas une motte de terre n'a bougé, les nids des oiseaux sont à la même place… .” For Geffroy's reports about the progress of his Breton journey, see the articles titled “Chronique: À Belle-Île-en-Mer; Notes de voyage,” in La Justice, October 17, 21, 22, 25, 27, 29, 31, and November 3, 1886. The articles were reprinted, with some changes, in Geffroy's later travelogue, Pays d'Ouest.
41. Monet's account of the meeting is in his letter to Alice, Belle-Île, October 2, 1886, in W., vol. 2, no. 702, 279. See also Geffroy's letter of October 3 to his mother describing the same event, in Geffroy, Belle-Île-en Mer: Notes de voyage, 93–95.
42. Geffroy, “Chronique: Claude Monet,” La Justice, March 15, 1883.
43. Monet to Alice, Belle-Île, October 4, 1886, in W., vol. 2, no. 704, 279.
44. Geffroy to his mother, Kervilahouen, October 8, 1886, quoted in JoAnne Paradise, Gustave Geffroy and the Criticism of Painting (New York: Garland, 1985), 26: “Avant hier nous avons fait tout ce côté de la côte Claude Monet et moi … nous avons vu des spectacles magnifiques de sables et de pierres à vous éblouir les yeux pendant le reste de vos jours.”
45. Geffroy, “Salon de 1887: Hors du Salon; Claude Monet, VI,” La Justice, June 2, 1887: “des bêtes mal dégrossies, des pachydermes à croûtes épaissses, … des rocs percés comme des arches, des promontoires… . hauts, carrés et massifs comme des cathédrales … creusés en grottes, agglomérés en fortifications. …”; reprinted with slight variations in Geffroy, “Claude Monet,” L'Art et les Artistes, n.s., 2, no. 10 (October 1920): 64; Geffroy, Pays d'Ouest, 254–57; and Geffroy, Claude Monet, sa vie, son oeuvre, 2 vols. (Paris: G. Crès, 1922), vol. 1, 275.
46. Geffroy, “Chronique: À Belle-Île en Mer, VIII”: “la vie inconsciente, immobile et vénérable des pierres.”
47. Geffroy, “Hors du Salon: Claude Monet, VI”: “la traîtresse effleure la pierre, la baise, la caresse, devient transparente, se fige en ces profondeurs vertes et bleues.”
48. Geffroy had read Gustave Flaubert's book, according to Patricia Plaud-Dilhuit, “Gustave Geffroy, critique d'art” (doctoral thesis, Université de Rennes 2, 1987), 81. In addition, both Monet and Geffroy may have been aware of Flaubert's earlier article “Les pierres de Carnac,” L'Artiste, April 18, 1858, 261–62. Steven Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection, 62, suggests that Monet identified with Flaubert.
49. Flaubert and Du Camp, Par les champs et par les grèves, 130–31 (my emphasis): “nous regrettions que nos yeux ne puissent aller jusqu'au sein des rochers, jusqu'au fond des mers, jusq'au bout du ciel, pour voir comment poussent les pierres, se font les flots, s'allument les étoiles… . À force de nous en pénétrer, d'y entrer, nous devenions nature aussi … nous aurions voulu nous y perdre… .”
50. A great reader of philosophy, including the writings of Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Flaubert nevertheless preferred Spinoza above all others. He studied Spinoza's works throughout his life, especially his Ethics, which he admitted reading three times. In his letters, he often refers to Spinoza as “a very great man [un fort grand homme].” His admiration for Spinoza and his fervent pantheism are reflected in his own works, including L'éducation sentimentale and La tentation de Saint-Antoine. See Albert Gyergyai, “Flaubert et Spinoza,” Les Amis de Flaubert 39 (1971): 11–22
; Timothy Unwin, “Flaubert and Pantheism,” French Studies 35, no. 4 (1981): 394–406 ; R. B. Leal, “The Unity of Flaubert's Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874),” Modern Language Review 85, no. 2 (April 1990): 330–40 ; Jean Bruneau, Les débuts littéraires de Gustave Flaubert 1831–1845 (Paris: Colin, 1962), 446–52 ; Jean Seznec, “Saint-Antoine et les monstres: Essai sur les sources et la signification du fantastique de Flaubert,” PMLA 58 (March 1, 1943): 195–222 ; and Andrew Brown, “Un assez vague spinozisme: Flaubert and Spinoza,” Modern Language Review 91, no. 4 (October 1996): 848–65.51. Flaubert to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, Croisset, November 4, 1857, in Correspondance, vol. 2, 774: “Il faut lire Spinoza!” Flaubert urges his correspondent, who had read Clarisse Coignet's article “Panthéisme-Spinosa [sic],” published in the Revue de Paris, September 15, 1857, to read more works by the philosopher, including his recently translated Ethics.
