Claude Monet - Gare St. Lazare

Claude Monet, Self-portrait, 1886

For Monet, the 1880's were a time of contemplation, doubts and a search for new avenues for his art.  He wanted to broaden his horizons, be able to reach new markets outside of Paris, find new avenues for the representation of nature caught in the transient moment and indulge his wanderlust.  There was also the issue of Georges Seurat and his followers who were trying to change the direction of the avante-garde art movement.  Monet was a well-known artist who had made a reputation for himself and wanted to go on pursuing new goals and taking Impressionism to the next level. This self-portrait with the furrowed brows and askance expression Monet painted around this time, seems to visualize his self-questioning.




Monet had to reassert Impressionism as the leading avant-garde style and reinforce his position as the leader of the modernist movement.  In order to do this, he set himself with very taxing goals and traveled in search of new places to paint and capture the light illuminated off these new landscapes.  His search led him to concentrate on specific sites and the differing conditions of  atmosphere.  At this time he started to paint the same landscape from different aspects that the critics started to call his series paintings.  But preceding his series paintings, Monet had already been thinking of making multiple paintings of the same subject when he had painted The Gare St Lazare ensemble in 1877.   These 12 painting were done over time and not meant to be exhibited together.  He had rented an apartment nearby and was given permission to paint by the train tracks.  He would start his paintings on site and then finish them in his studio.  Although these were focused extensively on one motif, they were differing perspectives some showing the trains under the shed, some showing the building behind the shed and in some smoke covering and rendering the shed invisible.  Some could even be classified as an interior space while others had the outside and inside feeling at the same time.

Claude Monet, The Gare St-Lazare, 1877
(National Gallery, London)

Claude Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare:  Arrival of a Train, 1877
(Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Claude Monet, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877
(Musee d'Orsay)

Claude Monet, Le Pont de l'Europe, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877
(Musee Marmottan-Claude Monet, Paris)

                                                  http://smarthistory.org/france-1848.html

From studying a site in detail and painting it from different points of view, Monet would go on to paint the same exact site from the same exact point of view making the subject secondary to the effects of atmosphere in his Grainstack Series.

Renoir's La Loge and Morisot's At the Ball

             

               Pierre-August Renoir, La Loge, 1874                                                              Berthe Morisot, At the Ball, 1875

                 (The Courtland Gallery, London)                                                                   (Musee Marmottan, Paris)

In Renoir's La Loge we see a cocotte sitting at the front of the box at the opera in front of a man who is probably her benefactor, her face painted white, lips red, displaying a generous bosom for all to see accentuated with the flowers she wears to display her cleavage to its best advantage.   She is in a garish black and white dress that would have drawn attention to her even from a distance.  Renoir has painted glistening pearls around her neck and white flecks in her eyes to further idealize her for the male viewer.  She is holding a pair of  binoculars; her accessories complete her decorativeness to the man sitting next to her.  She has an unfocused, vapid gaze, a passive looker, aware of being objectified.   The man sitting next to her, on the other hand, is looking out at the audience with his binoculars, not even paying any attention to her.  

Berthe Morisot was probably aware of Renoir's La Loge when she painted At the Ball in 1875 since they were acquainted and she would invite him to the salons she held for her artist friends on Thursdays, at her house in Bougival.  Even though Renoir was of middle class origins while Morisot was from the upper class, their shared passion for art, enabled them to become friends.  

In Morisot's painting we see another woman in an evening gown, wearing flowers and very little makeup.  She is in a dress that is subtle and the flowers are not to draw attention to herself but to symbolize her innocence.  She is a respectable, wealthy female at a ball.  Her sideways, assured, contemplative gaze informs the viewer that she is a thinking woman.  There is nothing in her eyes that tells us what she is thinking but  she has a meditative expression and this is probably a scene out of Berthe Morisot's own experience.  

The literature of Modernity describes the experience of men.  According to Baudelair "... (women are) objects of a keenest admiration and curiosity that the picture of life can offer to its contemplator. She is an idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching...  Everything that adorns woman that serves to show off her beauty is part of herself..."  Griselda Pollock in her essay Modernity and The Spaces of Femininity, has made a grid using Baudelair's theories about the position of women as the object of the flaneur's gaze and their representation by the artists of the time according to their gender.  While male artists had access to ladies as well as fallen women at the theater, park, cafes, folies and brothels, female artists only had access to ladies of fashionable society and  children to be represented either at the theater, park or at the home.  The opera and the ball were two places that were above the grid of respectability making it available to both genders.1 

Like Cassatt, Morisot painted the inner world of the upper class female.  Baudelair's explanation of the stupid, beautiful, adorned woman is visualized in Renoir's La Loge while Morrisot seems to be making a contradictory statement of her own in her painting, At the Ball,by showing for all to see that a woman who is beautiful could also be a thinking woman too.  

1.  Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, The Expanding Discourse:  Feminism and Art History, (Westviewpress, 1992,) 255-258