| This dissertation seeks to revise our understanding of Claude Monet's practice by attending to the dark, strange and exceptional paintings in his oeuvre. History remembers Monet more for his sunny and flower-filled subjects than for the somber and sometimes sinister paintings that complicate his practice and the Impressionist paradigm more broadly. This dissertation argues that Monet's most unusual paintings can help us come to a deeper understanding of the complexities and contradictions inherent in his quest tb capture light.;The paintings under discussion here date from before 1880, a year that is widely acknowledged to be a turning point in Monet's practice. In John House's terms, Monet's focus moved from "nature into art," surrendering its foothold in objective reality for the sake of surface unity.1 I aim to demonstrate the special complexity of arriving at this point. In so doing I hope to complicate Clement Greenberg's understanding of the arc of Monet's painting and of modernism more broadly as a linear progression from traditional illusionism to optical flatness.2 The paintings discussed here show Monet consistently and consciously wrestling with what this transition would require. Above all they reveal that Monet was much more than "only an eye,"3 as Cezanne once claimed.;Chapter 1 is devoted to analysis of one of Moneys earliest and least studied paintings, Coin d'atelier (1861), through which I explore the latent Romanticism and unexpected violence of Monet's early beginnings. I also investigate the relationship between painting and hunting in Monet's practice as it is evidenced in Coin d'atelier, arguing that the image posits a connection between painting and the pursuit of prey. Hunting is a leitmotif of this dissertation and, I argue, of Monet's practice.;Chapter 2 turns to one of Monet's most well-known and most unusual paintings, Le dejeuner sur l'herbe (1865-66), focusing on elements of it that have received relatively little attention from scholars. Among the themes discussed is Monet's engagement with the work of Watteau and with the ritual of hunting as practiced in the forest of Fontainebleau. Demonstrating how Monet's Dejeuner draws from the language of eighteenth-century paintings of the hunting party luncheon, I frame the work as part of a broader phenomenon whereby the hunt became a metaphor for the socio-cultural transformation actualized by the development of urban modernity.;Chapter 3 investigates Monet's paintings of his first wife, Camille Doncieux. While it has often been suggested that Monet cared little more for the people in his painting than for the leaves on a tree, I argue that Monet's approach to the landscape is in fact linked to his work with the figure of Camille. Tracing the development of Monet's paintings of Camille over time, I argue that her body was the human terrain across which Monet addressed broader questions of his practice.;Chapter 4 is devoted to the last painting of Camille that Monet ever made, Camille sur son lit de mort (1879), which has not been the subject of extended scholarly analysis until now. Underscoring the contrast between this painting and contemporaneous models of commemorating lost loved ones, I focus on Monet's attention to the invisible air surrounding Camille and her consequent effacement in this picture. In so doing I consider the work within a particular moment in French history when the invisible became the site of the interrogation of the limits of human perception.;In the final chapter I turn to a series of still lifes of dead birds that Monet painted in the wake of Camille's death. Like many of the paintings under discussion in this dissertation these particular still lifes have not been the subject of in-depth analysis. I argue that these paintings frame the act of making a picture in terms of life and death and ultimately reveal the singular driving force of Monet's painting to be the fact of its lying between these two states, bridging the divide between nature and morte, the two terms that structure the French conception of still life.;1 John House, Monet: Nature into Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 2. 2 See "On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting," in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 3Attributed to Paul Cezanne by Ambroise Vollard in his Paul Cezanne (Paris: Galerie A. Vollard, 1914), 88. |