52. Regarding developments in the period's natural sciences, see E. T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans and Green, 1910)
; and Bruce Hunt, “Lines of Force, Swirls of Ether,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art and Literature, ed. Bruce Clark and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) . Barbara Larson explores the intersections of Darwinian thought with all fields of knowledge in The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005) ; also idem, “La génération symboliste et la révolution darwinienne,” in L' âme au corps: Arts et sciences 1893–1993, ed. Jean Clair, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1993), 322–41 . Larson writes (322): “Darwinisme was not only the science of sciences, but also the philosophy of philosophies.”53. Alfred Fouillée, Le mouvement idéaliste et la réaction contre la science positive (Paris: Alcan, 1896), xxiii
: “les sciences positives laissent subsister un fonds d'indétermination radicale échappant à la connaissance.” Generally, on the history and aftermath of French Positivism, see W. M. Simon, European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963) , esp. chap. 4, “France: Philosophy, Science and Psychology,” 94–125; and Antonio Aliotta, The Idealist Reaction against Science (New York: Arno Press, 1975) . On the reconciliation of science and spirituality in the last two decades of the nineteenth century as a result of the emergence of new psychological theories, and its impact on philosophical and Symbolist aesthetic theories, see Filiz Eda Burhan, “Vision and Visionaries: Nineteenth-Century Psychological Theory, the Occult Sciences and the Formation of the Symbolist Aesthetic in France” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1979).54. Cousin considered Maine de Biran “the greatest French philosopher of the 19th century.” Paul Janet, “Le spinozisme en France,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Étranger 13 (January–June 1882): 129.
55. On Maine de Biran, see H. G. Gouhier, ed., introduction to Oeuvres choisies de Maine de Biran, by Pierre Maine de Biran (Paris: Aubier, 1942)
. Gouhier writes that “if ‘spiritualist positivism’ is a family name, the first one to bear it should indeed be Maine de Biran [si ‘spiritualisme positiviste’ est un nom de famille, le premier qui doit le porter est bien Maine de Biran]” (22). See also Victor Cousin, ed., Oeuvres philosophiques de Maine de Biran, 4 vols. (Paris: Ladrange, 1841) ; Ernest Naville, Maine de Biran, sa vie et ses pensées (1857; Paris: Didier, 1874) ; and Pierre Maine de Biran, Oeuvres inédites de Maine de Biran, ed. Ernest Naville, 3 vols. (Paris: Dezobry, E. Magdeleine, 1859) ; and Philip P. Hallie, Maine de Biran: Reformer of Empiricism 1766–1824 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959).On Biran's links to modern phenomenology, see David Stuart and Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology: A Guide to the Field and Its Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974)
; Bernard Baertschi, L'ontologie de Maine de Biran (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1982) ; and Mael Lemoine, “Spiritualisme et phénoménologie: Approche de l'unité et de la continuité d'un courant philosophique français depuis Maine de Biran” (PhD diss., Université de Poitiers, 2002) . On the parallels and distinctions between Biran's, Edmund Husserl's, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theories, see Bernard Baertschi, “L'idéologie subjective de Maine de Biran et la phénoménologie,” Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie 113 (1981): 109–22.56. For Maine de Biran the only valid sensation was conscious sensation resulting from a thought process in the individual as a “thinking substance,” or conscious subject. He thus refuted the empiricists' emphasis on the senses alone, as illustrated in Étienne Bonnot de Condillac's famous example of an inanimate statue that is enlivened by the sensation of the perfume of a rose. As Biran countered, although permeated by the sensation of the perfume, the statue would still lack the awareness of the nature of its experience because it was deprived of consciousness, especially of a consciousness of its own separate self as different from, and in opposition to, the scent of the rose. Gouhier, introduction to Oeuvres choisies de Maine de Biran, 28–30.
57. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” (1961), in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, trans. Michael B. Smith, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 125
. Compare with Maine de Biran, “The observer will be able to grasp, as if in some kind of unity, the phenomenon or the phenomena that are common in two [different] existences, two lives fused into one composite life that does not resemble either of its components. [L'observateur pourra saisir, dans une sorte d'unité, le phénomène ou les phénomènes communs à deux existences, deux vies réunies dans une vie composée, qui ne ressemble ni à l'une ni à l'autre des composants].” Maine de Biran, quoted in Bernard Halda, La pensée de Maine de Biran (Paris: Bordas, 1970), 64.58. Naville, Maine de Biran, 79.
59. Fouillée, Le mouvement idéaliste, xlviii, “Nowadays not only things in themselves… . have been reduced to facts of consciousness … but facts said to be of a material nature have also been attributed to the primary states of consciousness or of subconsciousness [Aujourd'hui, non seulement les choses en soi … ont été ramenées à des faits de conscience … mais les faits dits matériels ont été également ramenés à des états élémentaires de conscience ou de subconscience].”
60. The expression is from Ralph Barton Perry, Philosophy of the Recent Past: An Outline of European and American Philosophy since 1860 (New York: Scribner's, 1926), 98.
61. Fouillée, Le mouvement idéaliste, xlvi, xlviii: “it is what in the heart of multiplicity itself produces unity. Such is Nature” [c'est ce qui au sein de la multiplicité même, fait l'unité. Telle est la Nature]”; “everything is contained in everything, as Anaxagoras used to say [tout est dans tout, disait Anaxagore].”
