Monet, the Ultimate Impressionist by Sylvie Patin 的台灣版本:《莫內:補捉光與色彩的瞬間》台北:時報1995 雖然譯者是中國的 有些用詞不容易懂:"馬拉美夫人受了氣"...此書還是很好的入門書: 中文的副標題可能出自莫伯桑的傳記之說法.英文版書名的 Ultimate雙關: 一指他是印象派最後的大師. 又指其品質很好.
Thursday, 31 May 2012
Review: Monet, the Ultimate Impressionist by Sylvie Patin
In 1874 Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise
caused uproar among the critics and a revolution in painting. His
inventiveness was inexhaustible: with the Haystacks, Poplars and,
finally, the enchanting Water-lilies of Giverny, Monet captured light in
all its fleeting qualities.
At last, almost blind – 'I fear the dark more than death' – he feverishly produced near-abstract landscapes of water and reflection, a vision of nature that paved the way for the art of our own times.
Including hundreds of beautiful reproductions and contemporary illustrations,comprehensive text, documentary witness accounts and letters, Monet: The Ultimate Impressionist, a pocket-sized book, is perfect both for the lover of Monet and of the history of Impressionism.
Sylvie Patin worked at the Jeu de Paume and the Musée de l'Orangerie before being appointed curator of paintings at the Musée d'Orsay. (via nationalgallery.co.uk)
At last, almost blind – 'I fear the dark more than death' – he feverishly produced near-abstract landscapes of water and reflection, a vision of nature that paved the way for the art of our own times.
Including hundreds of beautiful reproductions and contemporary illustrations,comprehensive text, documentary witness accounts and letters, Monet: The Ultimate Impressionist, a pocket-sized book, is perfect both for the lover of Monet and of the history of Impressionism.
Sylvie Patin worked at the Jeu de Paume and the Musée de l'Orangerie before being appointed curator of paintings at the Musée d'Orsay. (via nationalgallery.co.uk)
Though I know very little about it, art has intrigued me for the past few years and impressionism, in particular, has really captured my interest. So, as I have a few months to go until my next university course kicks off, now seems like the perfect time to begin learning a little more about this form of creative expression.
After recently taking an audio tour around the National Gallery and finding myself admiring Monet's work more than most others, this book caught my eye in the giftshop. Unlike many art books that I've seen, this one, published by Thames and Hudson, comes as a compact paperback, making it easy to lug around outside the house without being too much of a nuisance. It's filled with full colour images and plenty of commentary, tracing Monet's life through various sources of direct evidence including the art, various letters, and a transaction log book kept by the artist himself.
- It was enlightening to find out how much Monet struggled during his career. He was frequently rejected by exhibition organisers,
critics often mocked his work, and he was forced to sell his paintings for
prices lower than their worth just to have money to live on.
- He formed very deep friendships and support systems with fellow impressionists such as Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro. He even appealed to Manet for monetary loans quite frequently, and of course he obliged, though Monet always paid him back. Vincent Van Gogh's brother, Théo, even bought some of Monet's work and had them exhibited.
- The back pages of the book include various documents written by
Monet, his friends, critics, and admirers. Here's a fraction of a letter
that Vincent Van Gogh sent to H.M. Levens in admiration:
"There are many things to see here .... In Antwerp, I never even knew what the Impressionists were; now I have seen them, and although I am not yet one of their club, I am a great admirer of some of their paintings ... [notably] a landscape by Claude Monet." (Paris, summer or autumn 1886)
Still, the book wasn't perfect. The compact size compromises the quality of the prints, and so it makes it slightly more difficult to appreciate what the author is trying to convey. Also, the pages are cluttered with information. There are notes explaining each of the illustrations alongside the more detailed main paragraphs, where perhaps readers might just benefit from the name of the piece and a reference to a footnote at the back of the book.
Altogether, though, I found this a very informative and enjoyable read. If you're looking for a good pocket-sized book to learn more about Monet, then this would be a good choice. However, if you'd prefer to something with more high quality prints, I would suggest something published by Taschen. I have several art books by Taschen, and though I haven't read them in great detail, they can be very affordable options (an A3 hardcover can be as little as £8.99, while this Thames and Hudson A5 paperback was £7.95).
