Word: monet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...door to the Swallowtail opens and there stands Saionji, good man that he is, as skilled a butler who ever buttled. He takes our coats and bags and shimmers away, leading us down the corridor past gilded mirrors, Monet prints and bursting bouquets to our table in the Swallowtail's elegant tearoom. As I move to sit at our table, a second butler, named Mikami, materializes to ease me into my chair. "Good day, princess," he says to my dining companion--and not, I assume, to me. I order the Earl Grey tea and the Macbeth--a petite...
...Monet worked in the Netherlands not just in 1871, but again in 1874 and 1886, and biographers offer wildly varying accounts of that first, life-altering Japanese print he bought: it was in Amsterdam, or Delft or Zaandam; at a food shop or a porcelain store; it was being used as wrapping paper or hanging on a wall. Monet himself recalled: "My true discovery of Japan, the purchase of my first prints, dates from 1856. I was 16. I spotted them at Le Havre, in a shop that dealt in curiosities brought back by foreign travelers." But even here...
More rewarding is to speculate about how art opened Monet to Japan. Printmaking is a more cumbersome and less forgiving process than painting, so Japanese artists developed a remarkable economy of expression. Utamaro, for instance, could with a mere line or two describe the course of a river or the fullness of a women's breast. Thus could Monet - in Impression, Sunrise (1873), the painting that gave Impressionism its name - conjure up a boat with a mere squiggle of the brush...
...Monet also shared his Japanese predecessors' fascination with nature and informal scenes of everyday life: compare Monet's two girls at the beach in Les Cousines (1870), downstairs at the Marmottan, to Utagawa Toyokuni's Three Women on a Boat Lamparo Fishing (before 1825), upstairs. Monet's snowscapes, like those he did of Argenteuil, are indirect descendants of the snowy fields and mountains of Hiroshige and Hokusai. The unconventional, asymmetric "snapshot" composition favored by ukiyo-e artists became a hallmark of Impressionism: a good example is the Marmottan's La Barque (1887), in which Monet places the barque, or boat...
Perhaps the greatest gift Japan gave Monet, and Impressionism, was an incandescent obsession with getting the play of light and shadow, the balance of colors and the curve of a line, just right - not the way it is in reality, but the way it looks in the artist's imagination. "I have slowly learned about the pattern of the grass, the trees, the structure of birds and other animals like insects and fish, so that when I am 80, I hope to be better," Hokusai wrote 16 years before his death at age 89. "At 90, I hope to have...