62. The name Spiritualist Positivism was coined by Félix Ravaisson, whose writings in the 1860s carry early intimations of that direction in philosophical thought: “There are many indications leading us to forecast the imminent advent of a philosophical era whose general characteristic would be the predominance of what could be called a realism or a spiritualist positivism, founded on the awareness the mind acquires within itself of a ‘being’ from which, as it acknowledges, all other ‘being’ derives and depends, [a being] that is none other than [the result] of its own activity.” Ravaisson, La philosophie en France au dix-neuvième siècle (1867; Paris: Hachette, 1895), 275
. In the entry “Spiritualisme” of his Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 8th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 1020 , André Lalande offers the following definition of the movement in the 1880s: “But there is an even more profound and more complete Spiritualism, which consists in seeking within the mind the explanation of nature itself, as if the unconscious thought that is at work in it [that is, in nature] were the very same [thought] that becomes conscious within us, and that its sole aim were to succeed in producing a [live] organism that would allow it [the thought] to move (through the medium of spatiality) from an unconscious to a conscious state.” See also Étienne Vacherot, Le nouveau spiritualisme (Paris: Hachette, 1884) , a period testimony by one of the followers of the movement; Perry, Philosophy of the Recent Past , esp. the chapter “Spiritualism in France: Maine de Biran, Cousin, Ravaisson, Boutroux,” 97–113ff.; Gouhier, introduction to Oeuvres choisies de Maine de Biran, 22–23; Dominique Janicaud, Une généalogie du spiritualisme français: Aux sources du bergsonisme; Ravaisson et la métaphysique (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969) ; Jean Beaufret, Notes sur la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle: De Maine de Biran à Bergson (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984) ; Jean Lefranc, La philosophie en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1998) ; and Sylvain Auroux, ed., Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, s.v. “Spiritualisme,” vol. 2, pt. 2, Les notions philosophiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 2444–46.63. Henri Bergson wrote: “Little noticed in its own time, the doctrine of Maine de Biran has had a growing influence… . As opposed to Kant, Maine de Biran has pronounced man's spirit as capable … of attaining the absolute and of making it the object of its speculations. He demonstrates that the knowledge we have of ourselves [that is, our consciousness]… is a privileged awareness that goes beyond mere phenomena, and reaches reality in itself—the reality that Kant has declared inaccessible to our speculations. Briefly put, he [Maine de Biran] has conceived the idea of a metaphysics that would rise ever higher toward the spirit in general, even as consciousness descended ever deeper in the depths of interior life… .” Bergson, quoted in Gouhier, introduction to Oeuvres choisies de Maine de Biran, 22–23. See also Céline Lefève, “Maine de Biran et Bergson: Science et philosophie; La question de la psychologie subjective” (PhD diss., Université Paris 7–Denis Diderot, 2003), http://www.cerphi; and Henri Bergson, “La philosophie française,” Revue de Paris, May 15, 1915, 247.
64. Fouillée, Le mouvement idéaliste, v: “Rarement en France on assista à pareil labeur des philosophes. Les productions dans l'ordre de la psychologie, de la philosophie générale, de l'esthétique, de la sociologie se succèdent sans interruption. Les thèses de philosophie sont plus nombreuses que jamais, et il en est peu qui ne soient des oeuvres remarquables. … Jamais l'enseignement philosophique n'excita chez la jeunesse plus d'intérêt… .” See also idem, “Le mouvement idéaliste en France,” Revue des Deux Mondes 134 (March 15, 1896): 276.
65. See, for example, Jules Simon's series of articles entitled “Philosophes modernes” in La Revue des Deux Mondes of 1841 (vol. 28), especially his essay on Maine de Biran in the issue of November 15, 1841, 634–58.
66. See, among others, Paul Janet's “Spinoza et le ‘spinozisme’ d'après les travaux récents,” La Revue des Deux Mondes 70 (July 15, 1867); his introduction to Spinoza, Traité de dieu, de l'homme et de la béatitude, traduit pour la première fois en français et précédé d'une introduction par P. Janet (Paris: Germer, Baillère, 1878)
; and his Les maîtres de la pensée moderne (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1888) , with a chapter on Maine de Biran and three on Spinoza, in which we read (142): “But a pantheistic naturalism that absorbs man into nature and turns nature into a divine being has nothing that cannot be reconciled with our times [Mais un panthéisme naturaliste, qui absorbe l'homme dans la nature et fait de la nature l'être divin, n'a rien d'irréconciliable avec la civilization de notre temps].” Other Cousin students who helped diffuse Spinoza's thought included Jean Philibert Damiron, Mémoire sur Spinoza et sa doctrine (1843); and Étienne Nourisson, Spinoza et le naturalisme contemporain (1866).67. Janet, “Le spinozisme en France,” 130–31.
68. Coignet, “Études philosophiques: Panthéisme-Spinosa,” 254: “Aujourd'hui le panthéisme est partout. Descendu des hautes régions de la spéculation métaphysique, il envahit les intelligences moyennes, séduites par l'unité grandiose de ses conceptions et la précision de ses formules; il envahit les masses mêmes, entraînées par l'appât des applications sociales qu'il leur promet.” On the relation between socialism and pantheism, especially Alexis de Tocqueville's analogy between pantheism and democracy, see Janet, “Le spinozisme en France,” 129.