Rating: 3.5 / 5
*****
Monet's Passion:
突發奇想，或許該寫本書介面美日法英台各一園。
"莫內葬於Giverny小教堂後方。"2007
A Stroll Through Wyeth's Giverny
By LAURA M. HOLSON
The Maine farmhouse made famous by Andrew Wyeth in "Christina's World" is open to visitors for wandering and wondering.
Overnighter
Finding Solitude at Monet's Gardens
By ALEXANDER LOBRANO
A new hotel has made it easier to avoid crowds at the artist's home and gardens in Giverny, a short trip from Paris.
Monet Garden: Giverny, France
World's most artistic garden?
Claude Monet, one of the founders of the French Impressionist painting
movement, bought a house and land in the village of Giverny in 1890 and
set about establishing the gardens that were to provide inspiration for
his art.The often-painted garden is famous for its water lilies, ponds and bridge and is a popular destination for art tours.
giverny.org or www.avalonwaterways.com
Paris's Jewel-like Orangerie, Home to Monet's Waterlilies, Reopens, Polished and Renovated
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
While the Orangerie museum was rebuilt around them for six years,
Monet's waterlily paintings, too large to move, had to remain in place
in the oval rooms built for them in 1927.
Published: May 16, 2006
PARIS, May 14 — Over the last six years, as the Musée de l'Orangerie
underwent a $36 million renovation and expansion, its most valued
treasure, the eight tranquil paintings of Monet's large-format waterlily
series, remained trapped inside a noisy and muddy building site.
There was no alternative. While the museum's Walter-Guillaume
collection of Impressionist paintings traveled the world, the
waterlilies could not be detached from the walls where they were
installed in 1927, one year after Monet's death. Construction — and
demolition — had to take place around them.
To protect the paintings from water, heat, dust and vibrations, they were sealed inside reinforced boxes, each attached to an alarm system. Even so, "On one or two occasions, because of vibrations, the waterlilies began screaming, and the workers had to drop tools," noted Olivier Brochet, the project's chief architect,
With the work completed this month, curators were at last able to relax: the "Nymphéas," as the paintings are known here, emerged no worse for the wear. And on Wednesday, a good four years behind schedule, this museum on the western edge of the Tuileries gardens reopens to the public.
At first glance, the Orangerie, standing across from the Musée du Jeu de Paume, its near-identical twin, looks largely unchanged. Yet, not for the first time, it has undergone a radical makeover, notably the addition of underground galleries for the Walter-Guillaume collection.
Built in 1852 to house an orange grove, with a glass facade facing south across the Seine, the Orangerie was used to billet soldiers on leave from the trenches during World War I. After the armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, invited his friend Claude Monet to display his large-format nymphéas there.
Monet had been working on them since 1914 in a spacious studio added onto his Normandy home in Giverny. And he would continue painting these vast canvases until his death at 86. The following year, 1927, eight were finally installed in two specially designed oval-shaped rooms in the Orangerie.
Waterlilies dominated the last 30 years of Monet's life.
"These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession for me," he wrote to a friend in 1909. "It is beyond my strength as an old man, and yet I want to render what I feel." In total, he painted some 250 oils of the vegetation in and around the Japanese-style lagoon at Giverny.
They are to be found in major museums around the world, as well as at the Musée d'Orsay and, prominently, at the Musée Marmottan-Monet, both in Paris. Yet the Orangerie series is unique, not least because of its size: each painting is two meters, or six and a half feet, tall. If lined up side by side, the works would measure 91 meters, or 298.5 feet, in width. They are also conceived so that the four in one gallery represent sunrise, and the four in the other evoke dusk.
Most striking, though, is how these paintings, particularly those of dusk, come close to abstraction: it is as if this master of Impressionism had chosen to leap beyond post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and other new movements and prepare the way for Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko more than two decades later.
After World War II, Monet was himself somewhat out of vogue. And in the 1960's, when Juliette Walter sold the collection of her first husband, Paul Guillaume, to the French state, no one thought it odd to alter the Orangerie to accommodate those 144 paintings. Twice married and twice widowed, Mrs. Walter also named the collection after her second husband, Jean Walter.
It was at this point that the 328-foot-long rectangular Orangerie was given a second floor, one that blocked the natural lighting intended for the nymphéas. For a while, at least, the newly arrived works by Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, André Derain and Chaim Soutine became the stars of the museum.
