Monet

Summary

Dominique Pagani treats Monet as the emblem of Impressionism in painting, which erases outlines. He often returns to the London paintings of the Thames: in a sunset over the river, one cannot tell where the water ends and the sky begins, which he reads as a Christian indeterminacy in the conceptual sense12. The reddish sun, "like a bloodstain," fixes an eternal twilight3. He links this sun to Baudelaire's "drowned sun" and "wet suns"4. In Nerval's "transparent and coloured mists" he already sees Monet rather than Ingres5. In music, Monet corresponds for him to Debussy, Fauré and Ravel. He also uses him as a point of comparison for Turner. Despite this blur, he stresses that one cannot move ten patches of colour in one of his paintings, which forms an organic whole6. He sees a neoclassical logic running from Monet's blur to Mondrian's geometric style.

1. 1#3.3 From Ulysses to Daedalus1 Aug 2017 · 1:45:30
2. 2#5 Harnessed to confinitude18 Apr 2020 · 19:39
3. 3#5 Happiness versus the death drive in music11 Dec 2020 · 1:22:50
4. 4Birth and carnage: the Massacre of the Innocents22 Dec 2023 · 47:00
5. 5#4.6 Angélique (by Nerval)15 Mar 2018 · 57:38
6. 6#4.4 Angélique (by Nerval)15 Jan 2018 · 42:11

Summary produced automatically from 16 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.