69. About Geffroy's keen philosophical interests, his friend, Jean Jaurès, also a Spiritualist Positivist, wrote: “But Geffroy is above all a philosopher and a writer… . The more Geffroy advances in his critical oeuvre … the clearer… . his philosophical awareness becomes [Mais Geffroy est avant tout un philosophe et un écrivain. … À mesure que Geffroy avance dans son oeuvre critique … il prend une conscience plus nette… . de sa philosophie].” Jaurès, “Gustave Geffroy: Études sur la vie artistique,” La Dépêche, May 29, 1894, reprinted in Oeuvre de Jean Jaurès, ed. M. Rebérioux and G. Candar, 18 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 2000–), vol. 16, 260. Geffroy's first biographer, Trisha Harlor, also refers to Geffroy's “philosophical anxiety” (13); his aptitude to “grasp the essence underneath appearances” (30); and his psychological subtlety, which enabled him to place the artist “in communication if not with the things in themselves, at least with the vibrations emanating from the noumena… .” (31). Harlor, Gustave Geffroy: Étude biographique et critique (Paris: E. Rey, 1934).
70. The philosophical context of Geffroy's formation and art criticism is discussed in Plaud-Dilhuit, “Gustave Geffroy, critique d'art.” See also idem, “Gustave Geffroy, le journaliste et le critique, l'éphémère et la durée,” in L'invention de la critique d'art: Actes du colloque international tenu à l'université Rennes 2, les 24 et 25 juillet 1999, ed. Pierre Henry Frangne and Jean-Marc Poinsot (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002), 148 and passim. See also Paradise, Gustave Geffroy and the Criticism of Painting, passim. More generally about the intersection of art criticism and philosophy, see Stephen Bann, “Entre philosophie et critique: Victor Cousin, Théophile Gautier et l'art pour l'art,” in Frangne and Poinsot, L'invention de la critique d'art, 136–44.
71. Paradise, Gustave Geffroy and the Criticism of Painting, 74–79.
72. Gustave Geffroy, La vie artistique, 8 vols. (Paris: Dentu, 1892–1903), vol. 3, xviii–xix, 12.
73. Ibid., vol. 3, xviii: “Tout est dans tout et l'unité des phénomènes de tous ordres s'aperçoit vite pour peu qu'on y réfléchisse.”
74. Pierre-François Moreau, “Taine lecteur de Spinoza,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Étranger 177, no. 4 (1987): 479
: “notre cher et vénéré Spinoza.” Taine's professors referred to him as a “fervent disciple of Spinoza” (480). On Taine's idealism and the influence exerted on his thought by Hegel and Spinoza, see D. D. Rosca, L'influence de Hegel sur Taine, théoricien de la connaissance et de l'art (Paris: J. Gamber, 1928) ; and S. J. Kahn, Science and Aesthetic Judgment: A Study of Taine's Critical Method (London: Routledge, 1953).75. D. G. Charlton, Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire 1852–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 133
. In the preface to the 1868 edition of his Les philosophes classiques du XIXe siècle en France (1st ed., Paris: Hachette, 1857) , Hippolyte Taine rejects both competing strains of Positivism and Idealism, superseded—as he writes—by his own superior method of a synthetic “scientific metaphysics.” No friend of Cousin, Taine devoted the last chapters of his book to a critique (and ridicule) of Cousin's eclecticism.76. Hippolyte Taine, H. Taine: Sa vie et sa correspondance, 4 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1902–7), quoted and trans. in Charlton, Positivist Thought, 128–29: “les vues sur l'ensemble et sur le fond des choses.”
77. H. Taine, History of English Literature (New York: F. Ungar, 1965), vol. 4, 407–12; and Charlton, Positivist Thought, 139–43.
78. H. Taine, Philosophie de l'art, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1909), vol. 1, 30, 31, 38–39, 42–43. See also T. H. Goetz, Taine and the Fine Arts (Madrid: Playor, 1973), passim and 72–73.
79. Taine, Philosophie de l'art, vol. 1, 30: “ce caractère est ce que les philosophes appellent l'essence des choses … ; et à cause de celà, ils disent que l'art a pour but de manifester l'essence des choses.”
80. Ibid., vol. 1, 43: “Il faut dans tout art un ensemble de parties liées que l'artiste modifie de façon à manifester un caractère.”
81. H. Taine, Les philosophes classiques du dix-neuvième siècle en France, 13th ed. (Paris: Hachette, n.d.,), 370, trans. Charlton, Positivist Thought, 143 (my emphasis).
82. Geffroy, quoted in Plaud-Dilhuit, “Gustave Geffroy, critique d'art,” 70: “l'idée que chaque être, en apparence distinct des autres, appartient à un grand être indivisible … ; et il [Taine] aboutit ainsi à une conception panthéiste de l'univers.”
