Cows are sizable animals, yet in two of these paintings the artist makes them appear small. This contrast characterizes them as helpless, as if a part of a machine controlled by an invisible giant, possibly a tyrant. We realize that the machine is the cattle industry whereas the giant is the man behind it. I think that in this setting the images will elicit different emotions from different people: remorse and pity from some, curiosity and indifference from others. I don’t think, however, that the artist intended to judge the audience. Instead he focuses solely on the theme; he presents his inarticulate models as either content and oblivious, when in a rural environment, or, as irritated, confused and alert when in a large-scale farm or auction theater.
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This painting (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden) combines secular and earthly clerical elements with the divine in an ostensible theatrical interplay. The lid of the coffin of Pope Julius II forms the stage, while the tableau curtains are drawn apart to reveal the divine action.
This hierarchical pastiche communicates the heavens to the devout in a known way: from the bottom of the painting — the church, along with its highest representative, — through the center, where the saints hover, — and to the top, where Mary with baby Christ on her hands treads the clouds. The myriad of seraphs in the background testifies to the transparency of the scene to both worlds, and its consequent significance to our existence here, as well as there. Perhaps the artist intended for every little alabaster face to find a counterpart in someone on the side of the beholder.
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I imagine the trees in the painting below as statues, obelisks or monuments. Perhaps I simply became accustomed to seeing such wide flower fields in an urban environment. In a way, for a city guy like me, these poppies are idyllic and inaccessible; I can picture them only on a town square, surrounded by concrete — but not in their natural environment. I suppose this is a degradation of sorts, or, from a different perspective, an integration of nature into the urban in the mind of city people. Seeing flowers in nature is a rare occasion for urban population and I am sure at least some of you can sympathize. But what I would like to discuss is how these poppy fields, despite the stifled association, and maybe because of it, gain in aesthetic value.
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It was probably since Monet’s celebrated “Impression: Sunrise” that water reflections became a trademark device of the artist. Moreover, it is thanks to him that these mirroring effects may be considered an important element of impressionism as a whole. It seems that the mutability of water, or simply put, the ripples, are inherently impressionistic — and they were such long before the term was ever coined. Taking into account these two main qualities, which basically translate to movement and rhythm (the ripples) and color (the reflections), water indeed makes the most obvious choice of subject matter for an impressionistic painting.
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These poplars are difficult to approach: they produce a somewhat alienating grid not unlike prison bars, particularly in the version where the trees are explicitly dark. In a way, everything around them may be considered as a beautifying counteraction, except that the trademark water reflections only serve to extend the prison effect.
I think that this was a bold and honest choice of subject matter on Monet’s part, to portray nature in its less pretty moments, and it is truly admirable that he managed to extract and capture the little beauty that there was to find in the poplars you see below. Because let’s face it, they are quite ugly.
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