Claude Monet (1840-1926)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 10 of 13

Monet (1840–1926)
Painting Explores Impressionism
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 6, 1984

Transcript:

The date is September the 6th, 1984. This is the 10th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on the prelude to the twentieth century. Tonight's lecture is on Monet. M-O-N-E-T, who lived 1840 to 1926. Painting explores Impressionism.

This series is attempting to give the basement of the twentieth 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 Monet is characteristically easy to miss. Monet 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 as one of the pioneers of consciousness in our time. Monet is a direct link to the last three figures that we will take in this series. Next week we have Strindberg and the week after the great Phenomenologist Husserl and we close out this series with Marcel Proust. Monet begins the movement toward Proust. We need to keep in mind that Monet and Proust are contemporaries – that the sophisticated French flow of consciousness of A la recherche du temps perdu is present in Monet fifty years before Proust. 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 psychoanalytic approach which does us a great disservice by taking our focus away from Monet for instance. He dwells at length 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 borrow money almost daily to survive. He quotes from Monet's correspondence,

“My dear Monet,” Monet is writing to Manet…[Roger sneezes] Excuse me. The air conditioning. Is bringing it on. “My dear Manet. If it does not inconvenience you too much. Would you again advance me the feeble sum of sixty francs. I am between the paws of a country bailiff who can do me much harm.” [Roger addresses the room] Could we turn that off or down? The air conditioner is bothering me. I'm not sure how to tell you. Perhaps I could sit out of its Its air. Is there one down here also? No 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 sum 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 ten o’clock and noon. If the thing is not possible for me, send me immediately a word so I can search elsewhere. With regards Claude Monet.”

Manet of course. Elegant, urbane individual forwarded the monies to Monet and Merrill Mount 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 Hoschedé. Ernest Hoschedé who is the director of a of a department store in the Avenue of the Opera. He was a gracious enough to invite Monet to his house in the picture of Merrill Mount. And there was he said living in a dream world of all the opulence of the furnishings. A dream world of the wonderful family of children. Five beautiful children and the wonderful easy feminine charm of the matronly Alice Hoschedé. And then he goes on to paint a titillating picture by which Monet finally seduces the wife of his would be erstwhile 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 tending her for the last year of her life. Excuse me. This way of portraying a great man is really beside the point. It misses the individual. It misses why? Monet is a great artist like Raphael was a great artist. Someone for whom an entire epoch came into focus in his talent. There are easily a dozen artists from this era who deserve to be called first rate but it is Monet who styles the whole age. It is a very great man. How is this and how is this possible? He was born in 1840 in November. And at the age of five years his father who had been a grocer. Now you have to imagine not a grocery clerk but someone who handled the transmission of foodstuffs from produce 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 live. And there his father and his mother's relations entered into a very lucrative business outfitting ships with foodstuffs and candles. And so they were doing a very big business. You can imagine having the concession for airlines today the food concession. It's a very big business. But young Claude Monet did not fit into this family picture. 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 Monet, 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 six, seven, eight years old. We have to understand this phrase, 'freedom of the sea', an 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 Le Havre was for Monet the portal of the whole world, the wide world. From the security of his spirit relationship to the sea, Monet became to the perspective of other people withdrawn in a mischievous sort of way. He became a troublesome child. Very brusque, very forthright and very privative. By the time Monet was fifteen he had found a little business for himself which is interesting. He began drawing caricatures of people in his city, very poignant caricatures. And these were good enough to sell in an art shop in Le Havre. And from the age of fifteen to the age of eighteen; nineteen - Monet earned money for himself by selling these caricatures of people. He was able to have an accurate cynical perception of the varieties of human nature if you will, the core of the individual, the aberrant 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 sea. The shop in which he displayed his caricatures, and this is when you know that some large archetypal pattern is operating, was owned and run by an artist who had studied in Paris. In fact we have indications that there were many provincial French painters who were going into Paris to try their hand at painting. But Louis Eugene Boudin 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. 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 Gustave Courbet who had published quite recent to this. We're now talking about the late 1850s, a manifesto in which Courbet made it clear that an artist could present in a canvas a bunch of carrots and that this would be presenting a voracity 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 up. 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. And in living their own lives. It was the everyday 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 anew that scintillating grasp of the essence of our own lives and what is important to us here and now.

