The Trials of Love and Art for an Impressionist Painter: Monet and Pierre Loti's Iceland Fisherman
2013; Routledge; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/08905495.2013.824276
ISSN1477-2663
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Critical Theory
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes A very readable account of how he did this with painting and sculpture can be found in Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism (New York: Walker and Company, 2006). See also Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). The Goncourts' writings on the arts have been gathered in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Arts et artistes, ed. Jean-Paul Bouillon (Paris: Hermann, 1997). For a good presentation of their views on Impressionism see Bouillon's Introduction (11-33) and that of Michel Crouzet to the Folio edition of Manette Salomon, ed. Stéphanie Champeau, Adrien Goetz (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 7-76. Zola's writings on the arts have been gathered in Émile Zola, Ëcrits sur l'art, ed. Jean-Pierre Leduc-Adine (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). For a good presentation of his views on Impressionism see Leduc-Adine's Preface (7-31) and that of Bruno Foucart to the Folio edition of L'Oeuvre, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris: Gallimard, 1983) 7-25. Also good on the differences between L'Oeuvre and Impressionism is Robert J. Niess, Zola, Cézanne, and Manet (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968). On Loti's art study see Pierre Loti, Correspondance inédite 1865-1904, ed. Nadine Duvignau, N. Serban (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1929) 14-74; Daniel Marchesseau, “Un journal de bord, les dessins de Julien Viaud,” in Pierre Loti: Fantômes d'Orient (Paris: Musée, 2006) 109-133; and the editors' Introduction to Pierre Loti dessinateur: Une oeuvre à long cours, ed. Alain Quella-Villéger, Bruno Vercier (Paris: Bleu autour, 2009) 5-38. Loti, Correspondance inédite 1865-1904 18-20. All translations from the French are my own. Loti, Correspondance inédite 1865-1904 22. Cf. King, Ch. 21. Loti, Correspondance inédite 1865-1904 47. Unfortunately, we have very little of Loti's correspondence from his year in Paris and no other comments on the art he saw there. Loti, Correspondance inédite 1865-1904 59. On the drawings he published in Parisian illustrated magazines, see: C. Wesley Bird, Pierre Loti correspondant et dessinateur, 1872-1889 (Paris: Pierre André, 1947), and the already-cited Pierre Loti dessinateur. Odette Valence, Samuel Pierre-Loti-Viaud, La Famille de Pierre Loti ou l'éducation passionnée (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1940) 187. On Loti's Impressionism in Iceland Fisherman see Richard M. Berrong, Putting Monet and Rembrandt into Words (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Ch. One. While Loti does not mention painting in Iceland Fisherman, he most certainly had it in mind while working on the book. As he polished the final chapters, he wrote to his publisher, Juliette Adam: “now, quickly, I'm doing the last vernissage of Yann and Gaud” (Lettres de Pierre Loti à Madame Juliette Adam [1880-1922] [Paris: Plon, 1924] 86). Zola, Écrits sur l'art 208. I follow the practice standard in Loti scholarship and reference the novel with part and chapter number rather than page numbers in a specific edition, of which there are many all with different pagination. There are, for example, seven different English translations of Iceland Fisherman, several of which have appeared in different editions with different paginations. Again, all translations from the French are my own. Zola, Ecrits sur l'art 315. In his next novel, Madame Chrysanthemum (1887), Loti makes a connection between capturing perceptions through all the senses and an Impressionist type of writing/painting very clear. Early in that novel the Narrator, an officer in the French navy, describes how his landlord in Nagasaki, M. Sugar, spends his days “writing a lot (his memoirs, I think) with a brush held at the end of his fingers” (Ch. XIV). Since M. Sucre uses that same brush to paint storks, for him there is little distinction between writing and painting, an idea Loti will take up again in his autobiographically-based novel The Story of a Child (1890). Later in Madame Chrysanthemum the Narrator comments self-reflectively that “I'm writing my memoirs [the novel we are reading], in short,— just like M. Sugar down below!” (Ch. XXXVII), implying that Madame Chrysanthemum is also both written and painted. Since the Narrator goes on to add that “my memoirs […] are composed solely of preposterous details; minute notations of colors, forms, smells, noises” (Ch. XXXVII), he makes it clear that the focus in his particular writing/painting is on conveying sensory impressions. The Narrator had already announced his intention of trying to do this quite directly near the opening of the text: For lack of a plot and tragic things, I would at least like to know how to put into [this book] a little of the good smell of the gardens that surround me, a little of the soft warmth of this sun, a little of the shade of these pretty trees. For lack of love, put into it something of the relaxing tranquility of this distant neighborhood. Put into it as well the sound of Chrysanthemum's guitar, in which I am starting to find some charm for lack of something better in the