108
PARTISAN REVIEW
sur /'herbe
of 1863, painters had repeatedly tried to achieve that updated
marriage between figure painting and landscape. Monet's sights are so clear–
ly set on pulling off this particular feat that the very grouping of his figures
(three massed together in the left foreground and one isolated in the right
middle ground) reenacts the
Dejeuner.
But the
Dejeuner
had been a studio
picture, and nothing less than total open-air execution would do for Monet .
Given the dimensions of his canvas, this necessitated the digging of a trench
in his yard so that, by lowering the canvas below grade, he could maintain
his own orientation to the scene while dealing with the upper parts of the
work .
Courbet came by to see Monet while the picture was in progress .
Because the sky was overcast , Monet had stopped work to wait for the sun .
Courbet thought this intermission peculiar . Why not, he reasoned , use the
time to paint in the trees and shrubs of the background? Describing this
incident in
The History of Impressionism,
John Rewald writes, "Monet ,
however, did not accept this advice, for he knew he could obtain complete
unity only if the whole painting was executed under identical conditions of
light ; othetwise, there seemed no reason to go to the trouble of doing it
out-of-doors ." Indeed . No reason at all . And yet the painting is strikingly
disunified .
It
is constructed of wedges of dark and light in such a way that
the figures render their surrounding space peculiarly unreadable . On the
left side, the group of one seated and two standing women form a complex,
saillike pattern that hooks onto the edge of the work as though attaching
itself to a mast . By contrast with that secure placement , the rest of the space
becomes indeterminate, so that it is hard to know where the fourth figure is,
or what, in the paper-cut-out quality of her rendering , she could possibly
be doing .
It is said that Manet disliked the picture . And even in Zola 's praise of
it , one hears a tone of defensiveness , an admission that the work exists in
fragments :
Last year a picture of his was rejected : a figure piece- women in light
~ummer
dresses picking flowers along the paths of a garden; the sun
falls directly on their brilliant white shirts; the tree casts warm shadows
like textile patterns on the path and across the brilliant white dresses .
The result is quite singular. To dare to do something like that- to cut in
two the material of the dresses with light and shade . . .
It
is hard for us to recapture the weirdness of a dress cut to pieces by a
cross fire of sunlight and shadow. What we can see much more easily is the
transitional quality of the picture-its stolid refusal to work according to a
traditional idea of structure , and its as-yet-unformed conception of a new