Rudin posted his amateurish paintings in the window of his shop and it just so happened that he posted them over the caricatures of the young Monet. And the young self satisfied Monet seeing this intuiting this ratio by which he was reduced to the common denominator of trying to support two bit canvases became angry. And he later in his old age said, “I was instantly angry and hated the man, I'd never met him…didn't want to talk to him.” And for over a year Monet seethed 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 caricatures. 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 his will, Monet met Boudin. We're not sure just how he convinced him but he bought Monet an artist's 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 Monet 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. And he said that day it 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 and the stone. Monet's sense of perception. The clarity of his regard, using the French word in an English way. The clarity of his regard was able to capture, and that's wrong not to capture, but to emphasize on an amphitheatrical 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 of the hand with the implements all of this became a part of a 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, 1864 1865 1866 are marvelous. What is in every canvas is the brisk weather today of the sea. And anyone who's ever been alive on an ocean coast can look at the Monet painting before him and see what kind of a day it was. Oh yes. We've been close to the sea in late October when the winds come up and it's cool. We've been next to the sea sultry julys where it seemed to just sigh with the air. All of Monet's 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 upon 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 a monet canvas, we are able to travel in that canvas perceptually and enjoy within ourselves the experience of that day…that hour; precise to the hour.

Wallace Stevens in 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 is forever the best example of what the occult metaphysician only aspires to. It is 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 Monet, 1858, actually show him looking very much like Kirk Douglas' son, Michael Douglas. Very much the same kind of a figure, very much the same sort of energetic exploring kind of manfully; developed youngster. Monet taking a cue from his now art friend patron Boudin finally got his father to appeal to the city fathers of Le Havre to raise money to send Monet to art school in Paris, Beaux-Arts 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 academies. The person is filtered down, funneled down, and taught to repeat by rote a kind of line shaping and mechanical shading in depth filling up of these line 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 being 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. It 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. Monet not only would not do it he could not do it. It simply was not anything he related to at all. Never did. So he took himself out of that picture completely. Yes he did traditionally study at one time for 17 months with a teacher, Gleyre. But Monet's artistic personality was never there in the classes. He was always out 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 alchemical medium by which he could dissolve the world of form and reprecipitate it out in terms of the balance of spiritual color so that the identifiable became transformed into what we would today term the mystical, a sense of unity. A sense that this composition is an accurate gauge of it all. That whatever is here is true and extends its veracity everywhere.

These thoughts of course were not yet formed for Monet. He almost never formed them in terms of theory or in terms of the kind of language which I now use for you. But what he did form was a sense of who was valuable in terms of their veracity in art. And his choice was very good. Renoir. His friend Bazille, Manet, Sisley, Pissarro and a few others. These became the companions of Monet. And later in his life he formed a very deep liaison in regard with Rodin. 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 Delacroix had gone to Algeria for the air and the sun. And he had seen in Delacroix's color how paltry the palette that Boudin had set for him. And once he had seen Delacroix's palette he realized that this was the dimension in which he was to spend the rest of his life in 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 for 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. And he committed himself as one commits oneself to a spiritual task completely; irrevocably. When he came back to Paris, after that, Manet had shocked the art scene in Paris. The salon had refused so many people in 1863 that there was a counter salon, the salon of the Refused artists. And Manet's Picnic on the grass stole the show. And Monet seeing this 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 saw it through Delacroix's palette and he blinked and saw it 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 telltale reverberation of what we today would call a kind of a light powder neon blue. 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 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 postures of the figures in the painting. It is a wonderful tribute to Monet's artistic capacity to be able to take something that only lasts 2 or 3 seconds at the most in a real concentrated very light samadhi but a very concentrated thought process for ordinary perception and to spread it out on a canvas which measured 20ft by 15ft and took him two years to paint. We get an 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 three hundred square feet over two years of working at something. And then characteristically he couldn't pay his rent 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 Monet came back to claim it a lot of it was corroded and they had to cut a couple of sections out. They cut one eight foot by seven foot section which later on when Monet came in to funds he bought and put on stretchers right in the center of his studio out at Giverny. The other sections in the Louvre today.

For 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 a depth 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 pizzazz to give it the scintillation of the moment.

A couple of years later he and his friend Renoir would try an experiment. They went out along the Seine 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 like two knights of the art world conquered this whole categorical labyrinth that had lain before the eyes of Western man for quite some time. And in searching around to try and find some artist who saw like they saw, they found one who was from Japan. His name was Ando Hiroshige. And they saw the Hokusai's and the Hiroshige 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 ukiyo-e print. Unschooled and undeveloped themselves they see a flat play of colored volumes that more or less cutely show the paper texture underneath. But Hokusai and Hiroshige are very great artists and their way of seeing is an indelible architectural construct.

