Monet understood the elusive power of a place's atmosphere

https://psyche.co/ideas/monet-understood-the-elusive-power-of-a-places-atmosphere


Detail of The Water-Lily Pond (1899) by Claude Monet. Courtesy the National Gallery London



Last year, I was invited to give a talk about Claude Monet’s painting The Water-Lily Pond (1899). Trouble was, I didn’t know much about Monet. I am a philosopher, working primarily on phenomenology, which is, in a nutshell, the study of conscious experience. It is about analysing the structure and dynamics of perception, imagination and emotion as they appear to the experiencing subject. The recurrent motto is: ‘Back to the things themselves.’ So, I found myself getting back to a very particular thing – Monet’s painting of his pond at Giverny.


The Water-Lily Pond (1899) by Claude Monet

The painting is still, but not completely: there is some dynamism, some slow play of light and shadow, of forces between the foreground of the water, the background of the trees, and the hanging Japanese bridge. And there is a sense, once you’ve been looking at the painting for a while, of being there. It is very immersive, especially for such a small painting. It’s as if Monet were inviting us into his garden.

This immersiveness does not come from an illusion of being in three dimensions – the opposite, in fact. Monet does a few subtle things that destabilise the elements of the perspective. The bridge looks two-dimensional. The whole painting is framed as if it were cropped (no shore where the viewer is; no banks for the bridge). The horizon is eclipsed by thick foliage, so that we cannot see the focal point. Even from the viewer’s point of view, the origin of the perspective is ambiguous. It is hard to gauge depth. If you look at it for a long time, elements of it seem now closer, now further away.

The art critic Clement Greenberg explained, in his essay ‘The Later Monet’ (1956), that Monet removes elements of three-dimensional form as a way to generate an atmosphere – something elusive that is at the core of both our experience of art and of our experiences in daily life. In this case, the feeling of serenity and the immersion come from Monet’s flattening of the perspective. And creating this atmosphere really seems to have been one of the main obsessions for Monet, who said:



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