83. Geffroy, quoted in ibid., 71: “Il n'en est pas moins le poète des faits—il a trouvé en eux leur cause.”
84. Geffroy, La vie artistique, vol. 4, 326
: “J'en conclu que l'oeuvre d'art doit être une comme la vie est une, que l'harmonie universelle doit se révéler par tout fragment d'art. …”85. Gustave Geffroy, “Les livres,” La Justice, August 30, 1882
: “d'un historien et d'un artiste, mais tous deux psychologues étroitement confondus, ne séparant pas les résultats des causes”; “des faits caractéristiques et aussi à caractériser le moindre fait”; and “l'art de la forme et la vérité du fond.”86. Gustave Geffroy, “Courbet,” La Justice, June 6, 1882
: “Courbet a été un produit de notre race et de notre sol. …”87. Gustave Geffroy, “Chronique: Eugène Boudin,” La Justice, February 15, 1883
: “C'est ainsi que Boudin connaît la surface des objets et en pénètre le sens, établi entre eux un accord parfait, leur assigne leur vrai place dans l'ensemble.”88. Gustave Geffroy, “Chronique: Jean-François Millet, II,” La Justice, June 17, 1887
: “simplifiant sans cesse, cherchant les lignes caractéristiques … il supprima plus que personne les détails, dessina en quelques traits essentiels les figures, s'appliqua à dégager l'expression dominante des physionomies… .”89. Geffroy, “Chronique: Claude Monet”: “paysages coquets”; “il étudie des terrains, écroulements des dunes, flancs des falaises, comme un géologue. … Il tient compte de toutes les actions extérieures; … Il reproduit à merveille les rocs mouillés, découverts par la marée basse… .”
90. Gustave Geffroy, “Salon de 1887: Hors du Salon; Claude Monet, V,” La Justice, May 25, 1887
(Geffroy's review was pubished in two installments in La Justice of May 25 and June 2): “qui ont vu avec leurs yeux la nature et l'homme, qui ont raconté leur observation et leur rêverie … en un langage qu'ils employaient naturellement, puisque ce langage, ils le trouvaient en eux-mêmes pour exprimer leur individu et les rapports de leur individu avec le monde extérieur.”91. Plaud-Dilhuit, “Gustave Geffroy, critique d'art,” 207. The issue of “series” and seriality in art, and in Monet's oeuvre more particularly, is a topic that goes beyond the boundaries of this article. With regard to the Belle-Île works as a “series” heralding Monet's 1890s cycles, art historians' opinions are divided. Doubts have been voiced primarily by Grace Seiberling, Monet's Series, PhD diss. (New York: Garland, 1976), 69: “Monet does not seem to have thought of these works as a group in the same way he would later in his career.” Others have attempted to diminish the importance of the paintings'serial nature by placing them in the larger perspective of the painter's oeuvre, as well as of “serial” practices in art more generally. See, among others, Isaacson, Claude Monet: Observation and Reflection
; K. S. Champa, “Monet and the Embrace of the Series: Decentralizing ‘Masterpiece’ or the Aesthetic of the Multiple Orgasms?” in Masterpiece Studies: Manet, Zola, Van Gogh and Monet (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) , who argues that Monet's serialism, initiated in the mid-1870s with the St-Lazare paintings, may have been driven by efforts to counter the Romantic idea of the single “masterpiece,” as well as by marketing speculations, such as the wish to secure solo gallery exhibitions; and John Klein, “The Dispersal of the Modernist Series,” Oxford Art Journal 21, no. 1 (1998): 123–35 , who explores the past history of the series in art as an antecedent to modernist and postmodernist strategies.My own position is aligned with Paul Tucker's (Claude Monet: Life and Art, 131; and Monet in the '90s, 25–28) in viewing Belle-Île as the launching ground of Monet's serialism. For Tucker, the Belle-Île paintings constitute a series because of their rigorously “integrated ensemble of sequential moments charted with a keen eye for nuances and variations” (26). In that regard, for instance, they differ from Monet's St-Lazare paintings, not a series. The seriality of the Belle-Île ensemble is also upheld by Delouche, Monet à Belle-Île, 207–8; and Ursula Prunster, “Painting Belle-Île,” in Belle-Île: Monet, Russell and Matisse in Brittany, exh. cat. (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2001), 20
: “Monet's repeated depictions of the same group of rocks in the sea on Belle-Île intensified his serial procedure, culminating in his final series… .”92. Geffroy, “Hors du Salon: Claude Monet, VI”: “Ces tableaux sont vus d'ensemble. Toutes ces formes et toutes ces lueurs se commandent, se rencontrent, influent les unes sur les autres, s'imprègnent mutuellement de leurs couleurs et de leurs reflets… . De là l'unité de ces tableaux qui donnent en même temps que la forme de la côte et le mouvement de la mer, l'heure du jour par la couleur de la pierre et la couleur de l'eau, par la teinte de la nue et la disposition des nuages.”
93. Monet bragged to Alice (Belle-Île, October 5, 1886, W. vol. 2, no. 705, 279) that, according to Geffroy, his paintings captured Brittany's real essence for the first time. See also Geffroy's statement about Monet's paintings: “For the first time, the terrifying sea of over there has found its [true] historian [Pour la première fois, la terrible mer de là-bas a trouvé son historien].” “Hors du Salon: Claude Monet, VI.”