silence of these beautiful summer evenings . . . (Ch.XVI) Near the end of the novel Loti makes a connection between art that can capture such sensations and a Monet-style Impressionism when he experiences the failure of Western Realism to convey the things about his Japanese dwelling that he wants to preserve. Having done a faithful, Western Realistic drawing of it, he is not satisfied with the results, and remarks:I put everything in its place, very exactly, but the overall effect has something ordinary, indifferent, French, that doesn't work. The feeling hasn't been conveyed, and I ask myself if I wouldn't have had more success if I'd falsified the perspective in the Japanese style and exaggerated the already bizarre lines of things to impossible lengths. And then, the drawing of this lodging lacks its delicate air and its dry-violin sonority. In the pencil lines that depict the woodwork there is nothing of the minute precision with which they are carved, nor their extreme antiquity, nor their perfect cleanliness, nor the vibrations of the cicadas that they seemed to have stored up in their dried fibers for hundreds of summers. Nor is there the impression that you feel here of being in a very distant neighborhood, perched at a great height among the trees, above the funniest of all cities. No, none of that can be drawn, expressed; it remains untranslatable and unable to be captured [at least by the Narrator's Western “naturalism”]. (Ch. LI)Here Loti suggests through his only partially comprehending Narrator the wide gap between the Western Realism/Naturalism that was the establishment-sanctioned style of his day and Monet's type of Impressionism, which sought first and foremost to capture very specifically the feelings/effects the artist experienced looking at the world, “the impression that you feel/experience here,” and was willing to abandon faithfully realistic reproduction in order to do so. The Dedication to the Duchess of Richelieu at the beginning of Madame Chrysanthemum had already made clear the importance of such feelings/effects in this work, declaring that “the three main characters [of the novel] are Myself, Japan, and the Effect that this country had on me.” In the drawing scene of Chapter LI Loti implies that in order to convey such effects/impressions an artist, unlike the Realists (at least as they presented themselves), sometimes has to change what he actually sees, “falsifying the perspective, in the Japanese style, and […] exaggerating the already bizarre lines of things to impossible lengths.” Monet held to the same aesthetics. As if paraphrasing the scene in Madame Chrysanthemum, he wrote to art critic Gustave Geffroy in 1912: “I do what I can to convey what I feel in front of nature; most often, to succeed in conveying what I feel I end up totally forgetting the most elementary rules of painting. […] In short, I let a lot of mistakes show in order to pin down my feelings” (Monet 2015; Monet's correspondence was published by the great art historian Daniel Wildenstein at the end of the various volumes of his first catalogue raisonné of the painter's work: Claude Monet: biographie et catalogue raisonné, ed. Daniel Wildenstein, 5 vols. [Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1974-1991]. I refer to this edition in my citations as “Monet” and reference the painter's letters by the number Wildenstein assigned them, since the pages are huge and contain many letters on each one). As Paul Hayes Tucker has remarked, “that Monet really set out to paint what he experienced' in front of [the grainstacks near his home in Giverny], and not so much what he saw, goes a long way to explain the apparent slips in his fidelity to nature's laws” (Monet in the 90s: The Series Paintings [Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1989] 101). Similarly, in writing about Monet's paintings of the Norman coast, John House observed that “on occasion the mood which he wanted a group of paintings to express might even override the actual effects he had before him” (Monet. Nature into Art [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986] 25). Loti's presentation of this issue in Madame Chrysanthemum would in turn have an influence on post-Impressionist painters like van Gogh. On this see Bridget Elliott, Anthony Purdy, “(Re)-Dressing French Modernism: Décor, Costume, and the Decorative in an Interarts Perspective,” in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007) 501-512. Maurice E. Chernowitz, Proust and Painting (New York: International University Press, 1945) 165-166. Ferdinand Brunetière, “L'Impressionnisme dans le roman: Les Rois en exil, par M. Alphonse Daudet,” La Revue des deux mondes (15 November 1879) 451. Brunetière 451. Gaud's very Impressionistic experience and recollection of Paimpol as she walked through its streets might recall some of the chapters in the novels published by the Goncourt brothers from 1860 1870, especially Germinie Lacerteux. (On impressionism in their work see Enzo Caramaschi, Réalisme et impressionnisme dans l'oeuvre des frères Goncourt [Pisa: Goliardica, n.d].) As Paul Bourget, Paul Valéry, and others have pointed out, however, the Goncourts often attributed highly refined sensorial perceptions to characters who were very unlikely to have been capable of experiencing them, which is never the case in Iceland Fisherman. See Paul Bourget, “Edmond & Jules de Goncourt,” Nouveaux essais de psychologie contemporaine (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1886) 194; Paul Valéry, “La tentation de (Saint) Flaubert,” in Variété, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) I: 614. In their very helpful study of Monet and Japanese art, Virginia Spate and David Bromfield show how he used “the brilliantly coloured, flat planes of Japanese woodblock prints” in this painting to “express […] the visual ‘shock’ associated with modern experience [of landscape, resulting in a work that] was totally different from the earlier landscape[s Monet had painted . . .]” (“A New and Strange Beauty. Monet and Japanese Art,” in Monet & Japan [Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2001] 5). Japanese woodblock prints played a major role in showing Monet how he could “distort” what he actually saw in front of him in order better to convey the impression it made on him. As Spate and Bromfield remark: “Japanese art influenced Monet […] in suggesting ways in which he could express his experience of modernity, […] of a modern relationship to nature” (5). The fact that Monet was clearly using techniques here that he had found in Japanese woodblock prints is demonstrated by the fact that Renoir even referred to it in a letter to Frédéric Bazille as “Monet's painting, the Japanese one with the little flags” (Spate, Bromfield 15). As a possible Japanese model for Garden at Sainte-Adresse Spate and Bromfield cite Hokusai's Turban-shell Hall of the Five Hundred Rakan Temple (16-17). Garden at Sainte Adresse is a particularly good visual image of the japonisme in Loti's adaptation of a Monet-style Impressionism in more ways than one. Spate and Bromfield use the canvas to demonstrate how Monet learned from Japanese woodblock prints to “construct […] a painting from juxtaposed cells of space rather than unitary perspective space” (16). In the same respect, Loti constructed Iceland Fisherman as a series of unlinked scenes, each presented from a particular character's perspective, without any one “unitary perspective space” provided by a traditional omniscient narrator to tie them together (on this see Berrong 218-228). That he saw this as a particularly Japanese mode of artistic construction Loti made clear a year later in his next novel, Madame Chrysanthemum, when he has the Narrator remark that preposterous interruption is absolutely part of this country's notion of good taste; it is practiced in everything, in casual conversation, in music, even in painting; a landscape painter, for example, having completed a painting of mountains and boulders, will never hesitate to draw in the middle of the sky a circle or an oval, some sort of a frame in which he will depict something incoherent or unexpected: a bonze playing with a fan or a lady having a cup of tea. Nothing is more Japanese than to make digressions like that without the least connection. (Ch. XI) Later in that novel the Narrator comes to recognize that he has constructed his own narrative in exactly that ununified, disconnected fashion (Ch. XVI). As if to highlight that in the first, lavish edition of the novel, Loti had individual episodes within chapters separated from each other with wide blocks of white space, reminiscent of the white frames Impressionists introduced in some of their exhibitions. On this see Anthea Callen, The Art of Impressionism: Painting Techniques & the making of modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)194. Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec, revised Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) 1154. Baudelaire 1163. Baudelaire 1163-1164. Speaking to his would-be biographer Thiébault-Sisson in 1900, Monet recalled the teaching style of the once highly admired academic painter Charles Gleyre, in whose studio Monet had studied briefly in 1860 when a young artist. Gleyre would look at Monet's work and comment“Not bad! Not bad at all, what you've done there, but it's too much in the character of the model. You have a squat old man: you paint him squat. He has enormous feet: you convey them just as they are. That's very ugly, all that. Remember, young man, that when you do a human form, you must always keep the Classics in mind. Nature is all well and good as a subject for study, my friend, but it offers nothing of interest. Style, don't you see, that's all that counts.” I was dumbfounded. Truth, life, nature, everything that provoked emotion in me, everything that in my eyes constituted the very essence, the unique raison d'être of art, did not exist for that man. I would not stay in his studio. I didn't feel myself born to redo the Lost Illusions [Gleyre's masterpiece] or other meaningless things in his wake. So then, why go on? (Pascal Bonafoux, Monet [Paris: Perrin, 2007) 65) Ernest Chesneau, “À côté du Salon, le Plein air. Exposition du Boulevard des Capucines,” Petit Journal [Paris] 7 May 1874, in Les Écrivains devant l'Impressionnisme, ed. Denys Riout (Paris: Macula, 1989) 64. On “Monet's unwillingness to continue to propagate the myth of modernity,” see Tucker 251. In her very detailed and knowledgeable study of how the Impressionists innovated not just with what they painted and what it looked like but with the very techniques they developed to create their effects, Callen asserts that “novel subject matter, the “painting of modern life,’ is not […] the central issue of modernity in painting from the 1860s on” (1). For Monet's Belle-Ile paintings see Denise Delouche, Monet à Belle-Île (Plomelin: Éditions Palatines, 2006). Monet 725. Monet 719. Monet scholar Paul Hayes Tucker has remarked: “Monet had always been fascinated by water. […] Aside from light, it was his most consistent artistic companion and his most revered earthly element. […] Because it was […] able to assume an infinite number of shapes, it was also not so unlike an aesthetic ideal” (“Revolution in the Garden,” in Monet in the 20 th Century, ed. Paul Hayes Tucker, George T. M. Shackelford, MaryAnne Stevens [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998] 40-41). Victor Giraud found that Loti's “descriptive genius is like a mirror that he moves from sky to sky and in which are reflected with admirable fidelity that which is […] irremediably ephemeral in the changing spectacles that pass one after the next before his eyes” (Les Maîtres de l'Heure: Essais d'histoire morale contemporaine [Paris: Hachette, 1919] 13). In their article on Loti and van Gogh, Bridget Elliott and Anthony Purdy declared that “Loti [i]s a largely unacknowledged catalyst of modernism” (511). I would say that he was not just a catalyst but, at least in works like Iceland Fisherman and Madame Chrysanthemum, a fully-participating proponent of the movement. Loti's way of first presenting Yann to the reader establishes the giant fisherman's connection with Nature from the novel's opening pages. In its first scene, we begin by learning that Yann is up on deck while the rest of the crew of the Marie is gathered together down in the cabin celebrating the assumption of the Virgin Mary. When he subsequently joins them, Yann “entered, obliged to bend over in two like a huge bear, because he was almost a giant. […] He exceeded the ordinary proportions of men a little too much, especially with his shoulders, which were straight like a ship's tiller […]. He had large brown eyes that were constantly moving, with a wild and proud expression” (“entra, obligé de se courber en deux comme un gros ours, car il était presque un géant. […] Il dépassait un peu trop les proportions ordinaires des hommes, surtout par sa carrure qui était droite comme une barre […]. Il avait de grands yeux bruns très mobiles, à l'expression sauvage et superbe” I.1). The fact that he has to “bend over in two” when he moves from the realm of Nature to the world of men, that he “exceeded the ordinary proportions of men a little too much,” and that Loti repeatedly describes him here and throughout the rest of the novel as wild/sauvage, all suggest that Yann is so much a part of Nature that he does not fit easily into world of men. In his preface to an American translation of the novel, Jules Cambon, then the French ambassador to the U.S., wrote that “with [Loti], the human being is a part of Nature, one of its very expressions […]. His characters are what they are only because they issue forth from the medium in which they live” (“Pierre Loti,” in An Iceland Fisherman [Akron: The St. Hubert Guild, 1902] xiii). Monet 963. Monet 1543; my italics. That with Monet this artistic ardor was very much like a romantic one is indicated not only by his vocabulary in describing it but also by the fact that his partner/later wife Alice often complained about being second in his affections after his art. Monet 1577. Loti repeatedly describes Gaud as experiencing strong “impressions.” Wandering around Guingamp for the first time in the winter, for example, “she had been seized [note the force of the verb] by an unfamiliar impression: she no longer recognized that little old town, which she had never crossed before except during the summer; she felt something like the sensation of suddenly plunging into what, in the countryside, they call the times, — the distant times of the past” (“elle avait été saisie par une impression inconnue: cette vieille petite ville, qu'elle n'avait jamais traversée qu'en été, elle ne la reconnaissait plus: elle y éprouvait comme la sensation de plonger tout à coup dans ce qu'on appelle, à la campagne: les temps, — les temps lointains du passé” I.3; my italics). On this see Richard M. Berrong, In Love with a Handsome Sailor: The Emergence of Gay Identity and the Novels of Pierre Loti (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) Ch. 6. Marcel Proust, a great admirer of Loti's work, would do the same sort of thing several decades later by turning a man he loved, Alfred Agostinelli, into a female character, Albertine Simonet, in his great novel In Search of Lost Time/À la recherché du temps perdu so as to be able to speak of his love more directly. Valence, Pierre-Loti-Viaud 146. Technique and Meaning in the Paintings of Paul Gauguin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 195, quoted in Elliott and Purdy 506-07. House 133. Jirat-Wasiutyński, Newton 195, quoted in Elliott and Purdy 507. In India (without the English)/Inde (sans les Anglais) (1903), Loti observed that no one would be interested in his explanation of the philosophy he had learned on that subcontinent because “people expect from me only the illusion of a trip, a reflection of the thousands of things over which I cast my eyes” (VI:14), in other words decorative but therefore non-intellectual art. André Suarès, one of the founders of La Nouvelle revue française, went so far as to declare that “far more than Sisley, Claude Monet, or the Goncourt brothers, Loti was the great impressionist” (Présences [Paris: Editions Emile-Paul, 1926] 211).
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