The Painting of Modern Life by T.J. Clark

Author:T.J. Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

85. Claude Monet, Argenteuil, fin de l’après-midi, 1872.

86. Claude Monet, Le Pont de Bougival, 1870.

87. Claude Monet, Le Pont de péage à Argenteuil, 1874.

There are other pictures of a similar kind from the first three years: chimneys appearing at the end of a path between the vineyards, aligned with Argenteuil’s church steeple; chimneys in among reeds or almost lost in mist; smoke pouring from the funnel of a dredger or a barge, making freehand looped reflections in the water; floodwater or snow overtaking the promenade; flowers in the foreground of much the same scene, with the factories just above them in the distance, a vague grey against a pale yellow, smoke from the chimneys scrawled in lightly.44

There is a rule to these paintings, and it might be stated roughly as follows: Industry can be recognized and represented, but not labour; the factories have to be kept still, as if that were the guarantee of their belonging to the landscape—a strange guarantee in an art which pretended to relish the fugitive and ephemeral above all else. Industry must not mean work; as long as that fictitious distinction was in evidence, a painting could include as much of the nineteenth century as it liked. The railway, for instance, was an ideal subject because its artifacts could so easily be imagined as self-propelled or self-sufficient. The train went discreetly through the snow, in a landscape as wild as Monet ever found in the area (Plate XVI); the station yard was full of machines and empty of people; the railway bridge was a fine, civic, obligatory sight, looking its best for the visitors45 (Plate XVII). (Train passing over, smoke becoming cloud; boat passing under, sail just entering the shade. If only modernity were always like this!)

88. Claude Monet, Argenteuil, la berge en fleurs, 1877.

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