Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Claude Monet
French; 19th-century, 20th-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rijksmuseum
61%
Le Corniche near Monaco. 1884. Oil on canvas
At upper left there are several impasto strokes of clear white that stand out against the otherwise flat if variegated sky, representing clouds. They make for an amazing passage of painting. However, without saying that their effect is unearned, I need to point out that the painting's overall clean divisions of decreasingly textured, readily receding planes do fail to make those clouds seem hard-won. They're a statement spoken over the way the scene unfolds, rather than an inevitable result of its unfolding. Likewise, the total frontality of that brown path is cool, but it doesn't really wrestle with its surroundings. Nor does the paroxysm of colored flowers to either side of the road present much of a challenge to the appearance of any other part of this picture. Here we see Monet simply painting, rather than working to solve the plastic problems that come out of the act of painting. In this sense he's closer here to van Gogh than to any of his other successors. (That's an indictment.) (TFS, 2026)