Impressionist Painters

If the two Sherpas were Impressionist painters, the older man would be Renoir, and the younger Monet.

In 1869, both of them – Monet, Renoir – were still poor, and no one had ever uttered the word impressionism. One day they arrange to meet in La Grenouillère, quite a small town some seventy kilometres from Paris. A sort of seaside resort with no sea where the bourgeois go for their recreation in the summer. On a bend in the Seine, the vital forces of La Grenouillère had managed to lend the town an identity: a summer escape close to the metropolis, but just far enough to detach from the gravitation of flourishing capitalism and the fetid vapours still expelled by the cadaver of the Ancien Régime almost a century after its death.

How or why Monet and Renoir decide to paint the same thing is not known. In a letter to Frédéric Bazille, then a pre-Impressionist painter himself, Monet writes: ‘I have a dream: a painting, the bathers at La Grenouillère. I’ve already done some bad sketches, but it’s just a dream. Renoir, who has been here for two months, also wants to paint the same picture.’ A year after receiving this letter, Bazille enlisted in a Zouave regiment, went to fight against the Prussians, surrounded by descendants of Algerians, and died in battle.

But it isn’t the tragedy of Bazille that is directly and intensely linked to the two Sherpas who are watching an Englishman on the mountain, but rather Renoir and Monet. The two artists who now put their easels next to each other choose a similar point of view and begin. Impressionists paint quickly. That’s a policy of theirs. Speed. A charm that prefigures industrialisation. They don’t take long to finish their canvases or to compare their works.

Neither one of them is a wonder. Neither Monet nor Renoir has reached full maturity. Impressionism is just now taking its first steps. It does not yet have a bed, or banks, or a direction. It only barely has any tributaries. From one side, Delacroix and his progressive abandonment of the dictatorship of the plane in favour of the body of the brushstroke; his contempt for Neoclassicism. His most famous work, Liberty Leading the People, may not be a good example. But Horse Frightened by a Thunderstorm is a breakthrough work: the clouds, ominous and without outlines, a bolt of lightning, a few zigs and zags that are nothing but light, the deformity of the terrified white equine, the contortion of his neck… The entire painting is a challenge. From the other side, we have Courbet and his realism, his contempt for just about everything. In this case, it is worth pausing on his most famous work: The Origin of the World. A naked woman lying down. A woman whose face and feet are out of the frame. A woman’s body between breasts and thighs; and, in the centre of the canvas, the cunt. In the forest of foregrounds, taking exclusive priority. There are sheets in the painting, nipples, a belly button. But no one doubts that it is the portrait of a cunt. Épater le bourgeois circa 1866: the painting remains almost hidden for a century. It is first purchased by a fan living in Montmartre, then by an antiques dealer, then it ends up in a gallery. There it is bought by a Hungarian baron with artistic pretences, who takes it to Budapest. It becomes part of his private collection, but only until the city is occupied by the Nazi army, which seizes it and notes it down in the inventory of their looting. At the end of the war, the Red Army finds the painting and returns it to the Magyar aristocrat. Jumping the iron curtain, the baron settles in Paris, returning the painting to its native land. At auction, he sells his Courbet for one and a half million francs. The buyer: Jacques Lacan, who secretly takes the painting to his country home. Lacan keeps the painting until his death. Finally, the French State takes it for itself as a down payment on the inheritance taxes and hangs it in the Musée d’Orsay, in 1995, where it can still be seen today.

But nor is it The Origin of the World, or Courbet, or Delacroix, that forms the radical and pristine link with the two Sherpas who are peering into the abyss of the Himalayas; rather, it is Monet and Renoir. We must place our focus on the simultaneous contemplation of their two canvases. Two works that – by mutual agreement, it would appear – their creators title almost identically. Monet calls his Bain à La Grenouillère; Renoir, just La Grenouillère. Two minor works, it must be repeated, by two titans of nineteenth-century art. The contemplation, then, not of the two images, but rather of that simultaneous contemplation. Or perhaps not simultaneous, but at least alternating, oscillating. Until a third image is born from the consecutive vision of these two paintings painted on the same day in the same place and before the same landscape.

In the distance, a century and a half away, what is interesting about these pieces is their conversation. The two pictures don’t look that different from each other at first glance. In both, a group of bourgeois enjoys a summer day along a river. On the right, a sort of gazebo that is nothing other than the outer gallery of a floating café, the most profitable business and the main attraction of La Grenouillère. From there, a footbridge connects the café with an islet. A dozen people dispense with civility under the only tree on that little Elba, or Saint Helena: all islands are important to the rise of the French bourgeoisie. On the left, a group of bathers with naked torsos swim in the river. In the foreground, an inarticulate set of boats, a concise river armada, more like a tourist fleet, ephemeral, adrift. In the background, a line of trees mark the edge of the river. Lindens, we might say, if we were being guided by Renoir’s gaze. Poplars per Monet.

It is obvious that in Renoir’s work there is a greater degree of detail: the hats of the gentlemen can be distinguished, the bows that encircle the women’s waists, the parasols the girls carry that enliven the riverbanks in the midsummer heat… The colouring of the painting decants into half a dozen shades of green. Renoir is delicate. He would like to be fully impressionistic, but he’s too delicate. There seems to be an effort to brutalise his brushwork in this painting. An effort evidently insufficient. It’s not enough for him to twist the mimetic direction of Western tradition. There’s something that’s stronger than he is. He is, against his will, overly adapted.

Monet’s picture, on the other hand, is nothing but splotches. Yes, that is a leg, and that is a bather looking out at the water, and that must be the short bridge that leads to the islet. Yes, it can all be understood. But that doesn’t make them anything but splotches. Yellow and sky blue, and largely black (though some furiously red diagonals give their all in the lower righthand corner, from the edge of a little boat). Splotches: impressionist euphemism once launched at the speed of modern art. The canvas no longer serves a cartographic purpose: it seeks not to miniaturise the hollow of the perceptible. Heuristic rather than mimetic, the brush is unleashed and, in that liberating gesture, it becomes a bit solipsistic.

Flabbier, less lucid, but also friendlier, Renoir’s painting preserves the deliberate effort to leave a testimony to the spirit of the age: the clothes of the bourgeoisie, their hairstyles, what they ate and drank. A panegyric on the new era. He even paints a scantily clad servant carrying a tray of refreshments to the bathers. Following the inspiration of Baudelaire, that generation’s mainstay, Renoir acts as a portraitist of modern life. He thus establishes a relationship with his historical locus. Renoir wants to be a chronicler. With religious images and mythological hyperbole in exile, he is able to paint what he sees.

Meanwhile, in Monet’s work there is one obsession: light. Each component of the painting is an excuse to establish a new anchor point in that unfinished argument between Monet and light. He is motivated by the debate on the possibilities of art. He doesn’t claim to paint portraits, to immortalise what stands before his eyes, but rather an idea, a concept, a capacity for expanding the bounds of representation to the point of ripping it apart and leaving it for dead. They will have killed it soon. And representation will be reborn. Three days later. And they will put on another crucifixion. But it will be back. And so on, all the time. Until it becomes boring, pointless.

But for now, Monet and Renoir swap places, study each other’s paintings; let us assume they praise each other. Then they fold up their easels, put away their tubes, wash off their brushes and return to Paris. Twenty, eighty, a hundred and fifty years pass. Two Sherpas look down; an Englishman, his body still. The two Sherpas look down on the nadir while Monet’s painting hangs on a wall in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, on Fifth Avenue, and Renoir’s painting is shown at the Nationalmuseum of Stockholm, 6,300 kilometres apart.