The Enveloping Air: Light and Moment in Monet (Selections)

by John Berger

There are doubtless many ways of taking in the marvelously arranged exhibition of Claude Monet currently at the Grand Palais in Paris. The visitor can follow it like walking along a country path, along coastlines and through forests, a path that eventually leads to Giverny, where the painter created his beloved garden and tried, again and again in his old age, to paint his famous Nymphéas. The nature this path leads us through is very recognizably French – as is the term Impressionism – a nature that entices you to fall in love with the France of a hundred years ago…

… Monet is traditionally thought of as the master, the monument, of the Impressionists, who were inspired by new subjects they discovered out of doors in the natural light brought on by the time of day and the weather. Their aim was to seize a vision of passing moments, often happy moments. Light and color took precedence over form and narrative, and their art was based on the closest observation of ever-changing atmospheric effects. They both celebrated and contested the ephemeral. All this in a cultural climate in which Positivism and Pragmatism counted for a lot. Monet painted the façade of Rouen Cathedral thirty times, each canvas seizing a different and new transformation as the light changed. He painted the same two haystacks in a field twenty times. Sometimes he was satisfied, often he was frustrated. Nevertheless he continued, searching for something more, determined to be more faithful, but to what? To the passing moment?

Like many innovative artists, Monet, I believe, was unclear about what he had achieved. Or, to be more precise, he could not name his achievement. He could only recognize it intuitively, and then doubt it…

… Monet once revealed that he wanted to paint not things in themselves but the air that touched things – the enveloping air. The enveloping air offers continuity and infinite extension. If Monet can paint the air, he can follow it like following a thought. Except that the air operates wordlessly and, when painted, is visibly present only in colors, touches, layers, palimpsests, shades, caresses, scratches. As he approaches this air, it takes him, along with his original subject, elsewhere. The flow is no longer temporal but substantial and extensive.

The air takes him and the original subject where then? To other things it has enveloped or will envelop but for which we have no fixed name. (To call them abstract is only to give them the name of our ignorance.)

Monet often referred to an instantaneity he was trying to seize. The air, because it is part of an indivisible substance that is infinitely extensive, transforms this instantaneity into an eternity.

The paintings of the façade of the cathedral in Rouen cease to be records of fugitive effects and become replies to correspondences with other things belonging to the infinitely extensive. And in this way the envelope of air that was touching the cathedral is permeated both by the painter’s painstaking perception of the cathedral and by a confirmation of those perceptions received from places without an address…

… In rethinking Monet I want to suggest that visitors to the exhibition see the canvases there not as records of the local and ephemeral but as vistas onto what is universal and eternal. The elsewhere, which is their obsession, is extensive rather than temporal, metaphoric rather than nostalgic.

One of Monet’s favorite flowers was the iris. No other flower demands so forcefully to be painted. This has something to do with the way they open their petals, already perfectly printed. Irises are like prophecies, simultaneously astounding and calm. Maybe that’s why he loved them.

This article appears in its entirety in the January 2011 issue of Harpers Magazine