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CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926) Argenteuil, fin d'après-midi signed "Claude Monet" (lower center right) ...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:5,000,000.00 - 7,000,000.00 USD
CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926) Argenteuil, fin d'après-midi signed Claude Monet (lower center right) ...
CLAUDE MONET
(1840-1926)
Argenteuil, fin d'après-midi
signed "Claude Monet"
(lower center right)
oil on canvas
23 5/8 x 31 7/8 in. (60 x 81 cm)
painted in Argenteuil, 1872
Estimate: $5,000,000-7,000,000 <p>Provenance
Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired dierctly from the artist in 1872)
Maurice Masson, Paris (sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, June 22, 1911, lot 22)
Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired at the above sale)
Comtesse Joachim Murat, Paris (acquired in 1912)
Marquis de Ludre, Paris
I. Montaignac, Paris
Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York
Mrs. Bernard F. Combemale, New York (acquired in 1956; sale: Christie's, London, November 27, 1964, lot 42)
Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York (acquired at the above sale)
Jack Lasdon, New York (acquired in 1964)
Lawrence Lever, New York (estate sale: Christie's, New York, May 15, 1979, lot 12)
Mr. and Mrs. Ralph C. Wilson, Jr., United States
Anon. sale: Christie's, New York, November 14, 1990, lot 13
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner <p>Exhibited
Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Collection Maurice Masson, February-March, 1911, no. 22
New York, Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Claude Monet, Seasons and Moments, March-August, 1960, no. 12.
New York, Acquavella Galleries, Inc., Exhibition Claude Monet, October-November, 1976, no. 11 (illustrated in color) <p>Literature
Camille Mauclair, Claude Monet, Paris, 1927, p. 61 (illustrated, pl. XIII)
Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Biographie et catalogue raisonné, Lausanne, 1974, vol. I, p. 210, no. 224 (illustrated, p. 211)
Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet, Catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1996, vol. III, p. 690, no.1579 (illustrated, p. 689)
"When you leave Paris and make an excursion into the suburbs, aggressive, industrial, and bourgeois all at the same time, you find the most astonishing contrasts...trees, fields, and grass clash with plots of arid earth, bald like the head of an old man....One also finds factories here and there, establishments of a totally modern kind. Chimneys poking up like obelisks from the street which is covered with their black smoke make you stop in more places than you know what to do" (quoted in Paul Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil, New Haven and London, 1982, p. 2).
This description made in 1856, more than a decade before Monet would paint his Argenteuil, Fin d'Après-Midi, describes the environs of Paris that, while catering to the leisurely desires of a growing middle class, were increasingly encumbered by the by-products of suburban industrialization. Monet's peaceful and harmonious view, seemingly untrammeled by the detritus of industrial waste, underscores the artist's interest in merging the traditional, idyllic landscape genre with a modern interest in the exploration of pure form. What is revealed, however, is a manipulation of the paint media that mimics and, upon greater scrutiny, discloses the transient, instantaneous, and fragmented nature of modernization, as well as his own quest to mask this disjunction, which began in Argenteuil and would conclude in Giverny with the artist's retreat into greater and greater abstraction.
Claude Monet moved to Argenteuil, a picturesque suburban town located just down the Seine from Saint-Denis only 11 kilometers away from Paris' newly implemented railroad system, after living across the Channel in exile during the Franco-Prussian War. He spent almost a decade here, 1871-1878, working out his Impressionistic methods, and he was not unaccompanied in this journey. Many of the artists that would soon be grouped together and dubbed "Impressionists" also frequented the area; Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro all spent time exploring the landscape in paintings. A comparison between Manet's rendition of Argenteuil and that of Monet affords an interesting contrast and elucidates Monet's progressive retreat from what must have been a time of massive epistemological upheaval. The ways that one experienced, understood, and viewed the surrounding world would have been subject to a drastic shift much the way our own epoch is undergoing a transition into a fully global and informational society.
Manet's painting, Argenteuil, les canotiers (fig. 1), completed during the mid-1870s while Monet was actively working there, offers a wholly different interpretation of the suburban landscape. That boating was an important pastime in Argenteuil is revealed in both canvases, but Manet incorporates figures into his. Although Monet often highlighted figures engaged in leisurely activities, for example in his La Grenouillère series painted in 1869, he progressively moved away from this. In both Monet and Manet's paintings, the viewpoint is from the boat rental area on the south bank looking west across to the riverbank north of the Île Marante. Manet, however, underscores the uneasy mixing of pleasure and modernization. The figures' effort to dress fashionably combined with their seeming discomfort and the backdrop of belching chimney smoke and exaggerated indigo blue water, known to be the result of waste from a dye factory, emphasize Manet's awareness and interest in capturing the changing world around him. Monet, on the contrary, offers us an entirely different perspective.
Argenteuil, Fin d'Après-Midi, the largest of four paintings made from this vantage point along the Seine (two of which reside in major museums), renders this urbanizing town as peaceful, harmonious, and unspoiled. While the chimney stacks so prominent in Manet's painting are evident in the background of Monet's work, they serve more as geometrical shapes accentuating the horizon and providing interesting visual rhymes against the triangular shapes of the moving sails and the receding pathway to the right of the picture plane. In a 1937 discussion of Impressionism, Meyer Schapiro offered the most telling explanation of works such as Monet's:
"It is remarkable how many pictures we have in early Impressionism of informal and spontaneous sociability, of breakfasts, picnics, promenades, boating trips, holidays and vacation travel. These urban idylls not only present the objective forms of bourgeois recreation in the 1860's and 1870's; they also reflect in the very choice of subjects and in the new aesthetic devices the conception of art as solely a field of individual enjoyment, without reference to ideas and motives, and they presuppose the cultivation of these pleasures as the highest field of freedom for an enlightened bourgeois detached from the official beliefs of his class... As the contexts of bourgeois sociability shifted from community, family and church to commercialized or privately improvised forms - the streets, the cafés and resorts - the resulting consciousness of individual freedom involved more and more an estrangement from older ties; and those imaginative members of the middle class who accepted the norms of freedom, but lacked the economic means to attain them, were spiritually torn by a sense of helpless isolation in an anonymous indifferent mass. By 1880 the enjoying individual becomes rare in Impressionist art; only the private spectacle of nature is left" (Meyer Schapiro, in "The Nature of Abstract Art," Marxist Quarterly, January-March 1937, p. 83).
Rather than confront us with any disturbing content as Manet had done, Monet began more and more to avoid depicting any scrutinizing images of the leisurely class. The view afforded us in Argenteuil, Fin d'Après-Midi is from the most innocuous vantage point of the area. Monet melds Manet's interest in the painted surface, atmospheric effects, and modern suburban regions with the more traditional landscapes and more muted tonalities of artists such as Daubigny. Between the two extremes, he is able to paint views of the landscape over and over, at different times of day, during different seasons, and from various angles. In so doing, Monet was working out, especially at this early moment in his career, the perfection of his impressionist technique, which would focus progressively on his visual concentration and interpretation of nature subjected to the most minute alterations of atmospheric effects.
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