American Art News
NEW YORK CITY

DEC 11 1926

## Claude Monet
Dean of French
Painters, Dead

*Last of the Great XIXth Century Group of French Artists Dies in 86th Year at His Famous Giverny Home*

Claude Monet is dead.

The last leader of the revolution; the last of the great artists of France who formed the now famous Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs in 1874; with the exception of Guillaumin the last link between the struggles of that day and the present triumph, has joined his fellow masters.

One wonders whether, the group again complete, they will gather around small tables in some Montmartois Olympus—Manet, Dégas, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir. Van Gogh would be with them, and Gauguin. Monet will have much to tell them and it may be news to some of them that they are old masters now.

For it was quite another story at that first exhibition in 1874, the exhibition which gave the name "Impressionist" to the world.

In a small room on the Boulevard des Capucines rented from a photographer, thirty painters among them Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Morisot, Cézanne, Guillaumin and Dégas, organized as the Société Anonyme mentioned before, held the first exhibition of "modern art" in France. The show excited derision and bitter recrimination. One of the canvases, Monet's "Impression, Soleil Lévant," was chosen by a mocking critic to give the group a title and, despite their early protests, the painters became identified as "Impressionists." The storm of protest was even greater than that which greeted the Armory Show in New York nearly forty years later.

The next year there was no exhibition, but a sale was held at the Hotel Drouot. About seventy pictures, twenty of them by Monet, brought about $2,000 and many of these were bought in. One of the high prices was paid for Renoir's "Vue de Pont Neuf" which brought the staggering sum of $60. The Monets brought from $40 to $60 each. Daubigny was one of the very few to buy Monet's work and evidently his purchases were regarded by his family as the result of a shameful aberration, for in the sale of his collections in 1878 the Monets were put with the "junk" in an anonymous sale and the "Canal à Saardam" was sold for $16.

The second and third exhibitions of the group were held at the gallery of Durand-Ruel, one of the earliest supporters of the movement. In view of the fact that American appreciation of art is sometimes criticized it is worth while to note that Durand-Ruel has said that without the support of a few American collectors he might have been unable to carry on.

It seems impossible that such a situation could have existed only fifty years ago, for to-day the paintings which were so scorned are now among the great collecting prizes.

All this change Monet saw. He enjoyed the experience, rare in the life of a great painter, of seeing his work appreciated before his death. It may have amused him in recent years, to find that, among the most modern critics, he had already become "academic."

But success in no way affected his integrity. He had set himself a problem—the perfect rendition of nature, the giving to light and color their true values. Almost to the day of his death he pursued this goal, working often on a half-dozen canvases at once, catching in each, the aspect of his subject at a particular moment in the day. From this labor came the great "Haystack" series.

## CLAUDE MONET
DIES AT GIVERNEY

*(Continued from page 1)*

and that of the Cathedral of Rouen. His garden and lily pond at Givernoise gave him in later years the only subjects he needed and from this tiny world came many of his finest works.

Modern critics have told us that this concern with the superficial aspect keeps him from membership in the first rank of artists and, in some measure, there is truth in the assertion. But the statement has always seemed to me to indicate an incomplete acquaintance with the work of Claude Monet. It is quite true that in many of his paintings design plays small part; that many of them are only perfect in the rendition of superficial aspects of nature; that some of them fall short even of that. He did not always strike twelve and the emphasis on his "Impressionism" has obscured the quality of his finest work. But there can be little doubt, from among the hundreds, a few of his canvases will rank among the first. It is a mistake to suppose that solidity must always be heavy. Although in Monet's greatest works the forms are light, they are none the less real. And through all his works there is quick, buoyant life.

Our debt to Monet does not end with his own work. It has been said that he "cleaned the palettes of Europe," that largely through the influence of his work, color became recognized as an essential element in fine painting. Before Monet the great majority of painters used color only as a pleasing dress for black and white design—Monet, with his careful study of color values, brought the realization that color is, of itself, a part of form and design and not something to be applied to a carefully worked out drawing in black and white. It is probable that none of the great artists of his day was uninfluenced by him and many, among them Signac and, greatest of all, Seurat, were his direct followers.

But, wherever he may eventually be ranked, his greatest legacy will be the record of the vision of the keenest eye in Europe. He has left a source for the study of color unequalled in the history of painting. He has left the Monets color and, in his work, he has published that knowledge. His influence has been worldwide. He was one of the few painters without whom the history of art would be incomplete.

He died, on December 5th, 1926, at Givernoise.

Tribune
Lila, Oklahoma

DEC 12

Speaking of a picture by Signor De Chirico, called "The Lovers," now on exhibition in Brooklyn, Miss Katherine S. Dreier refers in her preface to the catalogue to "De Chirico from Italy and his group working out the problems of his Interiors Metaphysiques." What a life saver! No one can speak disrespectfully of "Interjurs Metaphysiques." It does not matter that we understand it; it is just part of the ritual.

No one has better depicted this scared credulity as revealed in word-habits than Andre Maurois in his little skit called "Have You Ever Watched a Stream?" An artist was persuaded by a fun-loving critic to paint "synthetic portraits" as a joke upon the public. He then persuaded the artist to mystify all inquirers by repeating the words "synthetic portraits." The artist ended by repeating them in "calm good faith to the critic himself. By repetition he came to believe in his own vagary."

Many phases in art and literature have vogue not because of their content but because of their repetition without analysis. In recent literary conversation one is constantly hearing the word "dated." It is used, like all such words, with an air of finality. It is designed to convey the fact that a piece of writing is so connected and implicated with the special and narrow problems of its little moment in history as to lose all validity and meaning. One can hear "Mme. Bovary" estated dated and dismissed, also Shaw's "Candida" and Sudermann's "Magda." Just recently a frothy user of adjectives referred to Gissing and the Goncourts as "quite frightfully dated." According to this view everything in literature is "dated" unless its date is today.

Most of this sort of thing springs from something akin to what the psychoanalysts call a defense complex—an instinctive depreciation of what is too difficult, severe and troubling. "All art is dated in the sense that it uses the changing externals of the human show; all profoundly sincere art is dateless in the precise measure in which it deals with concrete problems of fate, character and circumstances. In these is the eternal and enduring."

But the person suffering from scared credulity does not feel or understand values because he is committed to the tyranny of forms. To such an one, life and nature are frozen into patterns and modernism is just a change of patterns. The fierce emotional certainties distilled from pain and conflict, from love and fear, have no lift or lift for him.

This type is not confined to art and literature. It is just as evident in commercial life. When asked to take a hand in some undertaking the refusal is not phrased in the language of inability but in the language of over-work—"too busy." The really over-worked are too over-worked to know it. The "too busy" type is just using a defense mechanism with a view of securing credit. It is just a childish form of scared credulity and it is a "dead-give-away."

Cultural allegiance reveals the same fetish. When asked to read about a new attitude or a new idea the language of refusal is not that of incapacity but of allegiance to some self-perpetuating pledge or taboo. The phrasing is ant and illuminating—"We have always read 'The Stand-patter' or, "we have always gone to the 'Ultra Grey.'" The emphasis is on the word "always." Thus scared credulity is immune to the names and achievements of initiators and innovators—Moses, Jesus, Abelard, Darwin, Lister and Burbank.

And yet the glad singers of heightened joy always welcome the new day. They are unaffected. They know that in reality a new idea or a new dawn is the friendliest thing in the world. It is the unswept and unenfiladed which breeds the cohesives. Light and sunbeams carry their own aspexs.