Monet, or The Artist as Silver Halide Surface
The longstanding way I’ve thought about Monet specifically, and Impressionist art broadly, is as a movement that sought to capture the ‘subjective experience of light and place,’ or as the movement’s name implies, the ‘impression’ of ephemeral light and color. This seems right to me, and yet…
Last week, I visited Potsdam and the Museum Barberini. The Barberini features approximately 70 Monet paintings from a private collection. I also visited the Deutsches Technikmuseum and spent especially long in the hall devoted to printing technologies—lithography, typesetting, and screen printing.
Lithography was on my mind in the Barberini, and I couldn’t help but read Monet through it. The Barberini gallery commentary supplies a few references:
Monet’s output was prodigious—37 paintings during a single 10-week trip
The Impressionist movement emerged at the beginning of mass tourism—trains stretching across Europe delivering a newly minted class of urban bourgeois to the Riviera, Venice, etc.
The technology of lithography is an antecedent to the emergence of postcards—mass artwork aiming to capture and recirculate the beauty of a holiday.
With this in view, maybe we can imagine a more debased path to Impressionism: a set of artists working to compete for mass public attention by presenting vistas with a fast and cheap technique. Monet is forming a light ‘impression’ in the same sense that silver bromide forms a light impression in a daguerreotype. A fast process that, in its very speed, opens up a new category of mass aesthetics.
The artist as silver halide surface.