“Monet is the painter of water par excellence”
“Everything changes,” Claude Monet wrote while he was painting stone volumes dissolving into reflections of light. What mattered to the painter was the exact moment when texture became atmosphere. That is why his landscape was a transitional moment. An impression was a moment in life, just as a brushstroke was like a wave roiling the water and a stream of light, stirring the snow and the flower in the blowing breeze. This wave, marking the trail of time and the rhythm of life, was also what moved his eye and his brush.
Following the wave down the river, painting the steam spread against the sky and the lake hidden underneath the sun, Monet found his landscapes at the water’s edge. He painted images made humid by the hydrological cycle, landscapes destined to the waves of change. His willow trees drank the waters of the Seine, and his bridges were bogged down into the mouth of the Thames, always pulsing in the painter’s eyes and hands, floating like waves of light. Élie Faure says that he was the painter of “everything that floats”. According to Arnold Hauser, he always painted the same theme: the river of Heraclitus, which “no man ever steps in twice”. For Claude Monet, his travels were a constant search for the “appearance that changes at every moment with the reflection of the sky”. With Monet, the landscape is a wave moving with the passing time, and the eye is a boat floating along with the shifting current and sunlight. Time is a bodyless physical might, yet it leaves a trail wherever it goes: through the water, through the light, through the steam.
Riding this same wave, M.I.R.A (The Museum of Immersive Roaming Art) is bringing audiences the “Monet By the Water” exhibit, diving into Monet’s landscapes. Through an audiovisual experience in landscapes as dynamic as a running river, the exhibit lets the eye float along an image using scale and effects, creating the illusion of “a wave with no horizon and no shore” (Monet). The audience is invited to step into Monet’s river and see his painting as if it were a large wave, an impression of the passing time and the changing landscape, because as Gaston Bachelard wrote, “the human being shares the destiny of flowing water”. Everything flows, everything changes and, by the water, transitions are like landscapes.
Immersion means sinking into the water; it means looking below the surface and getting wet to see. The lake is an eye, and it was through water that Monet saw light’s most sensitive effects.
Through the material and polyvalent image of water, Monet crated his most audacious project, the Grande Décoration: a set of paintings of aquatic surfaces floating in the rising and setting sun Paintings made as if they were water for a lake-shaped room, designed like a pond for an audience conceived as a diver. By chance, his pavilion was installed in an old greenhouse called L´Orangerie (The Orange Grove), along the banks of the Seine River. The paintings were placed inside of this lake-room so as to surround the environment according to his desires, like a “floral aquarium” where the eye could be submerged in the image and find its great destiny: the “the illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no shore”. Monet converted the canvas into an artificial landscape, and the room into an alternate reality. He invited the audience to don the diving helmet to see the light and the image floating framelessly.
“Monet By the Water” is an immersive exhibit. It uses new technologies to follow the artist’s intentions: to submerge the visitor’s eye in the illusion of the shoreless landscape and the frameless painting. Inside of the black box of the exhibition space, lit using projection, the observer can dive into an environment covered with floating images, walk over the waters or sink into the last rays of the sunset.
This exhibition space was planned as a relief. On the one hand, its design mimics the shape of the lake at Giverny. On the other, he is inspired by the scale of landscapes, by raising structures in a variety of formats (flat, concave, spherical) in order to support the images projected. Using digital manipulation to weave an illusion, Monet’s paintings create liquid walls, floating floors and a ceiling open to the rotating heavens.
If the eye is a lake, in “Monet By the Water,” image is a flood. While the landscape passes by like living water, the exhibit can be seen as a long dive.
The “Monet By the Water” exhibit was conceived as a trip through Claude Monet’s paintings. From an audiovisual experience by eight thematic situations, developed along the shores of rivers (the Seine, Thames, Sandvikselva), seas (the English Channel, Gulf of Venice and Genoa) and lake (Giverny), the audience can travel through landscapes that change as the water runs, diving into an abysm of light and color and, as Monet wished, feeling “the impressions of the most fleeting effects.”
