Why I'm Here

So again, the museum I visited today (Musée Marmottan Monet) didn't let me take pictures, so I can't distract you with my flashy photography and, thus, must actually focus on my words. Let me tell you why I'm here.

I received a school grant to come to Paris and carry out a writing-based project, one part critical and one part creative. For the critical part, I'm exploring the texts and contexts surrounding 19th-century naturalist Émile Zola's novel The Masterpiece, which chronicles the life of impressionist painter Claude Lantier while he struggles to live up to his genius and produce a painting that will "shatter the Louvre" (spoil alert: he doesn't). While the book is technically fictional, it reads like an autobiography; Claude's character is reportedly a composite of Zola's close friends Manet, Monet, and Cézanne. And so, in between eating baguettes and getting lost on the metro,* I've been wandering around Paris soaking up the sites and paintings that inspired the book, questioning how seeing such things in person influences my understanding of Zola's work.

The words "impressionist painting" connote, for most people, soothing pastel colors, water lilies, and a bearded man who bears a striking resemblance to Santa.* But at one time these paintings really rocked the art world. The young revolutionaries, fed up with the Academie des Beaux-Arts' strict ruling on what is art and what's not, wanted a change.

Specifically, they wanted a change from this:

To something more like this:

The contrast between the two schools couldn't be starker than in the Musée d'Orsay, with one room filled with dark, historical genres and the next blinding with the revolutionary treatment of light and use of pastels. It's all so dazzling that I want to take a picture off the wall and make sure the curator didn't install some light to illuminate it from behind. The luminous quality of the works -- from Monet's haystacks to Van Gogh's self-portrait -- is lost on the pages of textbooks, so when I walk into one of the rooms for the first time, the paintings confront, startle, and dazzle me. I swear, the central figure in Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe must have been colored with paint laced with some sort of magnetic dust, her stare is so halting.

Zola spends a good part of his novel expounding on the virtue of the Open Air school's original treatment of light, but I didn't really get what he was talking about until, well, yesterday. Museum trips this last week have just been one long, euphoric "aha!" moment, for I realize how monumental the break form the academy really was.

Monet and the rest of the gang bring a whole new meaning to the term "luminaries."

*That's a lie, I'm actually ridiculously good at navigating the metro.

*FYI, I'm talking about Claude Monet.