A few months ago I went to the Royal Academy to see the ‘Monet
to Matisse: The Modern Garden’ exhibition. I am far less knowledgeable about
art than literature and history yet, despite that, and perhaps because of it, I
thoroughly enjoy going to the occasional gallery. With literature, my prior-knowledge
creates expectations which hone contextual understanding but also narrow the
wider experience. A concept which Nassim Taleb coined the ‘narrative fallacy’
in The Black Swan, our eagerness to
squeeze everything into a logical story means that fundamental parts of the
whole are overlooked and neglected. When it comes to art, however, I approach
it with such a blank canvass (that’s a pun) that my mind is more open as a
result. In knowing less, I see more.
That does not mean that I bury my head in the sand and refuse to read or listen to any context behind the paintings. For those with a grasp similar to the one that I had of the movement which came to force in Paris in the 1880s (in other words, non-existent), a brief introduction:
Recalcitrant in the established art world of the 19th
Century, the Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, et cetera) focused not on
reflecting the image as seen in nature as accurately as possible, but on
highlighting the movement of light and passing of time’s synthesis with colour.
In effect, it was a latent form of abstract, as the painters distorted what
they saw to emphasise how they thought and felt. This description does little
justice to their work, so underneath is an example of the temporal expression
for which they strived:
At first it was enough just to stand back and observe their
work. For someone that contemplates the task of drawing a dog as an infliction
of severest misery, the way in which their myriad brushstrokes come together to
resemble something familiar, but not quite, to reflect landscapes as I know
them, but not quite, to show the passage of time on unchanging paper, but not
quite, was mesmerising.
Given my previous studies of literature, however, this unscrutinising state of observation did not last long. Despite Taleb’s admonishing warnings, I relapsed into the narrative fallacy of analysis and searched for the story behind the work in front of me. What could I latch on to in order to aid my understanding of the movement itself, rather than each individual painting? ‘Movement’ connotes change, or evolution, and I wanted to find it. What had progressed (or perhaps regressed?) between Monet’s first 1880 Impressionist pieces and his final paintings of the water lilies and willows during the Great War?
It is true that the Impressionists’ work reflected the world around them in a literal manner far less than that of the ‘conventional’ artists of the time. In sharpening attention on concepts (such as time, colour) they increasingly turned to the symbolic, often reducing emphasis on detail and surroundings. They deconstructed the whole to focus on individual elements, much like a contemporary (and clichéd) chef might deconstruct a lemon meringue to highlight the flavour of fruit. And this is what we see as the movement progressed through the years, evermore intrepid ventures into the abstract simplification of raw ideas. During the First World War, for example, Monet found cathartic solace by portraying overwhelming grief through the mournful deportment of willow trees.
I quickly began to realise that the more potent the emotion
behind the symbolically deconstructive distortion of reality, the further these
select artists moved into the abstract. Perhaps the most stunning of all was
Monet’s final major work, the Grandes
Decorations, a triptych wall painting of the eponymous water lilies, which
he painted for and donated to the people of France during this time of great
suffering.
But, as I continued to ruminate on this idea, I began to wonder whether it was such a novelty in the first place. My studies of literature revealed recognisable trends in that field; there was a simultaneous literary impressionist movement pioneered by the likes of Baudelaire, in which the reader’s vision of the plotline is blurred by the characters’ subjective and incomplete narrative. The similarities with the artists are clear. The appeal to writers of breaking down elements is recurrent, especially in the last few centuries; we see it in postmodern works (think of Nabokov’s ‘Signs and Symbols’, or Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’, an effort to condense a worldly experience into just 14 words) which caught Derrida’s attention and eventually caused him to devise his deconstructionism literary criticism.
It seems that humans feel an inexorable attraction to challenge what is integral, and what is superfluous. The ability (or need, even) to purify renders down our experiences and, in doing so, amplifies ideas and emotion. The result is an even more powerful communication of our existence. And is that not the purpose of art, after all?
