Artists, like no one else, understand the importance of lighting for the correct perception of the picture of the world. When choosing the place and time of writing their works, authors, first of all, take into account what the light will be like. Claude Monet was one of the first who began to treat light as the main character of his canvases. In the period from 1892 to 1895, the artist worked on a large series of paintings dedicated to Rouen Cathedral. Monet painted more than 20 paintings dedicated to the Rouen Cathedral, according to some sources there are about 50, but only 15 of them are now on display in various museums. All of them are made in the same format.
The artist specially rented housing in the house opposite famous cathedral in order to be able to constantly observe and preserve on canvases the fleeting states of the light mood of nature, to convey barely noticeable halftones of color. The author's brilliant idea was to show the same view in different times years, days, under different weather conditions, try to catch the slightest nuances in changes in color and light.
Claude Monet immortalized the appearance of the Rouen Cathedral, which became a symbol of France, without giving special significance his architectural features. In this series we see the same object, but not the same image. The artist was interested, first of all, in how light, the most great artist, plays with color reflexes on the stone when different angles the refraction of the sun's rays, how it colors pale walls violet-blue on a foggy winter morning, honey-golden at noon and. Only Monet could transform a huge mass of limestone into a pure vibration of light. The building is completely transformed, becoming the stage for a wonderful light show.
Claude Monet himself wanted the paintings of this cycle to be sold not one at a time, but as a whole series. Therefore, they were first presented to the general public only in May 1895 at the Durand-Ruel Gallery. Twenty of them were put on display for the audience to judge. large number paintings dedicated to Rouen Cathedral. The exhibition was a great success.
The paintings occupied the entire hall, and Monet himself approved the order of their arrangement. The viewing opened with a gray series - a dark mass that gradually became lighter and lighter, smoothly turning into white. Then the play of light and color gradually intensifies, moving from a faint flicker to brighter shimmer. The culmination was the canvases of the rainbow series, the most extraordinary in their expression and expressiveness. This performance ended with a calm blue series, where the light gradually softens and melts, like a heavenly vision.
Against Monet's wishes, the paintings from the Rouen Cathedral series were sold to different persons, and today they can be found in museums in France, Germany, Japan, the United States and Russia. In the Museum. Pushkin in Moscow, two paintings from this series “Rouen Cathedral at noon” and “Rouen Cathedral in the evening” are exhibited.
On the Internet this series with brief description on English you can look, for example, .
“Imagine a room on the walls of which paintings are hung in a sequence that reproduces the changes in objects depending on changes in light: first a gray series - a huge dark mass that gradually becomes lighter and lighter, then a white series, imperceptibly moving from a faint flicker to an ever-increasing the play of light, culminating in the flashes of the rainbow series, and then the blue series, where the light again softens into blue, melting like a bright heavenly vision. The colors are permeated with black, gray, white, blue, red light - all its shades. These twenty paintings are hung, they seem to us like twenty discoveries, but I am afraid that the close connection that unites them will elude the viewer if he does not pay enough attention to them.” Thus, in the article “The Revolution of the Cathedrals”, the future Prime Minister of France Georges Clemenceau described the exhibition at which Claude Monet presented to the public a series of paintings “Rouen Cathedral”. 
Rouen Cathedral. Postcard from 1881
This is the view from Monet's studio
Rouen Cathedral
Modern photo from Wikipedia, as during my trips to Rouen in 2012 and 2015
The facade was restored and was partially closed (.
Monet spent many years preparing for this exhibition, which took place in May 1895 at the Parisian gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel. Creating series of paintings that are interconnected and complementary to one another has occupied the artist for a long time. In the cycles "Gare Saint-Lazare" (1877), "Haystacks" (1890 - 1891), "Poplars" (1891), Monet repeatedly depicted similar subjects in different lighting and weather conditions, moving more and more decisively from a single landscape or a group of thematically similar ones landscapes to the united general plan series. However, if in his first series Monet still paid tribute to tradition, changing the point of view and composition, then in the series “Rouen Cathedral” he proposed a truly revolutionary solution: all the paintings depict, with very minor variations, the same thing - a fragment of the western facade of the famous gothic cathedral in Rouen.