Today, however, with Monet one of the art world's biggest draws, the new renovation was aimed at restoring the museum to the way he had imagined it. The second floor was demolished so that once again the nymphéas enjoy natural light, which, with the changing weather, seasons and hours of the day, constantly alters their mood.
Mr. Brochet, the architect, said unexpected problems arose because, despite the Orangerie's elegant neo-Classical exterior, it was in fact constructed shoddily. "It was thrown up quickly, without proper foundations," he said. "I have just been in Shanghai. They would have torn it down and rebuilt it properly. But that would not be possible here."
A fresh complication was posed by the discovery of remnants of a 16th-century city wall in the area assigned to the new Walter-Guillaume galleries. This led to a prolonged bureaucratic squabble over how the wall should be treated: in the end, a 30-foot section has been preserved and is now incorporated into the design.
In these new galleries, natural light floods a wide corridor where oils by Renoir and Cézanne are given pride of place. Other rooms are devoted to more modern masters like Picasso and Matisse. The museum's collection of works by Soutine is arguably the best in Paris.
Still, for all the extra space gained, what perhaps matters most is that the Orangerie is once again a shrine to Monet and his beloved waterlilies: anyone lucky enough to be alone with the nymphéas is invited to meditate, perchance to dream.
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
The waterlilies at the Orangerie are some of Monet's most abstract. To protect the paintings from water, heat, dust and vibrations, they were sealed inside reinforced boxes, each attached to an alarm system. Even so, "On one or two occasions, because of vibrations, the waterlilies began screaming, and the workers had to drop tools," noted Olivier Brochet, the project's chief architect,
With the work completed this month, curators were at last able to relax: the "Nymphéas," as the paintings are known here, emerged no worse for the wear. And on Wednesday, a good four years behind schedule, this museum on the western edge of the Tuileries gardens reopens to the public.
At first glance, the Orangerie, standing across from the Musée du Jeu de Paume, its near-identical twin, looks largely unchanged. Yet, not for the first time, it has undergone a radical makeover, notably the addition of underground galleries for the Walter-Guillaume collection.
Built in 1852 to house an orange grove, with a glass facade facing south across the Seine, the Orangerie was used to billet soldiers on leave from the trenches during World War I. After the armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, invited his friend Claude Monet to display his large-format nymphéas there.
Monet had been working on them since 1914 in a spacious studio added onto his Normandy home in Giverny. And he would continue painting these vast canvases until his death at 86. The following year, 1927, eight were finally installed in two specially designed oval-shaped rooms in the Orangerie.
Waterlilies dominated the last 30 years of Monet's life.
"These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession for me," he wrote to a friend in 1909. "It is beyond my strength as an old man, and yet I want to render what I feel." In total, he painted some 250 oils of the vegetation in and around the Japanese-style lagoon at Giverny.
They are to be found in major museums around the world, as well as at the Musée d'Orsay and, prominently, at the Musée Marmottan-Monet, both in Paris. Yet the Orangerie series is unique, not least because of its size: each painting is two meters, or six and a half feet, tall. If lined up side by side, the works would measure 91 meters, or 298.5 feet, in width. They are also conceived so that the four in one gallery represent sunrise, and the four in the other evoke dusk.
Most striking, though, is how these paintings, particularly those of dusk, come close to abstraction: it is as if this master of Impressionism had chosen to leap beyond post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and other new movements and prepare the way for Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko more than two decades later.
After World War II, Monet was himself somewhat out of vogue. And in the 1960's, when Juliette Walter sold the collection of her first husband, Paul Guillaume, to the French state, no one thought it odd to alter the Orangerie to accommodate those 144 paintings. Twice married and twice widowed, Mrs. Walter also named the collection after her second husband, Jean Walter.
It was at this point that the 328-foot-long rectangular Orangerie was given a second floor, one that blocked the natural lighting intended for the nymphéas. For a while, at least, the newly arrived works by Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, André Derain and Chaim Soutine became the stars of the museum.
Today, however, with Monet one of the art world's biggest draws, the new renovation was aimed at restoring the museum to the way he had imagined it. The second floor was demolished so that once again the nymphéas enjoy natural light, which, with the changing weather, seasons and hours of the day, constantly alters their mood.
