Monet : The Rouen Cathedral 1892
Monet started work on The Rouen Cathedral series in 1892 which took over a year to complete. Monet rented a room across from the cathedral which acted as his studio during this time. Approximately 30 paintings of the cathedral were painting throughout the year but only a select few were exhibitioned at a later date. Amongst some of the more practical difficulties that Monet faced would be the commitment of such a long term project and the resources to fund this exercise. According to the Art Wolf Online Art Magazine, Monet would work on various canvasses simultaneously and seemed more interested in how light affected the conditions around the cathedral throughout the year and not so much the cathedral itself. By experimenting with different luminances and climate conditions, the cathedral lost its architectural prowess and detail in Monet's paintings.
This lead me to look into how repetition of painting the same scene could become habit forming to a point of obsession. In the research paper Monet's Series: Repetition, Obsession By Steven Z. Levine (1986) he talks about how Monet could be seen to always trying to better himself with each painting, an admission he made himself to Alice Hoschede in 1884 by saying " it always seemed to me that in the beginning again I will do better" and how Monet would get lured into repeating previous efforts. Furthermore in The Encyclopedia of Impressionism (1997), Michael Howard writes "the pictures gave him intense difficulties, which threw him into despair. He had vivid nightmares of the cathedral in various colors, pink, blue and yellow, falling upon him". It just seems to me that it would take a strong person to emotionally detach themselves from an art project on such a grand scale. living and breathing it with no rest period topped with a perfectist trait that is always trying to improve.
Paul Cézanne : Mont Sainte-Victoire 1885–1887
Sharing some similarity. Picasso said of Cezanne,“He was my sole and only one teacher, He was the mother of all of us” where Picasso was not traditionally known for landscape work, the opposite can be said for Cézanne, who painted Mount Sainte-Victoire in Aix-en-Provence often. But unlike Monet, who painted quite similar pieces in series, in terms of the subject matter, Cezanne incorporated various types of vegetation within his series. His cubist approach also allowed him to see shapes in the natural forms of the landscape, using triangles, squares, diamonds and circles of different sizes to show perspective.
Below is the series work of Camille Pissarro, a Danish-French Impressionist who was interested in the human figure as a compliment to his landscape work, as he always seeked to find the " perfect method of expressing himself and his ideas" throughout his long career. From the off, thinking about how Pissarro would tackle a Series, unlike Monet, his subject was in constant movement, in that humans were just as important to him. This is quite evident in the many pictures of The Boulevard Montmartre where it could be argued that the scene would constantly be in transit, and if I were to put myself in Pissarro's place, I would feel that that too some extent, never fully understanding the composition in a way that Monet knew the the Rouen Cathedral, the reverse of this is that Pissarro had the option to just focus on the Boulevard and not the movement of traffic but chose not too. I have to say, there is a certain charm and humanity about Pissarro's Boulevard that would be sorely missed without the moving traffic and his series work would not have seemed quite so repetitive given the different types of people passing through.
Pissarro - The Boulevard Montmartre 1897
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/monet/rouen/
http://www.theartwolf.com/landscapes/cezanne-montagne-sainte-victoire.htm
http://mary-adam.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/picassos-landscaprs.html
http://www.jstor.org Monet's Series: Repetition, Obsession, Steven Z. Levine October Vol. 37, (Summer, 1986), pp. 65-75
http://www.degas-painting.info/impresionists/camille_pissarro_style_technique.htm
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