Fragment of the western facade of Rouen Cathedral
Why did Monet choose this subject? Other critics try to justify the artist’s choice with an interest in gothic architecture, which arose in France at the end of the century in the wake of national revival, but this explanation can hardly be accepted. The greatness of the Gothic was not reflected in any way in Monet’s paintings: for him, an architectural masterpiece and a haystack were equally interesting. Light stone, the play of light and shadow, carved lace - all this became for the artist an ideal “screen” on which the changes taking place in nature day after day, from dawn to dusk, were reflected.
Left: house on Cathedral Square(formerly Levi's store, now a tourist office),
in which Monet rented one of his Rouen workshops
Work on "Cathedrals" took more than two years. The first two paintings, which date back to the beginning of February 1892, stand apart in the series - judging by the angle, the artist painted them on the square, located to the north-west of the cathedral. Monet worked on the following canvases, created from February to April of the same year, in a specially rented apartment opposite the cathedral, converted into a workshop. From a window on the second floor, the artist watched the façade of the cathedral day after day, working simultaneously on several canvases. He took the unfinished canvases home to Giverny and continued to improve them from memory, and in 1893 he repeated everything all over again - he arrived in Rouen in February, rented an apartment, now in another house, and until April he painted the cathedral from the window. The last six works were created in the third apartment, into which the artist moved for purely domestic reasons. This explains the minor compositional differences between the canvases of the series and once again proves the randomness of the composition of the paintings. The series was finally completed only in 1894 in Giverny.
Third from the left is the window of Monet's studio
The work, as grandiose as the Rouen Cathedral itself, exhausted Monet. He rewrote his canvases many times, destroyed them in despair, and started again (which explains the conflicting information about total number paintings, from 28 to 40, counting sketches). His letters from Rouen to his wife and friends are full of complaints and doubts: “I’m broken, I can’t take it anymore /.../ My nights are full of nightmares: the cathedral is falling on my head, it seems blue, pink, yellow.” “I work so hard that I’m close to a stroke from fatigue.” "I can't think of anything but the cathedral." "I am completely confused and dissatisfied with what I did here. I aimed too high, but it seems I overdid it, ruining what was good. I have not been able to work for four days now and have decided to quit everything and return home. I won’t even packing up my canvases - I don’t want to see them, at least for a while. , the fourth dimension is time.
Rouen Cathedral. Symphony of blue and pink
There is a legend (supposedly, this is the memory of Monet himself) about how the very idea of the series arose. Once the artist was painting en plein air, but the lighting had changed so much that he could not continue the canvas he had started. Monet asked to bring a new canvas from home, but soon the lighting changed again, and he was forced to start working on another canvas, and so on, until the series was completed.
Facade of Rouen Cathedral
Of course, Monet's interest in the series had various reasons - in particular, we must not forget about his passion Japanese art and the famous graphic series of Hokusai. Nevertheless, this anecdote accurately reflects the contradiction that Impressionism inevitably encountered in its logical development, and which Monet sought to resolve in the series. The feeling of the constant variability of the world, the uniqueness of every moment, characteristic of the impressionists, led to the idea that a static object of painting, independent of the surrounding light-air environment, does not exist at all. And if the artist’s task is to capture a series of light effects, then this is possible not in a single canvas, but in a series. A series of paintings takes on a dramaturgy suggested to the artist by nature itself; the plot chosen by the author dynamically changes and develops over time. That is why it was so important for Monet to arrange the works in a strict sequence: only with such a presentation of the moments captured on each of the canvases was a temporal extension formed.
West façade at noon
At the same time, the motif itself, repeated from picture to picture, is no longer as important as its metamorphoses. The central “character” of the series is not the cathedral, but the light: changing before our eyes, the pearlescent-iridescent walls dematerialize, dissolving, like a mirage, in a light-air environment. “The older I get, the more I realize that I must work to reproduce what I am looking for: the instantaneous effect of atmosphere on things and the light diffused throughout everything,” wrote Claude Monet in 1891. He did not like to theorize (“I always hated those terrible theories”) and expressed his creative aspirations in three words: “I seek the impossible.” In this search for the impossible, in the painful pursuit of the moment, Monet spent the years devoted to the “Rouen Cathedral” series, which, according to critics, became the quintessence of impressionism.