If you look at Hiroshige's long enough intently enough you can learn to see in that way. You can look up from Hiroshige and go out and walk around and see the world through his eye. We use the singular here. The eye of the artist. Kandinsky would always talk later on about the language of the eye. Forget about the mind. The mind is filled with all kinds of junk including all kinds of expectations etc. etc. But the eye is wonderful. It can see the ear, it can hear. These are not redundancies. These are explications of an arcane process of coming back full circle to a primal conditionalist consciousness. And seeing that, Hiroshige especially, dealt with landscape.

Monet formed a bond, a union. Now Hiroshige had died about 1858 just about ten years before he ran across him. Monet's collection of ukiyo-e prints ran to several hundred and he had more than one hundred and forty Hiroshige's in that collection which is a phenomenal collection at that time. At any time at that time especially. And he had them up constantly. For in Hiroshige 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 and 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 composed. It's mysterious. Edward Weston will say later on, “composition is the strongest way of seeing.” 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 is no filter in between. There is no line shape getting in the way. There's no cross-hatched shading getting in the way. In fact the very education that usually is taught artists or any of us how to see, how to think, how to experience is the very education that gets in the way. It's the very obstructing veil that defeats the natural movement of consciousness to see, to hear, to experience.

For Monet he discovered along with Renoir, about 1869-1870, in that period that 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 worked with like the rice paper that Hiroshige and Hokusai worked with, registered what the eye actually saw. Not what we thought we saw, not what we thought we should see. One of the advice giving instructors to Monet said, “My dear Monet, you paint everything too natural, style is everything. Develop a style.”

For Monet, his style was the vivacity of the experience of seeing nature in terms of its amphitheatrical unity not separate from himself.

Then the Paris world, the French world, was interrupted by the fall of the Paris Commune. 1870- 1871. The Prussian armies occupied Paris came in to show the French how to set up house again and many of the young individuals in Paris trying to get away from the military draft went to various parts of Europe. Monet went to England. And there in England discovering J.W.M. Turner. Discovering that one could rise very early and look out on the foggy Thames and one could see a misty world and that the world of this mistiness was accurate to use a paradoxical phrase.

And so he began to paint in London. The the misty mystical with an accuracy that almost nobody had at that time. Not even Hiroshige, not even Hokusai. Monet discovered that he was at the top of the class of those few world artists who could see so indelibly clear that he could portray the mist on the River Thames at sunrise in all of its veracity. And he said then that 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 had 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 canvass the impression comes to you direct. It's not second hand. It's not critically distant as an esthetic experience upon which one could make esthetic judgments 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 as someone cross-hatching. What actually is there. I am delivering to he who can see the exact impression so that you too have that impression whole as if you were there. That you could stand in place of the artist at that moment at that time and that time and space are irrelevant to what is actually happening in terms of the composition of deep seeing. The time and space are irrelevant. What is relevant is the impression of color form.

He entitled one of his paintings simply “impression sunrise”. And from that the critical dis-acclaim. Labeled the movement impressionists. That's how they got their name.

There was only one real impressionist and that is Claude Monet. His friends were very close to him. And there are times when Renoir paints impressionistically. There are canvases by Pissarro that are impressionist but there's only one impressionist. Monet.

He's the lion in the garden. He simply was the one who did it 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 accouterment of the artist's craft. At the same time that his external life was actually being gotten rid of in just this fashion. It was just too ironical for words that the very inner process which he had to follow by his inner nature also dissolved 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 of a spiritual process penetrates every form.

Nothing is safe. So that the only guarantee of stability is the integrity of the procedure along that process. And all through the late 1870s Monet refused to let go of his mission, refused to let go of the assignment which he had 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, his so-called mistress's husband had gone bankrupt and had fled off to the continent and had left her with five children and she had to take in sewing just to survive. And Monet even though he didn't have any money at all took her and her children in so that she would have some place to be. She ended up sewing clothes for people that she had invited to soirees just a year or two ago.

The genuineness of the religious man, that under even extreme duress, even his whole sense of reality transforming in every identifiable stability of the world falling away, he was still man enough to take these people in. To hold these lives together and to see no kind of immorality in trying to hold those few human beings that he was responsible for together.

