Mary M. Gedo's new book, Monet and his Muse: Camille Monet in The Artist's Life has just been published by the Univ. Chicago Press.
This is not the usual popular review of a popular Impressionist. Gedo's whole career has been devoted to the psychological study of art, examining the idea that an artist's autobiography has a crucial impact on his or her practice and art content. Here she looks at the complex relationship between Monet and Camille and how a close study of Monet's practice can reveal how it was shaped by that relationship, despite being overlooked by the formalist critiques of Impressionism. Impressionism is not just cheery sunshine and broken colors, the painting of light aided by the invention of tube colors and chisel-style brushes There is a broader, perhaps darker human side too. I am pleased to say that I collaborated on this book with some analysis of one Monet painting at the Art Institute of Chicago aided by state-of-the-art digital and x-ray technology and expertise in the museum's conservation lab. Specifically I tried to reconstruct the original composition of Monet's famous On the Bank of The River based on pentimenti and the technology mentioned. The pertinent question here is, How and why did Monet overpaint the image of his infant son in that early picture, remove the puppy from Camille's lap, alter her face, shorten the river bank, and make other compositional changes? You can browse the book on Amazon. Take a look. I think it is provocative and stimulates a renewed discussion of Impressionist painting, actually threatening the narrow consensus that has reduced popular knowledge of Impressionism to a mere focus on painterly technique. WC