Evening. Harmony in brown
When Monet finally considered the series complete and presented it to the public, the times of misunderstanding and ridicule of the Impressionists had already passed. Monet's works - including those from the series preceding the Cathedrals - sold well, and even before the opening of the exhibition, eight Cathedrals were sold. The twenty paintings in the series included in the exhibition were received favorably by fellow artists and critics, although Monet was reproached for being too enthusiastic technical methods, and his canvases were compared to “the view through the curtain.”
Rouen Cathedral in the evening
However, Monet’s desire, who saw the series as a single work, not to separate the paintings, did not come true - there was no buyer ready to purchase all twenty canvases, each of which was valued at 15,000 francs. Against the will of the author, “Cathedrals” were sold to various buyers, and today paintings from the series adorn museum and private collections in many countries. Only a hundred years after the end of the series, in May 1994, seventeen “Cathedrals” met briefly in Rouen, at an exhibition in the city museum fine arts. But the scattered series “Rouen Cathedral” also became one of the most notable artistic phenomena the end of the 19th century, was ahead of its time and connected two centuries. "Oh, those cathedrals of his!" - the heroine exclaims enthusiastically
Marcel Proust's novel Sodom and Gomorrah (1921).
West façade and Saint-Romain Tower
Monet, the last of the Impressionists, is called the harbinger of abstract art. “Forget about what you see in front of you, be it a tree, a house or a field, just tell yourself: here is a small blue square, here is a pink rectangle, here is a yellow stripe, and draw not objects, but their color components,” these words Monet is perceived as a parting word not only to the artist’s contemporaries, but also to future abstractionists.
Claude Monet. Water lilies. Fragment. 1917-1920
It is symbolic that in the same 1895, when “Cathedrals” was exhibited at Durand-Ruel, an exhibition of impressionists was held in Moscow, at which thirty-year-old Wassily Kandinsky saw Monet’s painting “Haystacks,” which became the first step on his path to abstractionism. “...Deep under the consciousness, the subject was discredited as a necessary element of the picture,” Kandinsky conveyed his impression of “Stacks” in the book “Steps” (1913). Kandinsky’s words echo the discussion about Monet’s “Cathedrals” by another pioneer of non-figurative art, Kazimir Malevich: “It’s not a cathedral that is needed, but painting, and where and from what it was taken is not important to us, just as it doesn’t matter from which shell the pearls were chosen” (“ On new systems in art", 1919).
Painting by Jackson Pollock
Abstract art is usually associated with later creativity Monet, and above all - works from the grandiose series "Water Lilies": individual fragments of these works could, it seems, be painted by a representative of abstract expressionism - Jackson Pollock or Andre Masson. But in this sense, “Cathedrals” cannot be underestimated. After all, it was in “Cathedrals” that the artist most consistently declared the secondary nature of the object in relation to the actual pictorial effects. Even the names of individual works in the “Cathedrals” series bring us closer to non-objective art: “Brown Harmony”, “Harmony of Blue and Gold”, “Symphony of Gray and Pink”.
Roy Lichtenstein. Rouen Cathedral. 1969
Monet, who introduced fine arts the very concept of the series inspired one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Roy Lichtenstein, a representative of the opposite direction to abstractionism - pop art. Lichtenstein paid tribute to Monet in his own version of the Rouen Cathedral series (1969). By superimposing his “signature” typographic raster onto three works by Monet and thereby placing them in context popular culture, he emphasized the enduring greatness of Monet's painting.
Photo: http://www.tendanceouest.com/print.php?id=77008
And finally, Monet’s work on the “Rouen Cathedral” series itself is reminiscent of a modern performance: imagine how, day after day, month after month, he sits by the window in front of several easels and, hiding from the gaze of street onlookers, paints a cathedral, a cathedral, a cathedral... The master would probably have liked what can be seen today from this historical window: annual laser shows fabulously transform the walls of the ancient Rouen Cathedral, and along the façade that Monet immortalized, his paintings float - haystacks, water lilies in a pond, fields of red poppies, sea rocks, lady with an umbrella, garden in Giverny...
