Friday, July 07, 2006
Monet, Nature, and Art
Yesterday, I went (again) to the Monet exhibit currently being shown at one of the major museums here (just down the street from me, actually.) I have been quite impressed by this collection. It is more than mere art. To begin with, it clearly and impressively illustrates exactly what happened when art turned from the dark tones of the previous era to the brilliant, luminous, light filled canvases of the impressionists. It is one thing to read about this shift in books. It is quite another to stand before it and contemplate its many depths and nuances. (The originals by the way are infinitely more powerful than the bland reproductions of the famous water lilies you so frequently encounter in the dentist's office.)
This show was extremely powerful. First of all, Monet clearly loved nature on a very deep level. He was (I am convinced) a nature mystic of a high order. He had a profound connection with the "spiritual essence" of what he saw, and he captured the scene so that it seems to be somehow "lit from within," like a stained glass window with the light simply pouring through. And he was not afraid of beauty.
These two attributes set him well apart from many of our "post-modern" painters, whose work seems to be more an intellectual exercise or an experiment in chaos than a presentation of that which speaks to the soul of the viewer. In the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, poets and writers such as Wordsworth and Thoreau sensed that there was a divine power or presence behind the surface appearance of the natural world. The sensibility of the nature mystic has now gone out of style--instead of connection with, there is a pervasive deconstruction of--and many, I fear, don't even know what this experience--of oneness, of being filled with delight and wonder at nature's presence--is.
In cutting ourselves off from nature in this way, we lose an important part of our human capacities. In the universities, such perspectives (as Monet's) would be dismissed as "hopelessly romantic" and naive. High art disdains the mystical in favor of the--what?--maybe the analytical, the revelation of the nothingness and meaninglessness beneath the surface. Since meaning no longer exists, the artist focuses instead on surface and texture and arrangement and color--the "abstract" as opposed to the concrete and recognizable world from which we construct our lives and which (for some, at least) resonates with "intimations of immortality". In much of popular culture, the audience is confronted only with massive doses of destruction and violence. Our world sometimes seems to have turned from beauty to the pursuit of sensationalism.
I am very old fashioned. I like to stroll through a forest or beside a mountain stream and enter into an altered state--I think of it as a state of wonder or joy. I like to experience exaltation. I love Monet. He is the real deal. He reminds us of who we are.
This show was extremely powerful. First of all, Monet clearly loved nature on a very deep level. He was (I am convinced) a nature mystic of a high order. He had a profound connection with the "spiritual essence" of what he saw, and he captured the scene so that it seems to be somehow "lit from within," like a stained glass window with the light simply pouring through. And he was not afraid of beauty.
These two attributes set him well apart from many of our "post-modern" painters, whose work seems to be more an intellectual exercise or an experiment in chaos than a presentation of that which speaks to the soul of the viewer. In the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, poets and writers such as Wordsworth and Thoreau sensed that there was a divine power or presence behind the surface appearance of the natural world. The sensibility of the nature mystic has now gone out of style--instead of connection with, there is a pervasive deconstruction of--and many, I fear, don't even know what this experience--of oneness, of being filled with delight and wonder at nature's presence--is.
In cutting ourselves off from nature in this way, we lose an important part of our human capacities. In the universities, such perspectives (as Monet's) would be dismissed as "hopelessly romantic" and naive. High art disdains the mystical in favor of the--what?--maybe the analytical, the revelation of the nothingness and meaninglessness beneath the surface. Since meaning no longer exists, the artist focuses instead on surface and texture and arrangement and color--the "abstract" as opposed to the concrete and recognizable world from which we construct our lives and which (for some, at least) resonates with "intimations of immortality". In much of popular culture, the audience is confronted only with massive doses of destruction and violence. Our world sometimes seems to have turned from beauty to the pursuit of sensationalism.
I am very old fashioned. I like to stroll through a forest or beside a mountain stream and enter into an altered state--I think of it as a state of wonder or joy. I like to experience exaltation. I love Monet. He is the real deal. He reminds us of who we are.
