Monet, Rouen, and Bergson: the Eternal Cathedral (Part 1)
Compare The Oath of the Horatii by Jacques-Louis David (Figure 2) with Claude Monet’s Haystacks (Figure 1). 1n the late nineteenth century, a century after Jacques-Louis, Monet was leading the Impressionists into an entirely new era of painting, one that focused on color, light, and movement, always movement. While The Oath of the Horatii is hyper-detailed, the work of the Impressionists used quick, blurry brushstrokes to capture their subject in the moment. It is as if we were to glance quickly at a scene before looking away; we get a painting that is an impression, a blur, an instant, a feeling.
Figure 1. Monet, Haystacks, 1890. Oil on Canvas. Museum Barberini
Figure 2. Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784. Oil on Canvas. the Louvre
Claude Monet was considered one of the great fathers and masters of Impressionism. I will focus on one of the series most often used to exhibit his mastery: Monet’s 1892–1894 Rouen Cathedral series is a collection of thirty-one canvases depicting the west facade of Rouen’s Gothic cathedral. After Monet chose his favorite twenty to exhibit at the Durand-Real Gallery, the Cathedral series was immediately received as a success and, also, as a juxtaposition between artist and subject. On one hand, there was the face of Monet, renowned for his ability to capture the fleeting and his strong association with the modern Impressionist movement. On the other hand, there was the face of the cathedral, grounded in the old and the immovable. Critics were enamored with the seemingly obvious contrast: a hard, stony subject, represented with the soft and the ephemeral; an avant-garde painter sitting in front of an ancient, unmoving cathedral; the fleeting with the eternal. Whereas before, Monet had shown no interest in architecture, focusing on water lilies and landscapes, we see him here devoting two years in Rouen to painting thirty-one Rouen cathedrals. The question has therefore always been: why exactly did Monet choose to paint this Gothic cathedral?
The immediate proposal is that Monet was not focused on the cathedral at all. For some, “the building here is not more than a background, an ‘excuse,’ to show the authentic protagonist of the composition: the power of painting for representing the dynamic quality of the light and the atmosphere” (Wolf, 21). One could certainly agree with this. By using a static object, Monet is able to bring out the way it moves with the changing weather and time of day. A viewer can trace the gray gloom of Le Portail, temps gris (Figure 3) moving into the lightness of morning in Le Portail, effet du matin (Figure 4). “Monet causes that even the stones to come to life,” declared Georges Clemenceau, France’s former prime minister. For Clemenceau and many others, the Cathedrals are still grounded in Monet’s Impressionism and his preoccupation with the effects of nature and the instantaneous. To them, this series is no different from his 1890 Haystacks series (Figure 5). The Haystacks is a series that perfectly embodies the Impressionist movement: in a blur of color, Monet depicts moments from changing seasons, weather, and light using stacks of wheat. The cathedral was thought to be an even better subject to capture the ephemeral than the haystacks were, as it remains an immobile force, a stable stand onto which the fabric of light and nature can better be featured. But while I’ll never know Monet’s true motives, I propose that the Cathedrals is a very different series, and that the choice of the cathedral was a very different choice than that of the haystacks. The cathedral was actually the perfect subject for Monet’s series to do what it does because the cathedral does the very same thing. I argue that they both create a time continuum, a persistence of memory. In this essay, I will demonstrate how Monet’s work and Rouen cathedral are not so opposite after all, instead matching one another step for step.
Figure 3. Monet, La Cathédrale de Rouen. Le Portail, temps gris. 1892. Oil on Canvas. Musée d'Orsay
Figure 4. Monet, La Cathédrale de Rouen. Le Portail et la tour Saint-Romain, effet du matin. 1893. Oil on Canvas. Musée d'Orsay
Figure 5. Six paintings in Monet's Haystacks series
To explore our key question and our proposed answer, we must first discuss what exactly Monet accomplishes in this specific series, before visiting the cathedral itself. What distinguishes the Cathedral series from classic Impressionist work? In 1892, Monet wrote in a letter about his struggle to capture “‘instantaneity,’ especially the enveloppe, the same light diffused everywhere,” with the enveloppe defined as an amalgamation of air and light (Hamilton, 18). At first, this letter seems to validate the belief that Monet was interested in all the things he was always interested in—light, atmosphere, the instant. However, we can’t forget one important detail: Monet painted more than thirty canvases of the cathedral. “For the sole purpose of demonstrating the enveloppe…one canvas of the individual motif would have sufficed,” author Joachim Pissarro writes. “Monet’s paintings of the cathedral are about time” (Pissarro, 22).