Mr. Brochet, the architect, said unexpected problems arose because, despite the Orangerie's elegant neo-Classical exterior, it was in fact constructed shoddily. "It was thrown up quickly, without proper foundations," he said. "I have just been in Shanghai. They would have torn it down and rebuilt it properly. But that would not be possible here."
A fresh complication was posed by the discovery of remnants of a 16th-century city wall in the area assigned to the new Walter-Guillaume galleries. This led to a prolonged bureaucratic squabble over how the wall should be treated: in the end, a 30-foot section has been preserved and is now incorporated into the design.
In these new galleries, natural light floods a wide corridor where oils by Renoir and Cézanne are given pride of place. Other rooms are devoted to more modern masters like Picasso and Matisse. The museum's collection of works by Soutine is arguably the best in Paris.
Still, for all the extra space gained, what perhaps matters most is that the Orangerie is once again a shrine to Monet and his beloved waterlilies: anyone lucky enough to be alone with the nymphéas is invited to meditate, perchance to dream.
保羅塞尚曾說：「莫內只是隻眼睛罷了。
好隻眼睛。」
我說： 好兩隻白內障眼睛。白內障的世界恐怕不「印象」也不行。
（以下摘錄我翻譯的莫內紀錄片）
1.
年復一年，他的視力更加惡化2.
左眼很嚴重3.
非動手術不可
4.
莫內，瞎了5.
８３歲的時候6.
兩睛接連動了手術
7.
漫長復原期隨後而至 8.
他必須戴上彩色鏡片
9.
無論遠近10.
戴這些眼鏡我都不能看
11.
被扭屈的生存和事實12.
被誇大的顏色
13.
絕對會讓我發瘋14.
如果大自然一直都得像現在這樣
15.
我寧願瞎，
保留我記憶中的美
（略）
1.
他工作將近十年的壁畫
2.
終於懸掛在橘園美術館中
3.
特別為這幅畫所修建的橢圓廳內
4.
如他所願
5.
莫內要大家站在池塘中間欣賞
6.
在世界的心臟地帶
7.
水生、根莖纖維和顏色的世界
8.
畫中的世界
9.
目光所及之處
10.
除了水面，不見天際
Luisium Castle Garden: Dessau, Germany
Two and a half centuries of beauty. “I was deeply moved as we strolled through the lakes, canals and woods by how the gods have allowed the Prince to create a dream around himself.” That's how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described this place in 1778.
Now known as the Garden Kingdom Dessau-Woerlitz in Germany, it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000.
The Snake House, so called because of the shape of its gutters, was a retreat for Louise, the wife of Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau.
-----更多的名園
http://travel.cnn.com/12-fabulous-gardens-082376?hpt=hp_c3
The Royal Botanic Gardens: London
A piece of the tropics in London.On a bend of the Thames at Kew in southwest London, the Royal Botanic Gardens was listed as a World Heritage Site in 2003, acknowledging its contributions to botanical and environmental science since 1759.
The Temperate House is the world’s largest surviving Victorian glass structure. An iron-framed greenhouse dating from the 19th century, it was to become a model for conservatories around the world.
www.kew.org
Also on CNNGo: London’s World Heritage Sites: 5 ways to get cerebral
Kenrokuen: Kanazawa, Japan
Cherry blossoms, bridges, streams. Nothing not to like. Kenrokuen is considered to be one of Japan's "three most beautiful landscape gardens.”
It was formerly the outer garden of Kanazawa Castle. From the 1620s to 1840s, various rulers added waterfalls, a teahouse, winding paths, streams and bridges.
The garden was opened to the public in the 1870s.
www.pref.ishikawa.jp
Kenroku-en
www.pref.ishikawa.jp/siro-niwa/kenrokuen/ - Translate this page
石川県と金沢市では、世界遺産登録を目指して、その前提となる暫定一覧掲載の候補として、金沢城跡、兼六園等を構成資産とする「城下町金沢の文化遺産群と文化的 ...KENROKUEN - YouTube
www.youtube.com/watch?v=89cU6ETvfdg
Jun 1, 2009 - Uploaded by salakotdotcom
Kenrokuen in Kanazawa is considered one of the three most beautiful parks in Japan. Korakuen in Okayama ...
沒有留言:
張貼留言