94. Geffroy, “Hors du Salon: Claude Monet, VI”: “Toutes les configurations du sol, tous les états de l'atmosphère, toutes les tranquilités et toutes les fureurs de l'eau … tous les états si différents d'une même nature.”
95. Geffroy, “Chronique: Eugène Boudin.” On the characterization “sincère and savant,” co-opted from the 1890s on by Symbolist critics referring to Monet, see Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 10–11.
96. Paradise, Gustave Geffroy, 62. Burhan, “Vision and Visionaries,” 237–76. Citing key figures, such as Charles Baudelaire, Rodolphe Töpffer, and Champfleury, Burhan describes the fascination with the savage and the primitive in the two last decades of the nineteenth century as due to the “recognition of irrational, unconscious mental processes,” and to the growing interest in primitive cultures introduced by colonialism (237). The conceit is a topos of phenomenological writings, such as by Henri Bergson, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. In 1899, in his essay “Laughter,” Bergson urged artists to seek a “purity of vision” that would “abandon all prepossessions” in order to “recapture a fresh and primitive impression.” Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1899), trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks4352. Joel Isaacson, “Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé, Impressionism, Plein Air, and Forgetting,” Art Bulletin 36, no. 3 (September 1994): 427–50
, discusses the impossibility of such “a theory of transparency,” of which, as he shows, twentieth-century phenomenologists, including Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, were well aware. Isaacson attributes its popularity among painters, such as Monet and Paul Cézanne, to the wish to create paintings free from “the constraints of entrenched theory and practice.”97. Hippolyte Taine, On Intelligence, vol. 2 (New York: Henry Holt, 1875), esp. chap. 2, 40–96
. Charles Stuckey, “Monet's Art and the Act of Vision,” in Aspects of Monet, ed. John Rewald and Frances Weitzenhoffer (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), 108–21 , was among the first to discuss Monet's visual practice in relation to Taine's theories.98. Paradise, Gustave Geffroy, 62: “les yeux qui savent voir,” “les regards qui savent voir,” and “l'intelligence de son observation.”
99. Geffroy, Claude Monet, sa vie, son oeuvre, vol. 1, 2: “des yeux brillants, aigus, qui me transpercèrent dès la porte”; “Les yeux acérés se dardèrent de nouveau sur moi.”
100. Ibid., vol. 1, 284: “il réfléchit dans son oeil exalté, coordonne dans sa cervelle exacte… .”
101. Geffroy, “Hors du Salon: Claude Monet, V”: “les dispositions et les influences des tons.”
102. Ibid.: “ce rustique alchémiste … a acquis une singulière aptitude pour voir immédiatement les dispositions et les influences du tout”; and “les fées des sources, des rivières, des champs, des bois, de la mer, des saisons, il est en dialogue perpétuel avec elles, il écoute leurs voix, qui sont ses voix.”
103. Geffroy, “Claude Monet,” L'Art et les Artistes, 52: “Mais il est avant tout l'homme de solitude, habitant de la nature plutôt que du monde social, et là-bas il était chez lui, comme il est chez lui partout avec le sol, l'eau, la verdure, les fleurs, les nuages.”
104. Octave Mirbeau, introduction to the exhibition catalog of the 1889 Monet-Rodin exhibition, reprinted in facsimile in Claude Monet–Auguste Rodin, 51: “La vie de l'air, la vie de l'eau, la vie des parfums et des lumières, insaisissable, l'invisible vie des météores, synthétisée en d'admirables hardiesses. …”
105. Octave Mirbeau, “Claude Monet,” Le Figaro, March 10, 1889, 1: “et rien n'est livré au hasard de l'inspiration, même heureuse, à la fantaisie du coup de pinceau, même génial.”
106. “You have to admire these feverish canvases, for despite their intense color and rough touch, they are so perfectly disciplined that they easily project a feeling for nature in an impression filled with grandeur,” wrote Alfred de Lostalot, “Exposition internationale de peinture et de sculpture (Galerie Georges Petit),” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 35 (June 1887): 522–27
, quoted in Tucker, Monet in the '90s, 27–28. See also Jules Desclozaux, “L'exposition internationale de peinture,” L'Estafette, May 15, 1887.107. J.-K. Huysmans, “L'exposition internationale de la rue de Sèze,” Revue Indépendante de Littérature et d'Art 3 (June 1887): 352–53
: “La sauvagerie de cette peinture vue par un oeil de cannibale déconcerte d'abord, puis devant la force qu'elle décèle, devant la foi qui l'anime, devant le souffle puissant de l'homme qui la brosse, l'on se soumet aux rébarbatifs appâts de cet art fruste.”108. Ever faithful to the ideal of “sincère and savant,” Geffroy called the Italian Primitive painters true naïf artists who attempted to render nature accurately despite their technical “gaucherie.” Plaud-Dilhuit, “Gustave Geffroy, critique d'art,” 318.