While Monet’s series clearly traces chronological time, each painting depicting a different “instant,” the Haystacks series does this just as well. The Cathedrals are about more than just the instant. Philosopher Henri Bergson’s idea of “duration” is essential here, where he illustrates human perception not as a sequence of successive, isolated moments, but as a “multiplicity continually unfolding in the ceaseless and seamless flow of ‘duration’… a fusion of the past with the present and anticipated future” (Bernier, 58). “It involves the kind of time we mean when we say something like ‘this last hour has passed slowly’—that is, the experiencing of time rather than its external measure… a bringing together of duration, space, perception, and emotion,” states Ronald Bernier in Monument, Moment, and Memory (43). The proposal that Monet depicts duration is especially important considering the time period: the invention of “universal” time centered on the Greenwich meridian was happening in exactly the late nineteenth century, leading to an increased regulation, synchronization, and measuring of time (Dombrowski, 90). Identifying and capturing instances of time was, as we know, important to the Impressionists. Duration subverts this practice. In duration, we simply cannot measure and count objective time, as it is about continually unfolding past memory into the experiences of the present, creating a dynamic time continuum that makes it impossible to separate the two. Essentially, duration is memory, the past always shaping the experience of the present: it is the continuous becoming of something. This is the kind of temporality that manifests itself within the Cathedral series. It is no longer about the instantaneous; instead, Monet’s work acts as pictorial expressions equivalent to Bergson’s concept of duration (Winchell, 59).
In each of his Cathedral paintings, Monet elongates time into more than just separate instances. We might see evidence of this in one particular aspect of the paintings: the thick, heavy impasto layered onto each canvas like cream and butter is a mark of the many hours Monet spent with each of them (Figure 6). Le Portail, effet du matin has the most textured surface out of all the paintings: notice the thick whites and paste-like blues particularly at the vertex between the central tower and the Tour Saint-Romain (the tower on the left). This kind of technique was specifically developed for the Cathedral series alone. “The artist was, in fact, directly preoccupied with creating a granular, raised texture,” says Kaleigh Winchell. “Part of his preparation for the Cathedral series was to squeeze his colors onto blotting paper before applying them to the canvas in order to remove as much oil from the mixture as possible” (Winchell, 36). This dryer, stickier texture allowed Monet to “sculpt” with paint, slowly building up an architectural facade. For the Haystacks and most of his earlier work, Monet attempted to work in-the-moment, as quickly as possible, aiming to capture singular instances in time. This can be seen in the Haystacks’ short, quick brushstrokes, which are much more thinly layered than the Cathedrals’. With the Cathedrals, by contrast, Monet went through a long and arduous process of repainting, retouching, and revisiting each canvas. Based on his letters, his working day in Rouen would have lasted from around eight in the morning to six in the evening, layering and re-layering, sculpting and re-sculpting (Pissarro, 20).
Figure 6. A closeup of the paint applied on Rouen Cathédrale, Facade, 1894. Oil on Canvas. Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Monet thus continually revisits time in these paintings, working off past impressions and memory to unfold a new canvas. Time becomes long, fluid, an accretion. It is a work much more about extensive time and the extension of time than anything we might have previously seen from Monet. This is perfectly exemplified by his treatment of the clock hanging on the cathedral’s facade (Figure 7). The introduction of new time devices was a part of the rampant standardization and modernization of time happening during the 1880s. But Monet does not show a clock counting down the seconds: his clock is always glazed and blurred, rendered into just a circle of colors until it no longer looks like a clock at all. Thus, Monet avoids any sort of chronology, “divorcing sequences of time, dismissing the idea of a permanent reality” (Pissarro, 23). We are not measuring time, but experiencing time.
And yet Monet does not only find duration in each canvas; there is a different kind of spectacular time continuum found in the seriality of his Cathedrals (Figure 8). In having multiple iterations of the same subject, the experience of our viewing becomes entirely fluid. From witnessing one Rouen cathedral to another, our perception is repeatedly changed and changing. We are affected by what we have seen before and take it to the next cathedral: the images blend, blur, and build together, from separate images, into a fluid continuum of the real thing, the cathedral at all times of day, all at once (Bergson, 319). This is the continuous flux of duration. States of past, present, and anticipated future consciousness “mutually penetrate each other” and are bound together in a ceaseless flow, “each retaining something of what has just passed” (Bernier, 58). Thus Monet works in terms of Bergsonian duration, in each individual work and in the series as a whole, focusing not on glimpses but on a collection of perception which “exist cohesively in a time that is layered upon itself, much like the artist’s own collection of brushstrokes” (Winchell, 56). We are experiencing time in a way in which we are so immersed in it, we are beyond any sort of classification of what is past, what is present—time becomes timeless.
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