His abandonment toward the end of the decade of these motifs in favor of a “purer” conception of landscape painting purged of the signs of modernity marks a fundamental division within his oeuvre. Monet’s choice of such a motif was one of the most distinctive features of the painting, and it was ultra-modern motifs such as these that were to take precedence in the formative moment of Monet’s painting in the 1870s. In her analysis, though, the specific form of Monet’s engagement with the new economic realities of the port, at once paradoxically both bold and hesitant, remains very much in the background it forms the context against which the painting is set, rather than serving as an active part of the materials from which the picture was made.
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The question of Monet’s modernity is a point taken up in Géraldine Lefebvre’s essay, which provides much welcome information about the industrialization of Le Havre.
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If so, it seems likely he conceived his painting as a contemporary variation on Lorrain’s more timeless theme, thus taking as his guiding example Édouard Manet’s many contemporary variations on old master paintings in the 1860s. The possibility remains that he may have had a picture in mind, one that he almost certainly saw at the National Gallery while in London in 1870–71: Claude Lorrain’s Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648). The narrow scope of such source hunting precludes a wider view of the artistic objectives and reference points that informed Monet’s work. Here the French landscapist Eugène Boudin is given predominance over the claims of J. In a related vein, a chapter by Ann-Marie Bergeret-Gourbin and Laurent Mamoeuvre revisits the question of the competing influence of French and English artists on Monet’s painting: it has long been a matter of dispute whether the Impressionist landscape painting was a specifically French phenomenon in origin, or owed a strong debt to the example of nineteenth-century English landscape painters. Olson’s analysis suffers from a rigid scientism that assumes the work is a faithful copy of the scene that presented itself to the artist-an assumption that sits uneasily with the all-too-often ignored other variations Monet made of his motif at the same time, as well as with the broader aims that informed his Impressionism. In its time, it was listed and exhibited as both, and Monet himself seems to have had a less than perfect recollection of the events leading to its realization. Individual chapters explore the influences on Monet’s conception of the painting examine the port of Le Havre where Monet painted it recount the reception of the picture when it was first exhibited and, perhaps inevitably, provide a detailed chronology of the painting’s provenance and the circumstances of its entering into the museum’s collection.Īrmed with meteorological and astronomical computations, as well as photographic and topographical records of the port, Donald Olson attempts to resolve the problem of the exact date on which and location from which Monet painted the picture-and thereby to end the dispute over whether the picture shows a sunrise or a sunset. The focus is on solving a range of longstanding disputes in the scholarship on the painting, rather than providing a more expansive context in which to understand the picture. Contributions from a range of predominantly French curators, including the exhibition’s organizers Dominique Lobstein and Marianne Mathieu, have much of interest to say on these matters. The abiding metaphor of the catalogue’s title should not be taken lightly in this regard, however strange the notion of a painting’s “biography.” Essays detail the picture’s origins and paternity, the inevitable quarrels over its name, and its eventual coming to rest in the Marmottan. In other words, what light can this new research shed on Monet’s Sunrise? What significance does the painting have for understanding both it and the larger histories of Impressionism? Moreover, what does the catalogue reveal about the current direction of Impressionist scholarship? Readers familiar with the extensive literature may wonder whether there remains anything left to be said about this painting. The painting has long been considered the jewel in the crown of the museum’s collection, and the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue offer an opportunity to present new research on this well-studied picture.
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Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public PracticeĪs part of the celebrations attending its eightieth anniversary, the Musée Marmottan Monet organized an exhibition of its namesake’s famous work Impression, soleil levant ( Impression: Sunrise, 1872).Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration.Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice.Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media.Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation.Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice.