Claude Monet (1840-1926)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 10 of 13

Claude Monet (1840-1926)
Painting Explores Impressionism and Ukiyo-e
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 6, 1984

Transcript:
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The date is September 6th, 1984. This is the 10th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger, where on a preload to 20th century, tonight's lecture is on Monet, M O N E T, who lived 18 48, 19 26. Painting explores impressionism. This area is, is attempting to give the basement of the 20th century to look at the foundations and the structure, and some of the difficult aspects of our time become visible. In the most unexpected places. Tonight, we have Claude Monet and Manet. He is characteristically easy to miss. One a has been famous and disregarded several times over the last century, his fame and his disregard have been for irrelevant reasons, irrelevant to the actuality of Monet's work. And his true significance is one of the pioneers of consciousness. In our time. Manet is a direct link to the last three figures that we will take in this series.
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Next week we have Strindberg and the week after the great phenomenologists who throw, and we close out this series with Marcel Proust, one a begin the movement toward proofs. We need to keep in mind that Monet and Proust are contemporaries that the sophisticated French flow of consciousness about library associated to Tom Pardot is present in Monet 50 years before Paris. It's a long time. It's difficult to imagine what pioneering human beings are like in their personal life. The external portrait of Monet is a wicked fence that keeps us away from the person. There are biographies. I brought this one by Charles Merrill Mount as an example of the lukewarm approach, the segment analytic approach, which does this a great disservice by taking our focus away from Manet.
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For instance, you do all of that links in his biography on Monet. On the fact that Monet had a very difficult time psychologically with people in particular with women. And in connection with that, his economic sense with men was distorted. He uses the phrase to sum up his position each according to his ability to Monet, according to his need dwelling on the fact that Monet had to at a critical stage in his life, borrowed money, almost daily to survive. He quotes from Monet's correspondence. My dear Monet Monet is writing to Manet, excuse me, the air conditioning and said, bring it on my dear Manet. If it does not inconvenience you too much, would you, again, you advanced me the people thumb of 60 francs and between the paws of a country bailiff who can do me much harm, could we turn that off or down?
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The air conditioner is bothering me, perhaps I could, uh, set out of its, uh, it's air. Is there one down here also? No, I'm fine. It's just, I'm sitting right under the cold air. I am between the paws of a country bailiff who can do me much harm with this. Um, I can make a part payment with him. He has given me until tomorrow at noon. Try to help me out of this. I will pass by your house tomorrow morning, or I will send someone between 10, 10 o'clock and noon. If the thing is not possible for me, send me immediately a word so I can search elsewhere with regards quad one, a Manet of course, elegant urbane individual forwarded the monies to Manet and Merrill goes on to give us more extracts from more letters, painting the picture of the beggar Monet cannibalizing, his friends finally alienating his friends, giving us the portrait of Manet, introducing Monet to every purchaser of paintings that he knew. And finally brought him into contact with a wealthy businessman named a host today, earnest who's today, who is the director of, uh, of a department store on the avenue of the opera.
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He was gracious enough to invite Monet to his house and the picture of Meryl Mt. Yeah, there was, he said living in a dream world of all the opulence of the furnishings, the dream world of the wonderful family of children, five beautiful children and the wonderful, easy feminine charm of the matronly Alice has today. And then he goes on to paint a titillating picture by which Monet kindly seduces the wife of his would be earth while financier patron, and finally, Camille Madame Monet, falling ill with the last childbirth has to endure the final humiliation of having her husband's mistress with her five children, move in with them outside of Paris. And they're attending her for the last year of her life. Excuse me, this, um, this way of portraying a great man. Yeah. Is really beside the point it misses the individual. It misses why Monet is they great artists like Raphael was a great artist and someone for whom an entire epic came into focus in his talent.
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There are, are easily a dozen artists from this era who deserve to be called first rate, but it is Monet who styles. The whole age is a very great man. How is this? And how is this possible? He was born in 1840 in November at the age of five years, his father who had been a grocer, you have to imagine not a grocery clerk, but someone who, um, handled the transmission of foodstuffs from produce, uh, central to customers on quite a large scale. And at the age of five years in 1845, when his family moved to the coast to Leon and there his father and his mother's relations entered into a very lucrative business outfitting, uh, ships with foodstuffs and candles. And so they were doing a very big business. You can imagine having the concession for airlines today of the food concession, this is a very big business, but the young Claude Monet did not fit into this family picture.
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Sometimes children don't fit. They are not the children of their physical family. They belong to spirit families. They come in extra charged and the meaningfulness of their relationship in human terms is not to be found in their families, but in their friends, in particular, in the close companionship of certain friends for money, schooling was just intolerable to him. He couldn't sit still for several hours at a stretch. And in later life, he portrayed himself as having found the freedom of the sea as a boy, 6, 7, 8 years old. We have to understand this phrase, freedom of the sea and almost Homeric terms. When we think of Monet, someone for whom the sense of adventure was implicit in every mysterious bend of the shoreline, the disappearing horizons of the water leading clearly out into the grand world, undifferentiated by national boundaries that the coast at Lehigh was for Manet the portal of the whole world, the wide world, okay. From the security of his spirit relationship to the sea, when EY became to the perspective of other people with drawn in a mischievous sort of a way, he became a troublesome child, very brusque, very forthright and very private too.
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By the time when I was 15 and he had founded a little business for himself, which is interesting. He began drawing caricatures of people in his city, very poignant characatures. And these were good enough to sell again, an art shop in LA and from the age of 15 to the age of 18, 19 Monet earned money for himself, by selling these characters of people, he was able to have an accurate cynical perception, the varieties of human nature. If you will, the core of the individual, the abberant detailings that reveal in a few strokes of the pen, a person, a characteristic of someone intensely personal in order to render this Monet had achieved an openness in himself by his kinship, with the seat to shop in which he displayed. She has characatures. And this is when you know that some large architectural pattern is operating, was owned and run by an artist who had studied in Paris. In fact, we have, uh, indications that, uh, there were many provincial French painters who were going into Paris to try their hand at painting, but Louise Eugene Bruden had gone to Paris and had come back to his home city, realizing that he probably wouldn't be a great painter, would not be able to enter into the salons.
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His personal theory of art was that it should be practiced out of doors and that the subjects should be natural landscapes. In fact, he was influenced by Gustaf coral bay who had published quite recent to this. We're now talking about the late 1850s manifesto in which coral bay made it clear that an artist present in a canvas, a bunch of carrots, and that this would be presenting a veracity that exceeded any imitation of classical or Renaissance models, no matter how well they were drawn, no matter how polished the execution, because something had changed in the nature of man, he had grown, uh, he had grown away from the handed down second hand, third rate models by which people had lived for centuries, if not for millennia. And they were now in possession of a type of personal regard where they could live their own lives.
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And in living their own lives, it was the every day world around them. That was important to them. And that art should present this everyday world to these new people, because the function of art is not to hum us worn out lullabies of a dead past, but to present to us a new that sent the lighting grasp of the essence of our own lives and what is important to us here and now food in posted his amateurish paintings in the window of his shop. And it just so happened that he posted them over the character chairs of the, um, Monet and the young. So satisfied Monet, seeing this intuiting, this ratio by which he was reduced to the common denominator of trying to support two bet. Canvases became angry and he later and his old age that I was instantly angry and hated the man.
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I'd never been him. Didn't want to talk to him for a year one, a seat at the fact that he was coupled with some amateur who just by virtue of owning the shop was able to display himself next to Monet's wonderful satirical caricature, and what was worse. These were just simply scenes of the beach, which anybody could see. And they were not even anywhere near close to the sense of adventure that really existed by the sea. How dare this man do this and accidentally one day against as well, Monet, Nat boudin. We're not sure just how he convinced him, but he bought Monday, an artist set, took him out, got him to go out along the beach. The keys of the coast there at that time were not overbuilt as they are today with the sprawl of the city, set up his palette, set up his easel and told him just to let himself go. And Manet. I said, staring at the man and then staring at his work and then suddenly looking up and seeing what was also familiar to him. He knew all about the sea. The sea had been his father and friend since a little boy, why?
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And he said that day, he was like a veil torn from my eyes. He said, I understood what art was, what painting was. And from that time forth, he never again did caricatures. The canvas opened up for him in a vision. It was like a talisman waiting for the king. It was the sword in the stone Monet's sense of perception. The clarity of his regard using the French word in the English way. The clarity of his regard was April to capture and that's wrong not to capture, but to empathize on an app of theatrical scale with the natural setting so that the canvas became an extension of Monet's experience and the oils, the palette, the brushes, the motions, all of the hand with the implements, all of this became a part of the visionary experience. All those early canvases by Monet were lost, but the earliest ones that we have dating from just a few years after this 18 64, 18 65, 18 66 are marvelous. What is in every canvas is the brisk weather today. I see.
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And anyone who's ever been alive on an ocean coast can look them in a Monet painting before him and see what kind of a day it was. Oh, yes. We've been close to the sea and late October when the winds come up and it's cool. We've been next to the sea salt tree, July, where it seemed to just sigh with the air, all of monies paintings from these middle 1860s have a special flavor. And the flavor is conveyed by the sense of spatiality, which is imminent in the painting. We are given the canvas, as it were a window, the interior experience that we would have viewing the sea and the canvas is what we would register in our imagination in our mind seeing it so that when we face I'm on a canvas, we are able to travel in that canvas, perceptually and enjoy within ourselves.
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The experience of that day, that hour precise to the hour Stevenson. One of his poems, the idea of order at key west said the artist's capacity to measure precisely to the hour, the self that was the sea and the sea, whatever self it had became the self that she singing made. It's a magical transformation, a great artist forever. The best example of what they all called metaphysicians only aspire as to who's the great artist who actually transforms the seeming perceptual representation of the world into the essential world, in which we actually live early pictures of Manet, 1858, actually show him looking very much like Kirk Douglas, his son, Michael Douglas, very much the same kind of a figure. Very much the same sort of energetic exploring kind of men, fully developed youngster. They taking a cue from his now art friend, patron boudin finally got his father to appeal to the city fathers of Lucha to raise money, to send money to art school in Paris Bazaar.
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I imagine when he got to Paris this first time, he realized that the schools had nothing for him because what the schools were doing were caging the perception of the students in the kind of false education that always seems to happen in the traditional academy. The person is filtered down, funneled down and taught to repeat by wrote a kind of line shaping and mechanical shading in depth, filling up of these flying shapes. And that however, while one was able to produce was the gauge of how well you were doing in your artistic education. All of this was irrelevant to Monet. All of it is irrelevant to any human bank seeking to understand themselves and the world. These are the little senseless tasks of teaching people, how to pick the locks on other people's cages. So you can walk in and close the door. It has nothing to do with self-development has nothing to do with the world. It has everything to do with filtering down and funneling down the human being. So they fit in to someone else's cogs, someone else's machine one a not only would not do it. He could not do it. It simply was not anything he related to at all never did.
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So he took himself out of that picture completely. Yes, he did traditionally study at one time for 17 months with a teacher, they are right. Nice artistic personality was never there in the classes. He was always out in the, in the apartments with the other young artists or out on the street yearning to get back into nature, yearning, to get back close to water. And there's something important about water for Monet all through his life. It's like the chemical medium by which he could dissolve the world of form and re precipitated out in terms of the balance of spiritual color. So the identifiable became transformed into what we would today. Term the mystical sense of unity. I sense that this composition is an accurate gauge of at all that whatever is here is true and extends its veracity everywhere.
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These thoughts of course were not yet formed for a Mornay. He almost never formed them in terms of theory or in terms of the kind of language which I now now use for you. But what he did for him was a sense of who was valuable in terms of their veracity and art. And his choice was very good. Renoir, his friend, Bazil, Manet, Sisley, Pizarro, and a few others. These became the companions of Monet. And later in his life, he formed a very deep liaison in regard with a road down, he left Paris going back to his ocean to try to find his way again. He returned back to Paris after a stint in the military, the French military, he went to Algeria. Why did he go to Algeria? Because Della claw had gone to Algeria for the air and the sun.
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And he had seen in Della cross color, how poultry, the palette that boot Dean had set for him. And once he had seen Della claws palette, he realized that this was the dimension in which he was to spend the rest of his life and work. So he took the hint from boudin to work out of doors. Almost nobody did Constable I think occasionally Turner, perhaps, but never to finish a canvas to make sketches, but from four Monet, then the living experience in nature itself became the scene of art, not the studio and not the salon and not especially the conversation about art, but only the practice of it.
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And he committed himself as one commits oneself to a spiritual task, completely eroded her complaint. When he came back to Paris. After that, that Manet had shocked. The art scene in Paris salon had refused so many people in 1863, that there was a counter Salaam. They still honor the refused artists. Hmm nanays picnic on the grass, stole the show [inaudible] and understanding a like-minded spirit, someone who would just step outside the frame of reference very well. This is the frame of reference for them. Let them have it. I will dance here and all around, but he's thought through Della clause palette, any linked and thought through his own soul, we have to use that term. Now, if you've ever fallen asleep in the sun, full sun an hour or two, and upon waking go into a light meditation, you will find that the sunlight has penetrated through even the closed eyelids and that there is a tell-tale reverberation of what we today would call a kind of a light powder, neon blue.
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And if you hold a form in your imagination, it will structure itself out with highlights of this light powder blue. And if we look at Monet's painting, as I think we have a slide of it, of his picnic on the grass, trying to display his loving, Manet's stepping out of order, but showing him how to do it. For real, we find that this neon light powder blue highlights all of the major positives of your figures in the painting. It is a wonderful tribute to Monet's artistic capacity, to be able to take something that only lasts two or three seconds at the most, he had a real concentrated, um, very light somebody, but a very concentrated, um, thought process for ordinary perception. And to spread it out on a canvas which measured 20 feet by 15 feet and took him two years, we get index and a gauge into Manet's intensity and commitment to be able to take two seconds of a fleeting vision and put it into 300 square feet, over two years of working at something and then characteristic way, he couldn't pay his rent.
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And he left the painting as collateral. The landlord rolled it up and stuffed it in the basement. And a couple of years later, when minute Monet came back to the claimant, a lot of it was corroded and they had to cut a couple of sections out. They caught one eight foot by seven foot section, which later on when he came into funds, he bought and put on stretchers right in the center of his studio. I didn't give her any of the other sections in the loop today for a Monet. That painting was a sign of his coming of age. He knew then by 1866, that he could do it. He had the capacity to see with adapt of vision. That was almost unheard of in his time and the artistic capacity to hold it into the slow motion process of unfolding it onto canvas and to do it with enough desires to give it the scintillation of the moment.
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A couple of years later, he and his friend Renoir would try and experiment. They went out along the sane and they set up their canvas, their easels and their canvases side by side. And the two of them painted exactly the same scene with the same artist technique and talked over their perception and vision and Monet and Renoir together. The life two nights of the art world conquered this whole categorical librarian that had lain before the eyes of Western man for quite some time and in searching around to try and find some artists who saw like they saw, they found one who was from Japan. His name was Ondo Hiro Shiga, and they saw the hook size and the hero Shige that came into Paris in the late 1860s. And they realized that they saw the way they were seeing to most people who look at a Yukio print, unschooled and undeveloped themselves.
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They see a flat play of colored volumes, but more or less cute Les show the paper texture underneath, but Hochstein and Hiroshi are very great artists. And their way of ceilings seeing is an indelible architectural construct. If you look at Hiroshi gaze long enough, intently enough, you can learn to see in that way, you can look up from Hiroshi and go out and walk around and see the world through his eye. We use the singular here, the eye of the artist, Kandinsky, what always talk later on about the language of the, I forget about the mind. The mind is filled with all kinds of junk, including all kinds of, of expectations, et cetera, et cetera. But the eye is wonderful. It can see the ear that can hear these are not redundancies. These are explications of an arcane process of coming back full circle to a primal conditionalist consciousness.
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And seeing that Hiroshi gate, especially dealt with landscape one, a formed a bond, a union here, she had died about 1858, just about 10 years before he ran across him. When his collection of Yukio II prince ran to several hundred and he had more than 140 hero's Shakey's in that collection, which is a phenomenal collection at that time at any time at that time, especially had, he had them up constantly for in Hiroshi gate. One also has landscape as it is the hidden structures by which the eye actually sees by which the eye moves the way in which color form cues, a progression on that. We always see when we see in terms of a composition, there is no such thing as seeing formlessness one always sees a composition, even if there is nothing to see it is it's mysterious. Edward Weston will say later on composition is the strongest way of CA meaning that when you train the eye consciousness comes into play as a composer of patterns on the basis of some primordial unity between the observer and the observed that they are together. They are the same. There's no filter in between.
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There's no line shape getting in the way. There's no cross hatch shading getting in the way. In fact, the very education that usually is taught artists or any of it, how to see how to think, how to experience is the very education that gets in the way. It's a very obstructing veil that defeats the natural movement of consciousness to see, to hear, to experience for Monet. He discovered along with Renoir about 18 69, 18 70 in that period, but they were in a very small select group of individuals who actually could experience the world with such a clarity that the canvases that they work with, like the rice paper, that Harish again, hook side, worked with a registered what the, I actually saw, not what we thought we saw, not what we thought we should say. One of the advice giving instructors to Monet said, my dear Monet, you paint everything to natural style is everything develop a style for a Monet.
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His style was the vast city of the experience of seeing nature in terms of its empathy. Attrical unity, not separate from himself. Then the Paris world, the French world was interrupted by the fall of the Paris commune 18 70 18 71. The Prussian army occupied Paris came in to show the French how to set up the house. And the young individuals in Paris, trying to get away from the military draft, went to various parts of Europe when they went to England and in England discovering Jane M. Turner discovering that one could rise very early and look out in the foggy Tims. And one could see a Misty world and that the world of this Misty knows with accurate to you as a paradoxical frame.
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And so he began to paint in London, the, the Misty mystical with an accuracy and almost nobody had at that time, not even Hiroshi, not even hook. So Monet discovered he was at the top of the class of those few world artists who could see. So indelibly Claire, that he could portray the mist on the river. Thames had sunrise in all of its veracity. And he said them, but this was not an idea. It was not a perception, but was an impression, an impression, meaning that he had registered, what was there he'd simply registered it. He had not tampered with it. He had not stylized it. This was what was there. And I registered the impression accurately and give it to you. So that through the canvas, the impression comes to you direct, it's not second hand, it's not critically distant as an aesthetic experience upon which one could make a authentic judgments.
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Finally, it was simply the transmission of the impression without any one in between art critics would say, this is foolish. You can't talk this way. The classical and the Renaissance technique is well known. The artist interprets to his audience and it goes through the artists. And that's why it's so great. And Monet would say, this is not. So for me, I am not here as a filter. I am not. Here is someone cross hatching. What actually is there. I am delivering to he who can see the exact impression so that you to have that impression as if you were there, that you could stand in place of the artist at that moment. At that time, time and space are irrelevant to what is actually happening in terms of the composition of deep sea. The time and space are irrelevant.
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What is relevant is the impression of color form. He entitled one of his paintings, simply impression, sunrise. And from that the critical dis uh, claim labeled the movement impressionists. That's how they got their name. There was only one real impressionist, and that is Claude Monet. She has friends. We're very close to him. And there are times when Renoir paints impressionistically, there are canvases by Pizarro that are impressionist, but there's only one impressionist Monet. He's the lion in the garden. And he simply was the one who did, but could not theorize about it. And in fact, while he was doing this, his external life was just dissolving before him. He was having all these financial problems. He was having the problems with his wife, getting more and more sickly. And with the birth of their last son, she only had about a year to go and he was absolutely distraught. And yet he was trying to form inside of him at this time, that purity of inner being that would allow the impressions to come through so that he would not be there. He was trying to get rid of the self, trying to get rid of the ego, trying to get rid of the accoutrement of the artists' craft at the same time that his external life was actually being gotten rid of in just this fashion.
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It was just too ironical for words, that the very inner process, which he had to follow by his inner nature also dissolve the physical social world in which he lived. He realized that one does not play with divine fire. You don't do it part time. You don't do it on the installment plan. If you have accepted that way, then you have to live by that way. That's why there are monasteries. That's why there are retreats because you realize that the echoing effect, the reverberation on the spiritual process, kind of trades every form, nothing is safe. So that the only guarantee of stability, the integrity of the procedure, along that process and all through the late 1870s, when a refused to let go of his mission, refused to let go of the assignment, which he has accepted as a youngster, which he had reiterated to himself as a young man and throughout the late 1870s, finally, even Camille dying in September, 1879, yes so-called mistress's husband had gone bankrupt and had fled off to the continent and had left her with five children.
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And she had to take in sewing just to survive and Manet, even though he didn't have any money at all took her and her children in. So she would have some place to be. She ended up sewing clothes for people that she'd invited to as far as just a year or two ago, the genuineness of the religious map that under even extreme duress, even his whole sense of reality transformed me and every identifiable stability of the world falling away. She was still mad enough to take these people in, to hold these lives together and to see no kind of immorality and trying to hold those human beings that he was responsible for together. After Camille dine Monet and his fortunes began to improve slightly. There were people who bought canvases. There was a time when Manet wrote to Manet and said, I will sell any canvases in my studio for 10 francs because I have to have food for these children. But today, today, not tomorrow today, the people who look askance at Renee and say, well, how could a man beg line? Yes.
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Well, when you have seven children and you have to feed them today, you have to do something about that today. But mother nature loves her nights. She knows that they are genuine and she always comes through rescue there in her spirit, family and Manet almost magically was led outside of Paris, about 50 miles towards the coast long. One of the little tributaries of the same day is that the red to pronounce the little stream, then give her name. Had you ever been a, he was able to purchase a little farmhouse that had an orchard around it and set to work, planting vegetables, raising fruits, bringing the children out, bringing his lady and setting in there. And with just a little bit of stability, finally, one a, I asked through the threshold of what art had been in the west and went into completely unknown terrain.
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He became a pioneer. He began by discarding, everything that he had done and began to paint in series. He would take subjects like a haystack or a Grove of poplars for the facade of the cathedral that ruin. And he would paint them over and over again, different hours of the day, different days. He would take himself there as accurately as he could. And he would deliver the impression, what was it at 11 o'clock and such and such a day in such and such a year from such and such a standpoint? What was it like at two o'clock two weeks later? And he would hold in suspension in his artistic capacity, these moments as they were pleading, as they were hold them in suspension and recreate them on canvases methodically, going through his pattern, and then insisting that when they were displayed, they were displayed together in a series.
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So what he was presenting was no longer just the art of a canvas to decorate something, but he was presenting a threshold and a pathway of spiritual realization towards the end of the 1880s, when EY was able to scrape together enough money. And he bought the marshy swamp across the street from his phone house, farm house, across the road, it's all rural in that area. And he began building a series of little dams they're called weirs and diverting this little stream just enough so that he created a series of beautiful Lotus ponds, Allah Hera, shaky, and allow the Japanese style even put a hero shaky type parching Japanese bridge at one far end of the sequence at last about 1897, when they had put into BA a composition on the, in the landscape, that was like a miniature ocean of the eye. And that's what those Lily pond gardens that you Rene, where the whole ocean of this world was brought into a focus.
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So clear that it was there in those series of Lily pons. One could see the water. One could see the reflection carried by the surface of the water. One could see through the water to the bottom of the pond. One could see shadows on the bottom of the ponds from something floating on the surface. One had many levels so-called levels, but essentially what you had was a composition. Again, unraveling the veils of perception through the veracity of the eye, a meditative technique that is deserving of the name, yoga, what is the principle of yoga? If you bring into balanced operation, any aspect of a human being, all the other aspects will order themselves around that. That's the principle of the maypole. All you have to do is set one straight line in this universe and every other pattern that ever existed or will exist, orders itself, courtesy of nature, free of charge and sell them on a devoted himself for about 20 years at GE Renee.
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First two decades of the 20th century to try to accurately present those Lily pons. And finally realized that the dimension that he would need were oval canvases that were like Cinerama canvases, that ran, I guess they need to know these were oval canvases that were 80 feet long. Let us to say the canvases were like the pond themselves. There were two great oval canvases that were made and the so-called you or the so-called spectator who comes into these oval rooms. These are the real oval offices has the impression delivered before him, how the whole cosmic pattern of reality presented knit together, composed in that Lily pond canvas. And one can walk and experience that vibratory integration in terms of its completeness. What's immediately apparent is that we tire long before we got to any kind of comprehensive durational sweep of Monet's work. This is one index to the greatness capacity.
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We carry in a lot of sophisticated meditative stances, and yet after two or three hours, even that begins to tire and we still haven't covered what, when they delivered, he not only experienced it, how many was able to reach out like a great grand Pappy of the world and touch the perimeters of this composition, but was able to deliver it, hold it in suspension and painstakingly over decades, actually bring it out to pass. It's very difficult to even reach this, but to be able to deliver this for others, it makes one what the Greeks call a terrestrial hero. Somebody who goes to the kingdom of the gods and then comes back for a fellow man. Some of the last photographs we have of Monet. So the old man with the white beard, 85, 86 years old standing in front of his Cinerama painting looking very much like the Monet of 20 years before standing in front of the Lily ponds themselves.
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That transition in the early decades of the 20th century made for Monet, not only an experiment in consciousness, but completely transcended what we know as art history, after the art movements of the twenties and thirties and forties there, six sets of hay days, one a was rediscovered in the fifties, the great canvases and the sketches that went towards making these grand murals of reality were suddenly prize museums and individuals again to purchase this. And now some 30 years later, we realize the just barely beginning to realize the true extent of Monet's greatness. She has grandness. He's not an artist of a movement, not an artist of the period.
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He's an artist who delivered the real one of the largest dimensions that we've ever had. Those 80 foot canvases of Monet are for us. What the frees around the park nine was for the grapes. It is the holy procession by which we make our way to the temple of wisdom. And there are the goddess herself gray. I didn't even delivers to us the EGIS of the, the Gorgon and the owl in harmony so that we may live in peace in such an expanded universe that when most ordinarily educated people discover it, they think that they've gone crazy because it doesn't fit in the lines and it doesn't have the cross at Jenks. And it doesn't seem to have the paint by numbers order that we were told it should have it doesn't deliver itself. And the nice little sequences of the textbook, it exists online in Toto instantly.
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We all, I think we need a break. That's not very good color. Isn't these are slides I had made in 1970. I didn't think I'd ever have to press these into use. Again. We tried everything to get fresh slides for you for tonight and everything got in the way at every corner. So these are old slides. I had made a 1970, uh, some in San Francisco in seven Canada. So the color is off. So artistically they're not as valuable as they might be. This is skewed to the green man. He was a very cultivated individual Manet and they got where really they cultivated intellectual. So that whole art circle and this painting by Manet raise the consternation level of Paris to sky high.
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[inaudible]
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Let me just show you Monet's version, but I didn't have a slide of it.
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This is in backwards, I guess. No, I guess this is right.
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The same period as Manet's, um, great penny vision, a through letter. Um, he has wife. Camille is the model for each of these figures. All four of those figures are Camille. Okay. Well, they had a difficult time finally agreeing to marry, um, Camille from a very well-to-do family, very civilized and cultivate one a always felt a little uneasy around her with his second wife. Then he didn't matter her until about 12 or 13 years after they had been living together, bringing up the children together. And one of the older daughters was getting married and Monet by this time was world famous and everybody was coming out to his place. And he realized that because he wasn't technically married, that he was no relationship at all, technically to the girls so that he wasn't even supposed to be invited to the wedding. So he couldn't stand the fact that he was sort of a sidelight in his own home. He loved to be master of the house. So he, he took Alice by the hand and went out and they got married that day. But could again be the center of attention.
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It takes a while because Monet is so limited. So clear. You have to almost think in by the eyes, just think into his word. This actually is not too bad in terms of visually, in terms of theme, the composition is quite accurate. We, as viewers are sitting there not only by the mirror-like stream of life, but there was an open boat more before it's ready to take us. And there are dwelling places on the other side, all those metaphors work. And what's so great about Monet is that you can see them work without having to force it or fudge it. And button Monet never makes a point out of it.
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So many other artists or thinkers, even for that matter, who gets to the level of Monet's capacities, uh, go overboard. Yeah. Tried to bombard us with the wonderful universal structures, which they're able to see and discern. And one of the really difficult aspects of someone say like a spin ski is that he hits you over the head with his system all the time. Instead of letting you play in this wonderful dementia reality that has been uncovered. Well, Monet here lets us play through the eye, but in order to play, we have to tutor ourselves to be at home in our eye. We can carry out the thing in terms of its sematic possibilities of its metaphorical messages, if you wish, but essentially we first have to let the I play. And when you play with the eye, if you start with her head and follow her gaze in the short diagno, across the focus of that picture, you're immediately aware that there are other people watching her on the other side.
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Well, it's that kind of discovery. You would have to just take yourself to Los Angeles county museum of art, where they have the great impressionists show now and go and see them in person, go and see some of these canvases in person and just let your eye play. And very often for a Monet, he is like the director delivering us the story. And we are not so much actors in the story, but directors and we're directing the composition and is the movement of our eye. Then that becomes the actor with the eye has to move in terms of our consciousness, which is the director of the composition.
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And then everything will flow from that discovery mode yield themselves. Naturally. This is what Monday always insisted upon that. He was a natural painter. He painted nature, not so much from nature, but a deliberate nature. This is not by Monet, but by Renoir. But there is a painting by Monet that is almost identical to this. They were painted the same time from the same relative position. The two easels were up right next to each other. Contiguous it's one of these little soiree that were being held. The sane here has calmed itself down and Renoir delivers us in the impressionist style Monet in London, just a year later, the naive sensibility comes to a work like this, the canvas like this, especially in a photograph of it and dismisses it very quickly. We pass over it. We gloss over because we have been miseducated so often so deeply. We have to almost force ourselves to go back, go back and stay there. Be there with that work. It's a little easier to be there with the work when you're there with the original.
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When you come upon an original, it will seize you.
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The canvas itself is alive. The Tim's at sunrise impression, sunrise 1876. There was an enormous leap between Turner and Monet. Turner will give you speed and steam Monet gives you their relationality, the proportions in their total configuration. It's what Salvador dollar Dolly would later on in the 1960s called the maximum speed. Reality is the maximum speed. And it is at that speed, not moving at all, but as simply a unity, the maximum speed of the reel is the unity so that it would seem to be changeless to the temporizing reflective mind, but to the eye of the artist in Folsom consciousness, it is as Monet would express it and impression, if we try to see this in art school terms, we, we missed the work. We missed the composition, probably the best way to disorient the habitual categorizing approach to a work like this is to turn it on its end. So if we tell her heads to the left, a little squint, our eyes, just the level Renee is investigating the impression. The impression is not a roar shot pattern. This sematic cue of the water, reflecting they offer apart. The air part of the composition here has this reverberation in the way in which we see that work, does that work water in terms of how we're seeing it is the canvas. A reflection of our minds is our aesthetic experience. A reflection of that canvas. How are they related when they will deliver the experience that they are related? Because they form a continuous experience. [inaudible]
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Wire's portrait of Benet painting in the garden. [inaudible] The canvas is not just a camera before the artists to record the scene that they're on some medium, photograph a painting. [inaudible] It is not even further a prison through which the artist registers the display before him and freezes it in this prison. So that when we look at it, we play it back out again.
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[inaudible] probably the first
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Step of breaking. These kinds of patterns of perception is to think of that canvas displacing in terms of the real that garden, but even that is insufficient. And in beginning here's one a painting the same
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[inaudible]
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How about the time that his, uh, wife Camille was extremely ill? Yes, the sane has snow in Paris in winter, but the impression here is not limited to winter time. It's not limited in location to Paris.
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[inaudible]
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There is a winter of the world. There's a winter of our life cycle. Many of them, this is a moment in that regard, there was a period in Monet's life, in the 1880s, where he was suddenly needing to see ice. He'd seen flowers, loved flowers. He suddenly needed to see, he went to Norway on an expedition to go up and down in the fjords and to see the quality of light coming through ice.
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[inaudible]
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This is what he looked like about 1875. No, this was by Renoir.
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[inaudible]
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Attract is interesting. It's an impression of
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One, a the
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Relationship between the eye and the hand here is a primordial. If the eye is having to look at the hand, one is already lost. Art will never spring forth.
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[inaudible]
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The Asia tradition would say, you have to paint from two feet behind the shoulder and the eye has to look through the head. So if the hand has to become transparent phenomenon in meditation, that comes up from time to time. The feeling of the transparency of forum, what becomes transparent is that the mind no longer remembers to classify and to order. And the real appears without its clothing. This is the, I have one, a, this was painted just as his wife was dying. And it's interesting here to see the subject matter. First of all, man's wife is dying. The creditors are literally chewing up any funds that are coming in as fast as they come in. There's seven children to watch
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[inaudible]
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Painter of nature of landscapes has chosen to paint the industrial wasteland, but again, delivers it accurately, uh, clouded here, I'll call it here. You have the natural sky by the steam of the year engine. And even in this composition, they open amphitheater of the heavens themselves are portioned out by this steel structure, forcing an angle on the angle Renoir towards the end of his life said in the 1920s, he said, you can't believe those of you who did not know before the machine age, what a joy it was to be alive, to live with other human beings without the machines portioning out life. For us, that was 60 years ago. This is one of the series I had hoped to give you a whole series of one of Manet's work. This is the cathedral
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[inaudible]. I
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Used to use this and, um, the symbols cars back in the early seventies. And you can do a lot, um, with this whole series with particular series by Monday. Okay. And because of our technology, not all of it has been, we can super impose among monetize the various times of the facade upon one another. And that gives us, uh, uninteresting, uh, interplay. Also, I think this is our, our last ride. I just didn't have that many. This is a section towards the end of his life. I think this was done during the first world war. Almost all of the form has been absorbed by the emotion of color.
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It's difficult to see where the water, um, and a reflection of the sky or the grass waving Lily pad, or is just a reflection of it. All of the different, different shaming levels. All habitual seeing have been brought into such a sharp focus that they exist together. They form a composition of unity and this, yeah, a possibility will haunt the 20th century that human beings have the capacity to experience the universe as a whole instantly will increasingly dominate our century. So the next three individuals that we have will begin to sense as Monet dead, that there is something graspable in terms of consciousness, beyond what the mind portions out to us and that we are fed up with just accepting pablum of the mind, and we wish to mature and grow through it.
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So the next three individuals that will say we all camper with the mind to try and keys out of it, some structure or some de-structuring that will allow the real to occur. We'll take Strindberg who attempted to even Chronicle his own suppose going insane. And then we'll see in the next two weeks after that two other great individuals attempting to trick the mind into giving up, yes, habitual whole. It's almost like the old Sinbad, the sailor story of the old man who was on our neck and who directs us to go, and we want him to fall asleep so we can get free. And there must be some way in order to do this. And this becomes an obsession just as the 20th century comes in. Our time, comes in with this subsection, how to either compose or destroy the mind enough to allow the real to occur as it really is. And then getting quite surprised that what these tampering bring. So we'll see Strindberg next time, who tried to go a step even beyond him dead. And he were shocked by thanks for coming out on such a hot evening.

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