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Claude Monet
Bathers at La Grenouillre
Picasso, it is intriguing to note, did not like Monets work, particularly the famous water lily
sequences, the Nymphas, painted towards the end of his life. He found it insubstantial, flimsy,
perhaps even pretentious. Picasso was clearly reacting against Monet in order to find and determine
a place for his own work, to create a taste by which he might be appreciated (just as Monet and
the other Impressionists had reacted against the confining Beaux-Arts classicism that preceded
them).
Of course, it is possible, if you are determined to be prejudiced, to be against almost anything,
however universally admired, and, if one adopts Picassos standpoint and considers his own
contribution to twentieth-century art, one can understand the thrust of his reservations. For a
painter obsessed with structure and physicality the suggestibility and sheer airiness of Impressionism,
with its concentration on the fleeting and iridescent, might indeed make it seem somewhat
incorporeal and vacuous. However, I have always thought that Monets painting Bathers at La
Grenouillre can stand as a particularly redoubtable response to this line of attack.
First of all, while the painting seems to be prototypically Impressionist in subject matter, two
factors make it less obviously generic. First it is a painting of shadow rather than sunlight deep
shadow too, its dominant tones are blues, browns and greens, not yellows, lemons or creams and,
second, it is anything but ethereal in treatment. Although more than half the painting is water it is
rendered with a solidity and plasticity that, I dare say, Czanne would have been proud of. True,
the painting is a sketch, a study, presumably for a larger more finished painting that was never
completed, and the boldness of the individual brushstrokes might not have survived in anything
more worked up, but the thick smears of paint, the broad slashes of impasto recall the
uncompromising way the Fauves applied pigment to their canvases and Fauvism was still three
decades or so away from 1869 when Monets painting was executed. That such thick, dark oil paint
can look like rippling light-freckled water is part of the individual magic of this painting; and that a
palette so subdued, so positively sombre, can summon up all the luminous ambience of a riverine
scene is testimony to a talent and a painterliness that are remarkable. Even a pusillanimous Picasso
might have had grudgingly to concede that, sometimes, Monet could do no wrong.
1998
William Boyd (2005), Bamboo, Londres, Nova Iorque, Toronto, Dublim, Victoria, Nova Deli,
Auckland, Joanesburgo: Penguin, pp. 364-365.

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