After Camille died, Monet and his fortunes began to improve slightly. There were people who bought canvases. There was a time when Monet wrote to Manet and said, “I will sell any canvases in my studio for ten francs. Because I have to have food for these children today. Today not tomorrow. Today.”

The people who look askance at Monet and say well how could a man beg like this? But 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 knights. She knows that they are genuine and she always comes to their rescue. They're in her spirit family. And Monet almost magically was led outside of Paris about fifty miles towards the coast along one of the little tributaries of the same. Èpte, is that the way to pronounce the little stream there? Giverny. At Giverny, 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 out and sitting in there. And with just a little bit of stability finally, Monet passed through the threshold of what art had been in the West and went into completely unknown terrain. 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, or the facade of the cathedral at Rouen and he would paint them over and over again. Differing 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 11:00 and such and such a day, and such and such a year, from such and such a standpoint? What was it like at 2:00 two weeks later? And he would hold in suspension in his artistic capacity these moments as they were. Fleeting 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. 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 1880’s, Monet was able to scrape together enough money and he bought the marshy swamp across the street from his farmhouse 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 a la Hiroshige a la the Japanese style. He even put a Hiroshige type arching Japanese bridge at one far end of this sequence.

And at last, about 1897 Monet had put into being a composition in the landscape that was like a miniature ocean of the eye. That's what those lily pond gardens at Giverny were. The whole ocean of this world was brought into a focus so clear that it was there in those series of lily ponds 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 ponds. 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 in 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 so Monet devoted himself for about twenty years at Giverny first two decades of the twentieth century to try to accurately present those lily ponds. 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. [Roger addresses the room.] These were oval canvases that were eighty feet long. That is to say the canvases were like the pond themselves. There were two great oval canvases that were made and the so-called viewer, the so-called spectator who comes into these oval rooms, these are the real oval offices, has the impression delivered before him of 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 get to any kind of comprehensive durational sweep of Monet's work. This is one index to the greatness of Monet's capacity.

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 Monet delivered. He not only experienced it, not only he 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 makes one what the Greeks call a “terrestrial hero”. Somebody who goes to the kingdom of the gods and then comes back for fellow man.

Some of the last photographs we have of Monet show the old man with the white beard, eighty-five, eighty-six years old, standing in front of his cinerama paintings looking very much like the Monet of twenty years before standing in front of the lily ponds themselves.

That transition in the early decades of the twentieth 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 had their successive heydays, Monet was rediscovered in the fifties. The great canvases and the sketches that went towards making these grand murals of reality were suddenly prized. Museums and individuals began to purchase these. And now some thirty years later we realize the just barely beginning to realize the true extent of Monet's greatness, his grandness. He's not an artist of a movement. Not an artist of a period. He's an artist who delivered the real. And one of the largest dimensions that we've ever had. Those eighty foot canvases of Monet are for us what The frieze around the Parthenon was for the Greeks. It is the holy procession by which we make our way to the Temple of Wisdom. And there the goddess herself gray eyed and 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-hatchings and it doesn't seem to have the paint by numbers order that we were told it should have.

It doesn't deliver itself in the nice little sequences of the textbooks. It exists en masse in toto instantly. Well I think we need a break.

That’s not very good color is it? These are slides I had made in 1970. I didn't think I'd ever have to press these into use again. But 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 that I had made in 1970. Some in San Francisco and some in Canada. So the color is off. So artistically they're not as valuable as they might be. This is skewed to the green.

Manet was a very cultivated individual. Manet and Degas were really the cultivated intellectuals of that whole art circle. And this painting by Manet raised the consternation level of Paris to sky high limits. I wanted to show you Monet's version but I didn't have a slide of it. This is in backwards I guess. No I guess this is right. This is of the same period as Monet's great painting déjeuner sur l'herbe. His wife Camille is the model for each of these figures. All four of those figures are Camille. Monet had a difficult time finally agreeing to marriage. Camille came from a very well-to-do family very civilized and cultivated and Monet always felt a little uneasy around her. With his second wife he didn't marry 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 side light 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 so that Monet could again be the center of attention.

It takes a while because Monet is so limpid so clear. You have to almost sink in by the eyes just sink into his work. This actually is not too bad in terms of color. 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 is an open boat moored before us 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, but Monet never makes a point out of it.

