so it's been roughly two weeks since i posted about chainsaw man ending and that post's popped off in a minor way. since then i've (thankfully) only gotten a few comments calling me pseudointellectual or that i was purposely avoiding saying anything of substance, but i've gotten a few more agreeing with me but ultimately saying that they did wind up feeling a little like my reddit strawman at the end. like, that they did wind up wanting more from the ending. and like, that's fine.
but weirdly enough this all got me thinking of claude monet.
this is Impression, Sunrise, 1872 by Monet. It was first exhibited in Paris in 1874, and would wind up giving its name to the Impressionist movement as a whole. im sure a lot of y'all have heard of Monet before, but take a look at the painting. like, really.
there's a hazy, sketchy quality to it, but there's also something about the colors that strains the eyes, the colors used all closer together in value than not so that when the hue is different, it still seems to all muddle together. even the hot spot of the sun and its reflection on the water aren't really brighter than anything else, just a much different hue, which is why it feels like you still struggle to make out the shape of the sun hanging low in the sky. the shapes and figures rendered are imprecise and imperfect, and there's a sense that the farther the scene moves away from us, the more is being hidden, the more is lost. the first boat is stark against the water, the second is less so, and the third(?) is all but lost in the morning gloom.
here are a couple other paintings by Monet.
L'Entrée du port de Le Havre, 1867 (the same place he painted in Impression!) and Boats at Zandaam, 1871 (just a year before he painted Impression!) have more than a few things in common: shared subject matter, a much more varied use of values and colors, clear distinct shapes that help guide the viewer's eyes through the piece, visible brushstrokes that add a texture and liveliness to the piece. looking through Monet's early pieces, and well past his painting of Impression, its very clear he has a great deal of technical expertise, and he can use it when he wants to. he didn't have to paint Impression, Sunrise the way he did.
so why did he paint Impression the way he did? when he clearly commands the ability to render subjects clearly and faithfully, why did he choose to paint something so muddled and dim and incomplete?
When Impression was exhibited alongside other similarly styled paintings, it didn't make much noise. Among its neighbors in the gallery it wasn't among the most noteworthy. An art critic at the time did see Impression, though, and wound up writing in his review that drying wallpaper had more artistic merit than Monet's painting. Impressionism was a major step away from realism in art, but at the time that meant taking a step away from established, traditional artistic norms. The idea that art could not only fail to faithfully reproduce its subject but do so purposefully, to introduce the limited human perspective of the artist into the piece itself, was a genuinely novel idea at the time, and required breaking rules that implicitly said you can't do that. Impression, Sunrise was painted in a limited and incomplete way in part to frustrate the audience's need for clarity and closure, for a clean aesthetic synthesis, something said audience had come to take for granted when viewing "fine" art in exhibitions.
It asked a question of the audience: why is it that when you encounter art that frustrates or confuses you, you assume it is a flaw with the piece itself? Or perhaps more succinctly: maybe you're looking at me wrong?