109. J.-K. Huysmans, quoted in Patrice Locmant, ed., preface to Écrits sur l'art 1867–1905, by Huysmans (Paris: Bartillat, 2006), 35
(my emphasis): “Si je pouvais atteindre un idéal en art, ce serait celui des Primitifs que je voudrais toucher, un naturalisme résolument spiritualiste.” For a discussion of Huysmans's search for a hybrid aesthetic formula that would combine Naturalism's material veracity and the demands of the soul, see also Anette Kahn, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Novelist, Poet, Art Critic (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1982). About the novel, for example, Huysmans wrote (21–22): “If possible, the novel ought to be compounded of two elements, that of the soul and that of the body, and these ought to be inextricably bound together as in life. … we must trace a parallel route in the air by which we may go above and beyond, and create in a word a spiritualist naturalism.”110. Such views may be the legacy of pronouncements such as Cézanne's famous one, “But Monet is an eye, the most prodigious eye ever since there have been painters… . [Mais Monet est un oeil, l'oeil le plus prodigieux depuis qu'il y a des peintres… .].” Cézanne, quoted in Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne (Paris: Bernheim-Jeune, 1921), 90.
111. Monet to Stéphane Mallarmé, Giverny, February 15, 1889, in W., vol. 3, no. 911, 240: “Je ne suis qu'un ignorant, complètement illettré, mais n'en suis pas moins ému.” Monet was referring to his reactions to Edgar Allan Poe's poetry, which Mallarmé had translated into French.
112. Lilla Cabot Perry, “Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909,” in Monet: A Retrospective, ed. Charles Stuckey (New York: Park Lane, 1986), 183
; and Isaacson, “Constable, Duranty, Mallarmé,” 431.113. Robert L. Herbert, “Method and Meaning in Monet,” Art in America 67 (September 1979): 90–106.
114. Monet to Alice, Belle-Île, October 26, 1886, in W., vol. 2, no. 723, 284.
115. Le Men et al., La bibliothèque de Monet, 5. Prior references to Monet's library and readings are also to be found in W., vol. 5, 1991; Marianne Alphant, Claude Monet: Une vie dans le paysage, rev. ed. (Paris: Hazan, 2010); and Tucker, Monet in the '90s. Claire Joyes, Claude Monet et Giverny (Paris: Chêne, 1984), 31
, writes that at Giverny Monet and Alice spent their evenings reading Henri de Saint-Simon's Mémoires, novels by Honoré de Balzac, the Goncourt brothers, and Tolstoy, and plays by Henrik Ibsen and Maurice Maeterlinck. Eugène Delacroix's Journal was Monet's bedside reading.116. Champa, “Monet and the Embrace of the Series,” 136. The earliest suggestion of a possible connection of Monet's serial works and Bergson's philosophy occurs, albeit as an aside, in George Heard Hamilton, “Cézanne, Bergson and the Image of Time,” College Art Journal 16, no. 1 (Autumn 1956): 2–12
. See also Tucker, Monet in the '90s, 93, who, although acknowledging the simultaneity of appearance of Bergson's writings and Monet's series, expresses doubts about Monet's possible knowledge of Bergson on the grounds that Monet's “taste in literature ran counter to the theoretical.”117. Taine is mentioned in the souvenirs of Cézanne's first biographer, Joachim Gasquet, in Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991).
118. Le Men et al., La bibliothèque de Monet, 5. See also Tucker, “Monet's Library,” 188ff.
119. Pencil marks are visible in Taine's second volume on pages 118, 147, 181–82, 183, 231, 236, 246–47, 259–60, 261, 271–72, 294, 306, 314–15, 322, 434–44, 354–55, 356, 358.
120. Geffroy's book packages arrived with remarkable frequency on Belle-Île. See Monet's letters to Alice from Belle-Île, October 18, 20, 22, 26, 28, 29 and November 2, 9, 23, 1886, in W., vol. 2, nos. 716, 718, 720, 723, 726, 728, 734, 740, 749, 756, 757. The Giverny library includes seventeen Russian novels in French translation by authors such as Maksim Gorky, Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Anton Chekhov. The lion's share went to Tolstoy, with eight novels, a literary discovery for Monet that can be credited to Geffroy. Monet's enthusiasm for Tolstoy, especially for his novel Anna Karenina, is palpable in his letters to Alice: “Tolstoi is very nice: you will probably find quite a few dreary passages, philosophico-social questions, but it's very well done, and everything is well studied and observed; one gets to see Russian life absolutely [C'est très joli Tolstoi: vous trouverez peut-être bien des longueurs, des questions philosophico-sociales, mais c'est très bien, et tout y est étudié et très observé; on voit absolument la vie russe].” Monet to Alice, Belle-Île, October 18, 1886, in W., vol. 2, no. 716, 282. Russian novels, regarded as inclined to subtle psychological and ethnographic analyses, became all the rage among Paris audiences in the 1880s, as interest for naturalist novels, such as Zola's and the Goncourts', plummeted. As a sample of such popularity, see the Revue Illustrée 1 (December 1885–May 1886), with articles on the Russian novel by Maurice Barrès (“La mode russe”) and a serialized translation of Tolstoy's “Scènes de la vie populaire en Russie.” See also the important study by E. M. de Vogüé, Le roman russe (Paris, 1886), and its analysis in Magnus Rohl, Le roman russe de Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, Stockholm Studies in the History of Literature, no. 16 (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International, 1976). On the fall from fashion of Zola and naturalist novels in the 1880s, see Jean Martino, “La réaction contre le naturalisme,” in Le naturalisme français (1870–1895) (Paris: Colin, 1923), 189–206.
