When I first moved to the city two and a half years ago, I decided that I needed to be really cultural and avail myself of all the opportunities that New York has to offer to someone who cares about creative expression. I also had no money, so I immediately began to hunt for ways to become a culture hound on the cheap. One of those ways was not getting a membership to the Museum of Modern Art for a year (75 bucks), but I did that anyway. Not really knowing anything about art, art history, or history in general, I wasn't sure how long a person was supposed to stand before a painting and ponder it, or how much that person was supposed to think about things like the artist's background, color composition, images vs. abstractions, etc. I usually looked at a painting for about twenty seconds and merely tried to appreciate it. I've never actually had a class in art appreciation though, so even that was sometimes difficult. I remember walking into the "Water Lily" room my first time at MoMA. It's on the 5th floor, which is all paintings, and it's dominated by Monet's Water Lilies, which is about twenty feet long and eight feet high, so it's pretty hard to miss. It's a great painting, but the one that really took my breath away was behind me. Agapanthus is a painting of flowers that are similar to water lilies but, if Monet is to believed, infinitely more colorful and textured. I wish I had the right words to describe the glory of this painting but, once again, my lack of art education speaks for itself. I just think it's really, really cool. And with that, Monet became my favorite painter.
Since then I've done my best to actually learn a little bit about him and become more familiar with his work, since I don't want to be one of those people who has a favorite painter but doesn't know his first name or has never seen more than a couple of his paintings. There aren't very many of his works at MoMA, but I've taken in a few more at the Met, and I also have three prints of his hanging on my wall (if anyone can find a poster with Agapanthus on it, by the way, that would make a fantastic gift for me. I could only find the less spectacular Water Lilies and Agapanthus). I love his vivid colors and the way he captures clouds and water. He's an Impressionist, so technically he's supposed to be portraying a moment in time, but of all painters I've seen he is the one who best creates movement.
Soon after deciding Monet was going to be my favorite painter, I read a review of the book The Private Lives of the Impressionists, by Sue Roe. This was shortly after I moved to New York, so I hadn't yet become the champion book buyer that I am today, and I pretty stupidly ordered that book, even though it was still in hardcover and I was in no hurry. So for about two years it's sat on my shelf, taunting me, making fun of me for pretending to be highbrow and cultural enough to buy a book about art (in hardcover no less), and then phony enough to let it sit there, unread. Finally, I am proud to say, I have remedied this situation.
It took me about a week to read this book, and that is mostly because I wanted to get it over with. Not to say I didn't enjoy parts of it, but it felt a little like a textbook for a class I didn't want to take. Sue Roe is very journalistic in her approach, and it seems like her intent was to weave the facts of these eight or ten lives together into a coherent narrative without commentary. Every so often she waxes poetic when she describes the scenes they painted, but other than that her writing is very straightforward. This is not a criticism; trying to turn it into some kind of complicated historical fiction story wouldn't have served the work very well. But it also made it kind of tough to plod through. For the first chapter or so, I had to reread almost everything, and I kept having to turn back to remind myself who everyone was. Maybe I'm revealing my incompetence as a reader of history, but when you keep bouncing back and forth among a lot of different people, it gets confusing. Once I got past that point, though, I really enjoyed learning about how the Impressionists interacted and what their lives were like. It was a little depressing; France in the mid-19th century is not a place you or I should desire to be. There were a lot of uncurable diseases, the Franco-Prussian war left significant scars on Paris and the surrounding landscape, and people had a really hard time keeping their families together. Monet fell a little bit out of favor with me as I read that he (and most of his friends) had mistresses and illegitimate children, and that most of them also kept these families secret from their parents so they could continue to live on allowances from their fathers. Apparently, being an artist is hard. In the end, though, it was enlightening to learn more about the circumstances under which these works were created and I felt a deep appreciation for the camaraderie the Impressionists had. If nothing else, artists have to stick together, because if no one else believes in you it's very hard to believe in yourself.
Song In My Head: "O Holy Night." Well. It's Christmas.
Up Next: Nineteen Minutes, by Jodi Picoult
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