Camille: Monet's inspiration

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Monet and his Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist’s Life

By Mary Mathews Gedo

If much popular art history works in a biographical mode, I guess psychologically oriented art history would normally be seen as a logical extension and deepening of such an approach. Marry Mathews Gedo has applied this approach before (as in Picasso: Art as Autobiography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982) before now turning to Monet’s representations of his first wife Camille inMonet and His Muse, a book clearly mainly aimed at a specialist academic audience.

We will see some of the weaknesses of such art history in a moment, but its strengths derive from traditional academic virtues of focusing on documentation, dating, and the paintings themselves, especially the discussion of the evidence of the X-rays of On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (1868). Gedo also gives us a plausible narrative of Monet’s relation to Camille, and her help to him during his early years, although her use of the cultural construction of the ‘artist’s muse’ needed to be less naturalizing and more historically investigative.

The problem of wanting to make putative private psychological motivations and messages replace obvious public meanings abounds throughout the book. For example, Gedo argues that Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (1865–6) is essentially about Monet’s celebration of Camille as worthy of bourgeois marriage (a reading supposedly nailed by the love graffiti on the right-hand tree trunk), but this depends on the spectator’s knowing the model’s class background and anyway its public meaning is clearly about the middle class as rightful inheritors of the possibility of picnicking pleasure previously enjoyed only by the aristocracy, even if they do graffiti on trees! For Gedo, On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (1868) is about Monet’s attempt to distance himself from Camille and to erase her features and the presence of their child, facing the viewer in the painting process. We could, however, say instead that Monet was trying to represent the absorptive sense of daydreaming vision and indeed to align his own developing painting practice with such looking.

Gedo’s anxiety about the reception of her overall project is clear at one point where she takes to task Colin Bailey’s assertion that biographical interpretation of the Metropolitan’s The Bench (1873) ‘diminishes the painting and fails to explain the uncertainty and agitation that creates its singular mood’. By contrast, Gedo sees this work and the Musée d’Orsay’s The Luncheon, 1873 as narrating the impact of the death of Camille’s father, reminding Monet of the death of his own mother, so that the hat hanging from the tree in The Bench is described as symbolically that of Monet’s mother while the child using building blocks in The Luncheon is seen as Monet distracting himself from grief with art-making! In this reviewer’s eyes, the book’s weaknesses unfortunately derive from the very method that Gedo as a clinical psychologist wants to champion, the psychological analysis of art, making her specific interpretations sometimes far-fetched and frequently untenable.

Gedo’s overriding big idea is that Monet’s involvement with water (sea and lilypond) is determined by his early loss of his mother and his need to return to ‘the intrauterine life of the fetus’. Other artists who had not experienced early mother loss have also captured the ocean’s engulfing vastness, and one need only refer to Alain Corbin’s wonderful book The Lure of the Sea (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994) to remind ourselves that attitudes towards the sea are formed by culture rather than individual life-events. Monet’s treatment of the sea does not actually feature in the book, although the pond at Giverny does. This is described implausibly as a ‘memorial garden’ associated with memory of the deaths of his mother and Camille. Similarly Camille Monet on Her Deathbed (1879) is described in terms of watery metaphor, although the rather floating light strokes over her were simply observed from the sort of ‘white chapel’ of veils that was normal period practice around laid-out corpses.

However suggestive, at times, Gedo’s discussion of Monet’s images may be, psychological art history is always going to suffer from a crucial lack of attention to both painting practice (its performance, codes and conventions) and the way in which individuals are formed by culture and society. It is only by recognizing history and culture, change and distance, that in fact we approach understanding.

Monet and his Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist’s Life by Mary Mathews Gedo is published by University of Chicago Press, 2010. 289 pp. 51 colour and 65 mono illus, £35.50. ISBN 13978-0-226-28480-4