So many other artists or thinkers even for that matter who get to the level of Monet's capacities go overboard and try 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 Ouspensky, is that he hits you over the head with his system all the time. Instead of letting you play in this wonderful dimensionality 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 seeing in terms of its thematic possibilities of its metaphorical messages if you wish. But essentially we first have to let the eye play. And when you play with the eye if you start with her head and follow her gaze in the short diagonal across the focus of that picture you're immediately aware that there are other people watching her on the other side. Well it's that kind of discovery. You'll have to just take yourselves to the 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. But the eye has to move in terms of our consciousness which is the director of the composition and then everything will flow from that. All of the discovery modes yield themselves naturally. This is what Monet always insisted upon that he was a natural painter. He painted nature not so much from nature, but delivered 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 soirees that were being held. The scene here has calmed itself down and Renoir delivers us in the Impressionist style in that moment.

Monet in London just a year later. The naive sensibility comes to a work like this, a 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. When you come upon an original it will seize you. The canvas itself is alive.

The Thames at sunrise. Impression Sunrise 1876. There is an enormous leap. Between Turner and Monet. Turner will give you speed and steam. Monet gives you the relationalities the proportions. In their total configuration. It's what Salvador Dali 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 is simply a unity. The maximum speed of the real is a unity. So that it would seem to be changeless to the temporizing reflective mind but, to the eye of the artist in fulsome consciousness. It is as Monet would express it, an impression. If we try to see this in art school terms, we miss the work. We miss 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 tilt our heads to the left a little and squint our eyes just a little. Monet is investigating impression. The impression. It is not a Rorschach pattern. The synaptic queue of the water reflecting the upper part. The air part of the composition here has its reverberation in the way in which we see that work. Is that work? Water in terms of how we're seeing it is the canvas a reflection of our minds? Is our esthetic experience a reflection of that canvas? How are they related? Monet will deliver the experience that they are related because they form a continuous experience.

Here's Renoir's portrait of Monet painting in the garden. The canvas is not just a camera before the artist to record the scene that's there on some medium. Photograph, a painting. It is not even further a prism through which the artist registers the display before him and freezes it in this prism so that when we look at it we play it back out again. Probably the first 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 beginning.

Here's Monet painting the Seine. About the time that his wife Camille was extremely ill. Yes. The Seine has snow in Paris in winter. But the impression here is not limited to winter time. It's not limited in location to Paris. There is a winter of the world. There is 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 ice. 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.

This is what he looked like about 1875. Now this is by Renoir. This in fact is interesting. It's an impression of Monet. The relationship between the eye and the hand here is primordial. If the eye is having to look at the hand, one is already lost. Art will never spring forth. The East Asian tradition would say you have to paint from two feet behind the shoulder. The eye has to look through the hand so that the hand has to become transparent. This is a phenomenon in meditation that comes up from time to time. The feeling of the transparency of forms and 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 eye of Monet.

This was painted just as his wife was dying. And it's interesting here to see the subject matter first of all. A man's wife is dying. The creditors are literally chewing up any funds that are coming in as fast as they come in. There are seven children to watch. The painter of nature of landscapes is chosen to paint the industrial wasteland. But again delivers it accurately. What is clouded here, occulted here, is the natural sky by the steam of the engines. And even in this composition the open amphitheater of the heavens themselves are portioned out by this steel structure forcing an angle on the angleless. 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 sixty years ago.

This is one of the series I had hoped to give you a whole series of one of Monet's works. This is the cathedral Rouen. I used to use this in the symbols course back in the early 70s. And you can do a lot with this whole series. This particular series by Monet. We can because of our technology. Not all of it is bad. We can superimpose in montage the various times of the facades upon one another and that gives us an interesting interplay also.

I think this is our our last slide. 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 motion of color. It's difficult to see where the water ends in a reflection of the sky or the grass waving becomes lily pad or is just a reflection of it. All of the different differentiating levels of habitual seeing have been brought into such a sharp focus that they exist together. They form a composition of unity. And this as a possibility will haunt the twentieth 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 did, 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 the pablum of the mind and we wish to mature and grow through it. So the next three individuals that we'll see will tamper with the mind to try and tease out of it some structure or some destructuring that will allow the real to occur. We'll take Strindberg who attempted to even chronicle his own supposed 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 its habitual hold. It's almost like the old Sinbad the Sailor story of the old man who is on our necks 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 obsession. How to either compose or destroy the mind enough to allow the real to occur as it really is. And then getting quite surprised at what these tamperings bring. So we'll see Strindberg next time who tried to go a step even beyond Ibsen and did and was shocked by it.
Thanks for coming out on such a hot evening.

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