Monet’s Vétheuil in Winter

OLAFUR ELIASSON

Claude Monet in front of his Water Lilies paintings in his studio at Giverny Gelatin silver print by Henri Manuel, 1920

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imagination, I try to intuit how my lived body relates to the water lilies and how they, in turn, make me turn my gaze inward to understand how I relate to that same lived body. The paintings take place in between these axes of perception and reflection.

Monet painted his Orangerie water lilies right after World War I. Did he hope to denumbify viewers who were marked by recent memories of war? To resensitize them to the ephemeral changes of daylight and landscapes? The paintings cycle through the different times of day, and you, as an embodied viewer, can leap across time zones, speed up the passing of the hours, by walking alongside the artworks, from sunrise to sunset, entering a multidimensional mode of looking/perceiving/moving/reflecting in a critique of how central perspective and orthogonal lines organize space.

In my own work, I welcome the fuzziness of the passing of time, the blurring of dimensions—not as a loss of control or binary opposition to metric, clearly parsed activities, but as an untelling of the modern grid, a welcoming

A SPACE WITHOUT BEGINNING AND END

of the presence of the body and the work the body does. In 2021, the water lilies and their radical spatial organization came back to me when I made Your ocular relief, a large-scale curved projection first shown in New York, at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. The artwork emerges in slow transformations of colored light filtered through leftover lenses, mirrors, color-effect filters, and prisms. Visitors to the gallery would stand still and watch attentively, as if in a cinema, or else move along the curve. For me, the best way to experience any work of art is with an awareness of the sensorimotor activities involved in meeting up with that artwork.

Vétheuil in Winter, painted by Monet long before the Orangerie series, is the mark of an artist on a journey from figurative painting—which he never fully left—toward abstraction. The layer of snow erases the details of the

Olafur Eliasson, Your ocular relief, 2021 Projection screen, aluminum stands, LED projectors with optical components, lens enclosures with integrated motors, electrical ballasts, control units Dimensions variable Private collection

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Fig. 2 Claude Monet The Studio-Boat, 1874 Oil on canvas 193⁄4 × 253⁄4 in. (50.2 × 65.5 cm) Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

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With no family money to fall back on, Monet was dependent on the sale of his canvases and the generosity of his wealthier artist friends. In the early 1870s, Durand-Ruel stepped in to represent him and his fellow painters, introducing their work to the public and obtaining high prices for their paintings. Through his dealings with Durand-Ruel, Monet experienced a brief period of prosperity. By 1874, however, the dealer, beset by financial problems, was no longer able to purchase the work of the young painters, although he continued to lend his support by organizing exhibitions for them.

Into this breach stepped Ernest Hoschedé, who would exert a major influence on Monet’s career and life, especially during his Vétheuil period.11 The son of a wealthy Parisian department-store owner and art collector, Hoschedé took over the family business in 1867, although his primary occupation was pursuing his interest in the movement of modern art then taking shape. He befriended the leading young artists and began speculating in their work, spending without restraint after his father’s death in 1874.12 In addition to paintings by Monet, Hoschedé bought works by Eugène Boudin, Gustave

MONET’S VÉTHEUIL IN WINTER

Courbet, Edgar Degas, Johan Barthold Jongkind, and Camille Pissarro and placed them on the market in January of 1874, giving the artists exposure just before they began to organize independent exhibitions of their work.13 A year earlier, Monet had banded together with Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, and others to form an artistic corporation, the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc., for the purpose of holding exhibitions of their own work, both in defiance of and in opposition to the official Salon. (In fact, some of the artists argued for prohibiting submissions to the Salon the same year.14) Eight artist-organized exhibitions would be held in various spaces between 1874 and 1886, with Monet participating in five of them. In their debut show, which opened on April 15, 1874, Monet displayed his now-famous Impression, Sunrise (fig. 3). The painting was derided in the press by the critic Louis Leroy, although its title gave the group of artists its name.15 Yet, as scholars have noted, other than a common commitment to modern or new painting, the group lacked cohesion from the outset. Even the name “Impressionists” was a matter of

Fig. 3 Claude Monet Impression, Sunrise, 1872 Oil on canvas 195⁄8 × 255⁄8 in. (50 × 65 cm) Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris; Gift of Eugène and Victorine Donop de Monchy, 1940

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SUSAN GRACE GALASSI

Fig. 9 Claude Monet The Church at Vétheuil (Winter), 1878 Oil on canvas 253⁄4 × 197⁄8 in. (65.5 × 50.5 cm) Musée d’Orsay, Paris

vantage point was from within the village, in the winter views, it was from without. In addition to the pair, he made a third painting, the Frick canvas, now looking across the river from the opposite bank. The order in which he painted them is not known.