Departing from Saint-Lazare Station, Monet paints the Paris-Argenteuil route with its stations set amongst clouds of steam and smoke, snow and fog, in search of fluctuations in the “light and in the air that unceasingly varies.” Crossing bridges along the Seine on summer and winter days, he arrives in London to paint “that unique atmosphere of the Thames.” It is a journey in the trail of the clouds and fog that devour the light and transform landscapes.
Monet follows the waterfront along the harvest route. He crosses grainfields in Chailly and Giverny and poppy fields in Argenteuil and Vétheuil, in search of the cycle of life at the edges of the Seine River. In the fields, under the sunlight, he paints wheat and flowers as though they are works of time. Arriving in the Netherlands, Monet continues along the banks of the Zan River, the Onbekende Canal and The Hague Coast to collect winds from the eyes of windmills and colors from the petals of tulips. On this trip through the cycles of time, he stands in front of the banks of the Epte River to watch the poplars dance near Giverny. Meanwhile, time passes like the wind…
On Monet’s travels, his most frequently travelled route is on the coast of Normandy. At the Mouth of the Seine, he grows and learns to paint the landscape. In Le Havre, Monet sees the sunrise, baptizing its “impression” with water and light. This is also where he leaves his epitaph: “when I die, I want to be interred in a buoy.” Passing through the ports of Honfleur and Fécamp, he observes the sun sinking into the water and the lighthouse coming to life in the darkness of night. Moving along the precipices of Pourville and Varengeville, he follows trails of wheat while fleeing to the sea. He reaches the cliffs of Dieppe, Étretat, Valmont and Belle-Île to paint the waves of water and light breaking on the rocks. At the famed beach of Trouville, he makes a record of the bright days of summer; yet on the trip to Italy, Monet leaves part of his painted heart at the Grand Canal. The sun dies in Venice.
The walk by the lake is Monet’s longest journey. In Giverny, the painter travelled within his own garden, following the reflecting light sparkling on the water’s surface like tracks of steel. For 29 years, he goes through the Rose Arches as if tunnels to the sun, crosses the Japanese Bridges as if passages in time, watches the Weeping Willows, focusing on the shore and the Water Lilies floating on the reflecting pool, in search of the “appearance that changes at every moment with the sky’s reflection.”
Walking along the banks of rivers and seas, Monet also paints the metamorphoses of stone. “Everything changes,” he said. Buildings shed their skin in the cycles of the day and the seasons, like wheat fields stained by the colors of the rising and setting sun. At this pace, the Rouen Cathedral, the Bridges of London, and the Basilica of Venice set the stage for the miraculous transfiguration of light and dark at the water’s edge. They offer the painter, who looks through the open house of the day, a few instants of life in the images that are born and die with the passage of time. Life is an impression…
Following white paths to see the effects of light on winter’s many faces, Monet follows the Paris-Le Havre line along the frozen Seine. Painting snowy roads and thick fog over the river’s surface, sunbeams crossing the sky and breaking the ice, Monet continues to search for the “impressions of the most fleeting effects.” In his yearning to see what cold weather has to teach him, he even extends the route to Norway to paint “the fearsome north.”
The green landscapes route departs Barbizon and follows the Paris-Le Havre line, going up the Seine River to the English Channel before taking a sharp turn through the mediterranean flora of the Gulf of Genoa. In search of the light that feeds nature’s shell, Monet goes along the wild trails or through gardens. He follows his destiny along paved roads, pursuing “colorful silence” and “the smallest piece of color,” reaping impressions of the time lost like water in a running river.
Passing along the banks of the Seine River, in Argenteuil and Vétheuil, Monet lets his painting bloom. Like a hummingbird, he approaches the flowerbeds at the water’s edge and exhales a wish: “I would like to paint the way a bird sings.” Birds, like flowers, are sensitive: they presage time’s passing. And to paint like a bird, Monet uses the flower as his third eye: through it, he sees the portrait of time in a brief life; in the “appearances changing at every moment.” In Giverny, he cultivates paintings by following the light on the tulip’s petals and the artichoke’s heart. And there, among the scented poplars and the smiling water lily, his life ends on a domestic trip: he sinks his eyes into the water’s surface to cross the abyss of light. He lies in a bed of chrysanthemums surrounded by sunflowers and leaves his painted impressions by the water. The life is an instant that passes by…