Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Claude Monet

Bathers at La Grenouillère

Picasso, it is intriguing to note, did not like Monet’s work, particularly the famous water lily sequences, the Nymphéas, painted towards the end of his life. He found it insubstantial, flimsy, perhaps even pretentious. Picasso was clearly reacting against Monet in order to find and determine a place for his own work, to create a taste by which he might be appreciated (just as Monet and the other Impressionists had reacted against the confining Beaux-Arts classicism that preceded them).

Of course, it is possible, if you are determined to be prejudiced, to be “against” almost anything, however universally admired, and, if one adopts Picasso’s standpoint and considers his own contribution to twentieth-century art, one can understand the thrust of his reservations. For a painter obsessed with structure and physicality the suggestibility and sheer airiness of Impressionism, with its concentration on the fleeting and iridescent, might indeed make it seem somewhat incorporeal and vacuous. However, I have always thought that Monet’s painting Bathers at La Grenouillère can stand as a particularly redoubtable response to this line of attack.

First of all, while the painting seems to be prototypically Impressionist in subject matter, two factors make it less obviously generic. First it is a painting of shadow rather than sunlight — deep shadow too, its dominant tones are blues, browns and greens, not yellows, lemons or creams — and, second, it is anything but ethereal in treatment. Although more than half the painting is water it is rendered with a solidity and plasticity that, I dare say, Cézanne would have been proud of. True, the painting is a sketch, a study, presumably for a larger more “finished” painting that was never completed, and the boldness of the individual brushstrokes might not have survived in anything more worked up, but the thick smears of paint, the broad slashes of impasto recall the uncompromising way the Fauves applied pigment to their canvases — and Fauvism was still three decades or so away from 1869 when Monet’s painting was executed. That such thick, dark oil paint can look like rippling light-freckled water is part of the individual magic of this painting; and that a palette so subdued, so positively sombre, can summon up all the luminous ambience of a riverine scene is testimony to a talent and a painterliness that are remarkable. Even a pusillanimous Picasso might have had grudgingly to concede that, sometimes, Monet could do no wrong.

1998