Laser show "Paintings by Monet" on the facade of Rouen Cathedral. 2014
photo: http://www.tendanceouest.com/print.php?id=77008
It seems that Monet would have approved of the action that took place in front of the Rouen town hall in June 2010: here, on square six hundred square meters, 1,250 people gathered, and each of them held in their hands an enlarged fragment of a painting from the “Rouen Cathedral” series. The "living picture" was photographed and filmed from a helicopter to provide evidence for the Guinness Book of World Records.
Rouen, action "Rouen Cathedral", 2010
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name “Rouen Cathedral”? Many people think that this is a majestic architectural heritage, but it is also a series of paintings famous artist Claude Monet.
A little about the history of Rouen Cathedral itself. Construction began in 1145 and ended in 1506. For a long time (from 1876 to 1880) it was the most tall building in the world, 151 meters long. The cathedral suffered the most during World War II; it was hit by 7 bombs. Now it is the hallmark of Rouen and a favorite place of inspiration for all artists.
First opinion
Monet first visited Rouen in 1892 and was delighted with the pomp and decoration of the cathedral. Then he began to paint the first paintings from the cycle, and there are about 30 of them in total. The idea was to show every vibration of light, the reflection of the day on the facade, the influence of weather conditions on the details. He brought the temple into the history of modern impressionist art. Playing with objects, the maestro created a lot of new images. Admired, he borrowed the play of the sun's rays and captured every detail, be it pale walls under the influence of a foggy gray haze, golden-amber facades at the peak of the midday heat or the multifaceted glow of stained glass windows.
But different views on the same subject at different moments and at different times in different light were not new to him. Indeed, in 1891, he had already created a similar series of 15 paintings, where he depicted a haystack lying on the outskirts of the city of Giverny. And here he showed restraint by showing the hay under the summer sun, in winter and spring, at sunrise and sunset.
Many people ask the question: “Why this particular plot?” But the idea that Gothic architecture was very interesting and fascinating to the artist is incorrect. After all, for Monet, a simple stone and a haystack and a cathedral had the same weight in terms of artistic heritage.
When my friends and I were just planning our trip and making a list of places we wanted to visit, I had three wishes. Firstly, I wanted to get to the English Channel coast in northern France. I don’t know exactly why... perhaps I secretly hoped to see England from there :) The second goal was Marseille, which Luke and I had already been to last year, but only a few hours away. I was left with the impression that I was looking at this city through a keyhole - but I wanted more. And finally, another must see on my list was Rouen. Because of all the artists I love the impressionists most, and of all the impressionists - Claude Monet. And coming to the Museum of Fine Arts. Pushkin in Moscow, I can stand in front of this picture for a long time.
Monet created a whole series of paintings depicting the Rouen Cathedral - 28 paintings are known. In these paintings, the cathedral appears before us at different times of the day, under different lighting, in different climatic conditions. Over the course of two years, Monet repeatedly came to Rouen and made sketches, which he then finalized in his workshop in Giverny. In February 1892, Monet rented a small room in a house opposite the cathedral, where the tourist office is now located. Monet protected the secret of the creation of the series even from his friends, so he lived incognito in Rouen. It is believed that it was in this room that he painted the western façade of the cathedral. However, looking at the paintings, you understand that the artist painted, of course, not from the second floor of the building opposite the cathedral, but from a slightly different angle - slightly to the right of the cathedral.
By the way, when comparing the paintings with our photographs, we noticed another curious detail - that during the restoration process it was disassembled - I hope that with good intentions- pointed gable above the central portal of the cathedral.
Rouen Cathedral - which, like many French cathedrals, is called Notre Dame - was built in the 12th century on the foundations of a 4th-century basilica. In 841 it was completely destroyed by the Vikings. In 911, Rouen became the capital of the Duchy of Normandy, and the first Duke Rollo was baptized here. Around 1020, work begins on a new cathedral in the Romanesque style. At present, only the crypt remains from it. The entire remaining cathedral was built in gothic style.