121. Geffroy, “Chronique: Eugène Boudin”: “N'est-ce pas la condition suprême de la production de l'oeuvre d'art que l'artiste connaisse à fond les êtres et les choses au nom desquels il veut parler, le milieu dont il veut surprendre et exprimer la vie?”
122. The passage reads: “We have mentioned that the work of art has as its goal to reveal some essential and salient feature… . In that aim, the artist acquires his own idea about that character, and, according to this idea, he transforms the real object. In turn, the object thus transformed, matches the idea, in other words becomes ideal [Nous avons dit que l'oeuvre d'art a pour but de manifester quelque caractère essentiel et saillant. … Pour cela, l'artiste se forme l'idée de ce caractère, et d'après son idée, il transforme l'objet réel. Cet objet, ainsi transformé, se trouve conforme à l'idée, en d'autres termes idéal].” Taine, Philosophie de l'art, vol. 2, 259–60.
123. Trebuchet, Promenades à Belle-Isle-en-Mer, 75.
124. Geffroy, “Les paysages d'eau ou les nymphéas” (1909), reprinted in Geffroy, “Claude Monet,” L'Art et les Artistes, n.s., 11 (November 1920): 53: “Nous avons gardé tous deux à travers la vie, le souvenir des heures passées dans cette région sauvage, presque solitaire, et ce fut ainsi que naquit une amitié qui ne s'est pas démenti depuis. …”
125. Monet to Geffroy, Giverny, April 15, 1901, in W., vol. 4, 1985, no. 1632, 358: “Je serais aussi enchanté de vous montrer la quantité d'études, pochades, essais de toute sorte que j'ai rapportés, et d'avoir votre impression.”
126. Monet to Geffroy, Giverny, June 4, 1904, in W., vol. 5, no. 1732, 366: “Certes la presse me comble cette fois avec exaggération d'éloges … mais vos compliments à vous, j'y suis sensible … et vous remercie de ce bel article ajouté à tant d'autres.” The article discussed Monet's London views exhibited at Durand-Ruel's in May 1904.
127. Geffroy, trans. in Stuckey, Monet: A Retrospective, 165.
128. Geffroy, La vie artistique, vol. 6, 169.
129. Geffroy, “Les paysages d'eau,” 81.
130. Monet to Geffroy, Giverny, June 1, 1909, in W., vol. 5, no. 1892, 376 (my emphasis): “J'ai lu votre article sur mon exposition. Je vous en remercie. C'est toujours vous qui dites le mieux ce qu'il y a à dire et ce m'est toujours un plaisir d'être louangé par vous.”
131. Monet, quoted in Roger Marx, “Les Nymphéas de M. Claude Monet,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 43 (June 1909): 527–28
: “c'est pour avoir retrouvé et laissé prédominer les forces intuitives et secrètes que j'ai pu m'identifier avec la création et m'absorber en elle… .”; and “le don, l'abandon integral de moi.” However, Marx registered Monet's angry reaction to being described as a “visionary,” most likely because of the Symbolist associations of that term, which he, as a painter committed to nature's realities, abhorred (530): “What kind of demon of the ideal torments you, and why should you accuse me of being a visionary? [Quel démon d'idéal vous tourmente, et à quoi bon me taxer de visionnaire?].” Monet's rejection of Symbolism and its exponents matches Geffroy's distaste for that movement. Though often using language peppered with pantheistic and universalist overtones, Geffroy repeatedly expressed his distaste for Symbolism's mysticism, metaphysics, and evocations of imaginary, visionary realms. He remained a stolid supporter of Impressionism, whose foremost loyalty to nature he (and Monet) shared. See Christian Limousin, introduction to Paul Cézanne et autres textes, by Gustave Geffroy, “Carré d'art” (Paris: Séguier, 1995), 13–15 , for a discerning rebuttal of the Symbolist label applied to Geffroy. Also, Paradise, Gustave Geffroy and the Criticism of Painting, states Geffroy's “lack of sympathy for Symbolism” (70–71) and acknowledges the critic's uncomfortable fit with either Naturalist or Symbolist denominations (xiv). Awareness of Geffroy's (and Monet's) alignment with the period's hybrid Spiritualist Positivist worldview—as it is argued here—will, it is hoped, dispel such misrepresentations of both the critic and late Monet as Symbolists.132. Monet to Geffroy, Giverny, January 16, 1900, in W., vol. 4, no. 1494, 340: “Ce n'est pas un merveilleux cadeau que je vous fais là, mais ce sera pour vous un souvenir de notre rencontre à Belle-Île. …” The painting is no. 1096, Bloc de rochers à Port Goulphar, in Daniel Wildenstein, The Triumph of Impressionism: Claude Monet; Biography and Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 3, (Cologne: Taschen-Wildenstein Institute, 1996), 416.
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Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer
Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Professor Emerita of art history at the University of Delaware, is the author of books and articles on nineteenth-century French art and culture, including Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture (2003) and Théodore Géricault (2010) [Department of Art History, University of Delaware, Newark, Del. 19716, [email protected]].