Monet is popular because of his use of color. In l967 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, under its new director Thomas Hoving, acquired Monet’s La Terrace à Sainte-Addresse for 1.4 million. Monet had painted it in 1867, at the age of twenty-seven and had sold it for pittance because as a new father he needed the money. But I digress.
Hoving fought to get the painting for the museum. When he saw it in the dingy quarters of its eccentric owner, the Swedenborgian pastor Theodore Pitcairn, in a suburb of Philadelphia, he was so overcome by the painting’s beauty that he ”sat down on the bed and stared at it for what must have been an hour.” In his book, “Making the Mummies Dance,” Hoving talks only about the exquisite colors in this painting.
Well, now, as is our custom in this blog, let’s have another look. Colors, yes, but what about all this geometry.
I immediately notice two things in the geometry: 1) the two flag poles, making me suspect a Golden Section and 2) a dominant line at the lower right.
The Golden Section (1) is right there, defined by the flag poles and the center of the umbrella and the eye of the man in the hat, the beholder of the scene, and therefore one of us the viewers. (The bright green lines).
The dominant line (2) is the strong line dividing the pavement from the garden. (The pink line) This line, in the Western tradition, is read as going down. Hm, down. Here’s this cheerful scene, which Hoving describes as pure joy, and what we get is this dominant line directing our eye down, down, down. If you don’t immediately see the down-effect of this line, just flip the
image over. Now, the line goes up. When that line goes up, the joy loses all gravitas and turns the image into a tourist bureau advertisement. Doesn’t the optimism in the flipped version become facile and trivial?
The picture within the picture that frames the man, the woman and the black sails through the use of the flag poles (3) is clearly intentional especially since the man in the hat is looking at that scene. A few days after the birth of his son, the penniless Monet wrote to his friend Bazille: “Everything is fine here, work and family; were it not for the birth I should be the happiest man alive.”
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 