In the 15th century, a majestic tower on the western facade was built - the so-called Butter Tower. The name of the tower arose from the fact that the tower was partially built with funds donated by the citizens of the city in exchange for permission to eat butter during Lent. However, according to a more prosaic version, the Butter Tower is called because of its cream color.
In the choir of the cathedral, the tombs of the Norman dukes are preserved, among which lies Rollo, the creator of the dukedom in 911. The heart of Richard the Lionheart, King of England and Duke of Normandy, is also buried here.
If we return to the conversation about painting, it should be noted that not only Monet worked in the capital of Normandy - Rouen also served as a source of inspiration for Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Gauguin. The city that Pissaro called “as beautiful as Venice” became one of the most significant characters impressionism. To see this, you need to visit the Museum of Fine Arts. Of course, the most famous works Impressionist paintings are kept in Paris, but the Rouen Museum also boasts an exceptional collection of artistic paintings.
One of the first to be fascinated by the Impressionist painting style was François Deupault, a Rouen businessman as we would now call him. In 1909 he bought and donated to the Rouen Museum of Fine Arts about sixty early works impressionists. Thanks to this gift, the city is ranked among the world's great treasuries in this direction of painting.
I especially remember this small work by Sisley - one of winter species the town of Marly, which we visited just a few days ago.
Of course, in the Museum of Fine Arts you can see not only impressionists - the collection includes works by Caravaggio, Velazquez, Delacroix, and Géricault. There are halls dedicated contemporary art. And in general, this museum seemed to us extremely cozy and pleasant.
“Imagine a room on the walls of which paintings are hung in a sequence that reproduces the changes in objects depending on changes in light: first a gray series - a huge dark mass that gradually becomes lighter and lighter, then a white series, imperceptibly moving from a faint flicker to an ever-increasing the play of light, culminating in the flashes of the rainbow series, and then the blue series, where the light again softens into blue, melting like a bright heavenly vision. The colors are permeated with black, gray, white, blue, red light - all its shades. These twenty paintings are hung, they seem to us like twenty discoveries, but I am afraid that the close connection that unites them will elude the viewer if he does not pay enough attention to them.” Thus, in the article “The Revolution of the Cathedrals”, the future Prime Minister of France Georges Clemenceau described the exhibition at which Claude Monet presented to the public a series of paintings “Rouen Cathedral”.
Rouen Cathedral. Postcard from 1881
This is the view from Monet's studio
Rouen Cathedral
Modern photo from Wikipedia, as during my trips to Rouen in 2012 and 2015
The facade was restored and was partially closed (.
Monet spent many years preparing for this exhibition, which took place in May 1895 at the Parisian gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel. Creating series of paintings that are interconnected and complementary to one another has occupied the artist for a long time. In the cycles "Gare Saint-Lazare" (1877), "Haystacks" (1890 - 1891), "Poplars" (1891), Monet repeatedly depicted similar subjects in different lighting and weather conditions, moving more and more decisively from a single landscape or a group of thematically similar ones landscapes to a series united by a common concept. However, if in his first series Monet still paid tribute to tradition, changing the point of view and composition, then in the series “Rouen Cathedral” he proposed a truly revolutionary solution: all the paintings depict, with very minor variations, the same thing - a fragment of the western facade of the famous Gothic cathedral in Rouen.
Fragment of the western facade of Rouen Cathedral
Why did Monet choose this subject? Other critics try to justify the artist’s choice by interest in Gothic architecture, which arose in France at the end of the century on the wave of national revival, but this explanation can hardly be accepted. The greatness of the Gothic was not reflected in any way in Monet’s paintings: for him, an architectural masterpiece and a haystack were equally interesting. Light stone, the play of light and shadow, carved lace - all this became for the artist an ideal “screen” on which the changes taking place in nature day after day, from dawn to dusk, were reflected.