In The Church at Vétheuil (Winter) (fig. 9), painted from just offshore, the town’s buildings are compressed into a tight space of overlapping shapes, with the church tower on the left balanced by a round red gazebo with a conical roof on the right. The water in the foreground, the heavy snow piled up on the riverbank, and the blue fence stretching between the bank and village present a series of barriers in front of the town. Devoid of human presence, the village at the outset of winter appears constricted and turned inward, unwelcoming.

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MONET’S VÉTHEUIL IN WINTER

In a horizontal version, The Church at Vétheuil, Snow (fig. 10), Monet has repositioned his boat to take in a broader stretch of the shoreline. The large scale of the Romanesque structure, set off by the surrounding houses and gardens, is emphasized, with the pyramidal top of the tower cut off by the upper edge of the canvas. A single male figure in a blue jacket or vest and top hat, perhaps an acquaintance, stands on the snow-covered riverbank, discreetly humanizing it, while three trees counter the horizontality of the format and the fences with their delicate upward-reaching branches. This beautifully composed winter scene found an immediate buyer in Monet’s friend and supporter, the artist Gustave Caillebotte.36 In the Frick’s Vétheuil in Winter (frontispiece), Monet took his vantage point from the Lavacourt side, which afforded him a panoramic view of

Fig. 10 Claude Monet The Church at Vétheuil, Snow, 1878 Oil on canvas 205⁄8 × 28 in. (52.5 × 71 cm) Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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SUSAN GRACE GALASSI

Fig. 21 Claude Monet La Débâcle, 1880 Oil on canvas 233⁄4 in × 391⁄4 in. (60.3 × 99.9 cm) University of Michigan Museum of Art; Acquired through the generosity of Russell B. Stearns (LS&A, 1916) and his wife, Andree B. Stearns, Dedham, Massachusetts

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As the series progressed, Monet left behind the geographic markers of the villages of Vétheuil and Lavacourt and signs of civilization, setting his scenes in pure nature—his private Arctic—though the views he painted were not far from home. In La Débâcle (fig. 21), made (or begun) from the Lavacourt side, Monet looked across the river with ice floes rippling out from the shores and drawn downstream in curved lines in a purely natural landscape. Yet, the lingering imprint of the composition of the Frick painting (and its variant) may be detected. The tall trees lining the shore across the river, with a sloping hill behind them, are grouped in a rough triangle, forming a natural version of the village of Vétheuil.

In The Ice Floes (fig. 22), Monet demonstrated his extraordinary sensitivity to the nuances of atmospheric light and color. In this work, the painter looked downstream on a small branch of the Seine between the Moisson islands.

Begun on site in the warm glow of sunset, he depicted blue-edged, roughly textured floes suspended in transparent, orange-tinted water, holding the trees’ reflections. They diminish in size and substance as they approach the horizon.

MONET’S VÉTHEUIL IN WINTER

The painting was bought by the collector Charles Ephrussi and displayed at his house, where the young Marcel Proust saw it and commented in poetic language on the multi-layered reality and ambiguity that lie at the heart of these immersive views of nature and account for their mesmerizing quality:

Fig. 22 Claude Monet The Ice Floes, 1880 Oil on canvas 237⁄8 × 391⁄8 in. (60.5 × 99.5 cm) Musée d’Orsay, Paris

See how everything shimmers, how everything becomes a mirage with this thaw; you can’t make out if it is ice or sunlight, and all these pieces of ice break and carry along the reflections of the sky, and the trees are so bright that one cannot know if their redness results from autumn or their own nature, and one doesn’t know where one is anymore, if it’s a riverbed or a clearing in the wood.79

The Ice Floes is the model for four additional works.80 Among them is a larger painting, in a long horizontal format that gives it the feeling of a panorama (fig. 23). Executed in a more meticulous fashion than others in the series, it was made entirely in the studio a month or so later.81 This image is a summation of and farewell to the ice floe paintings. (Variations on previously completed 53

SUSAN GRACE GALASSI

Fig. 27 Claude Monet Vétheuil, 1901 Oil on canvas, 353⁄8 × 363⁄8 in. (90 × 93 cm) Art Institute of Chicago; Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection

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MONET’S VÉTHEUIL IN WINTER

Fig. 28 Claude Monet Vétheuil, Gray Effect, 1901 Oil on canvas, 353⁄8 × 363⁄8 in. (90 × 93 cm) Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille

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