Left: house on Cathedral Square (former Levi's store, now a tourist office),
in which Monet rented one of his Rouen workshops
Work on "Cathedrals" took more than two years. The first two paintings, which date back to the beginning of February 1892, stand apart in the series - judging by the angle, the artist painted them on the square, located to the north-west of the cathedral. Monet worked on the following canvases, created from February to April of the same year, in a specially rented apartment opposite the cathedral, converted into a workshop. From a window on the second floor, the artist watched the façade of the cathedral day after day, working simultaneously on several canvases. He took the unfinished canvases home to Giverny and continued to improve them from memory, and in 1893 he repeated everything all over again - he arrived in Rouen in February, rented an apartment, now in another house, and until April he painted the cathedral from the window. The last six works were created in the third apartment, into which the artist moved for purely domestic reasons. This explains the minor compositional differences between the canvases of the series and once again proves the randomness of the composition of the paintings. The series was finally completed only in 1894 in Giverny.
Third from the left is the window of Monet's studio
The work, as grandiose as the Rouen Cathedral itself, exhausted Monet. He rewrote canvases many times, destroyed them in frustration, and started again (which explains the conflicting information about the total number of paintings, from 28 to 40, including sketches). His letters from Rouen to his wife and friends are full of complaints and doubts: “I’m broken, I can’t take it anymore /.../ My nights are full of nightmares: the cathedral is falling on my head, it seems blue, pink, yellow.” “I work so hard that I’m close to a stroke from fatigue.” "I can't think of anything but the cathedral." "I am completely confused and dissatisfied with what I did here. I aimed too high, but it seems I overdid it, ruining what was good. I have not been able to work for four days now and have decided to quit everything and return home. I won’t even packing up my canvases - I don’t want to see them, at least for a while. , the fourth dimension is time.
Rouen Cathedral. Symphony of blue and pink
There is a legend (supposedly, this is the memory of Monet himself) about how the very idea of the series arose. Once the artist was painting en plein air, but the lighting had changed so much that he could not continue the canvas he had started. Monet asked to bring a new canvas from home, but soon the lighting changed again, and he was forced to start working on another canvas, and so on, until the series was completed.
Facade of Rouen Cathedral
Of course, Monet's interest in the series had various reasons - in particular, we must not forget about his passion for Japanese art and the famous graphic series of Hokusai. Nevertheless, this anecdote accurately reflects the contradiction that Impressionism inevitably encountered in its logical development, and which Monet sought to resolve in the series. The feeling of the constant variability of the world, the uniqueness of every moment, characteristic of the impressionists, led to the idea that a static object of painting, independent of the surrounding light-air environment, does not exist at all. And if the artist’s task is to capture a series of light effects, then this is possible not in a single canvas, but in a series. A series of paintings takes on a dramaturgy suggested to the artist by nature itself; the plot chosen by the author dynamically changes and develops over time. That is why it was so important for Monet to arrange the works in a strict sequence: only with such a presentation of the moments captured on each of the canvases was a temporal extension formed.
West façade at noon
At the same time, the motif itself, repeated from picture to picture, is no longer as important as its metamorphoses. The central “character” of the series is not the cathedral, but the light: changing before our eyes, the pearlescent-iridescent walls dematerialize, dissolving, like a mirage, in a light-air environment. “The older I get, the more I realize that I must work to reproduce what I am looking for: the instantaneous effect of atmosphere on things and the light diffused throughout everything,” wrote Claude Monet in 1891. He did not like to theorize (“I always hated those terrible theories”) and expressed his creative aspirations in three words: “I seek the impossible.” In this search for the impossible, in the painful pursuit of the moment, Monet spent the years devoted to the “Rouen Cathedral” series, which, according to critics, became the quintessence of impressionism.
Evening. Harmony in brown
When Monet finally considered the series complete and presented it to the public, the times of misunderstanding and ridicule of the Impressionists had already passed. Monet's works - including those from the series preceding the Cathedrals - sold well, and even before the opening of the exhibition, eight Cathedrals were sold. The twenty paintings in the series included in the exhibition were received favorably by fellow artists and critics, although Monet was reproached for being too enthusiastic about technical techniques, and his canvases were compared to “the view through a curtain.”
Rouen Cathedral in the evening
However, Monet’s desire, who saw the series as a single work, not to separate the paintings, did not come true - there was no buyer ready to purchase all twenty canvases, each of which was valued at 15,000 francs. Against the will of the author, “Cathedrals” were sold to various buyers, and today paintings from the series adorn museum and private collections in many countries. Only a hundred years after the end of the series, in May 1994, seventeen “Cathedrals” met briefly in Rouen, at an exhibition in the city's Museum of Fine Arts. But the disparate series “Rouen Cathedral” became one of the most notable artistic phenomena of the late 19th century, ahead of its time and connecting two centuries. "Oh, those cathedrals of his!" - the heroine exclaims enthusiastically
Marcel Proust's novel Sodom and Gomorrah (1921).
West façade and Saint-Romain Tower
Monet, the last of the Impressionists, is called the harbinger of abstract art. “Forget about what you see in front of you, be it a tree, a house or a field, just tell yourself: here is a small blue square, here is a pink rectangle, here is a yellow stripe, and draw not objects, but their color components,” these words Monet is perceived as a parting word not only to the artist’s contemporaries, but also to future abstractionists.
Claude Monet. Water lilies. Fragment. 1917-1920
It is symbolic that in the same 1895, when “Cathedrals” was exhibited at Durand-Ruel, an exhibition of impressionists was held in Moscow, at which thirty-year-old Wassily Kandinsky saw Monet’s painting “Haystacks,” which became the first step on his path to abstractionism. “...Deep under the consciousness, the subject was discredited as a necessary element of the picture,” Kandinsky conveyed his impression of “Stacks” in the book “Steps” (1913). Kandinsky’s words echo the discussion about Monet’s “Cathedrals” by another pioneer of non-figurative art, Kazimir Malevich: “It’s not a cathedral that is needed, but painting, and where and from what it was taken is not important to us, just as it doesn’t matter from which shell the pearls were chosen” (“ On new systems in art", 1919).
Painting by Jackson Pollock
Monet's later work is usually associated with abstractionism, and above all, works from the grandiose series "Water Lilies": individual fragments of these works could, it seems, be painted by a representative of abstract expressionism - Jackson Pollock or Andre Masson. But in this sense, “Cathedrals” cannot be underestimated. After all, it was in “Cathedrals” that the artist most consistently declared the secondary nature of the object in relation to the actual pictorial effects. Even the names of individual works in the “Cathedrals” series bring us closer to non-objective art: “Brown Harmony”, “Harmony of Blue and Gold”, “Symphony of Gray and Pink”.
Roy Lichtenstein. Rouen Cathedral. 1969
Monet, who introduced the very concept of series into fine art, inspired one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Roy Lichtenstein, a representative of the opposite direction to abstractionism - pop art. Lichtenstein paid tribute to Monet in his own version of the Rouen Cathedral series (1969). By overlaying three of Monet's works with his signature typographic screen and thereby placing them in the context of popular culture, he emphasized the enduring greatness of Monet's painting.
Photo: http://www.tendanceouest.com/print.php?id=77008
And finally, Monet’s work on the “Rouen Cathedral” series itself is reminiscent of a modern performance: imagine how, day after day, month after month, he sits by the window in front of several easels and, hiding from the gaze of street onlookers, paints a cathedral, a cathedral, a cathedral... The master would probably have liked what can be seen today from this historical window: annual laser shows fabulously transform the walls of the ancient Rouen Cathedral, and along the façade that Monet immortalized, his paintings float - haystacks, water lilies in a pond, fields of red poppies, sea rocks, lady with an umbrella, garden in Giverny...
Laser show "Paintings by Monet" on the facade of Rouen Cathedral. 2014
photo: http://www.tendanceouest.com/print.php?id=77008
It seems that Monet would have approved of the action that took place in front of the Rouen town hall in June 2010: here, on an area of six hundred square meters, 1,250 people gathered, and each of them held in their hands an enlarged fragment of a painting from the “Rouen Cathedral” series. The "living picture" was photographed and filmed from a helicopter to provide evidence for the Guinness Book of World Records.
Rouen, action "Rouen Cathedral", 2010
Published in the magazine "Partner" (Dortmund), No. 1, 2016
Original taken from marinagra
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