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Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen: Read by Christopher Eccleston | Remembering World War 1 | C4

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The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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Claude Monet was a key figure in the Impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long career, Monet consistently depicted the landscape and leisure activities of Paris and its environs as well as the Normandy coast. He led the way to twentieth-century modernism by developing a unique style that strove to capture on canvas the very act of perceiving nature.

Raised in Normandy, Monet was introduced to plein-air painting by Eugène Boudin ( 2003.20.2), known for paintings of the resorts that dotted the region's Channel coast, and subsequently studied informally with the Dutch landscapist Johan Jongkind (1819-1891). When he was twenty-two, Monet joined the Paris studio of the academic history painter Charles Gleyre. His classmates included Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and other future Impressionists. Monet enjoyed limited success in these early years, with a handful of landscapes, seascapes, and portraits accepted for exhibition at the annual Salons of the 1860s. Yet rejection of many of his more ambitious works, notably the large-scale Women in the Garden (1866; Musée d'Orsay, Paris), inspired Monet to join with Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, and others in establishing an independent exhibition in 1874. Impression, Sunrise (1873; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris), one of Monet's contributions to this exhibition, drew particular scorn for the unfinished appearance of its loose handling and indistinct forms. Yet the artists saw the criticism as a badge of honor, and subsequently called themselves "Impressionists" after the painting's title, even though the name was first used derisively.

Monet found subjects in his immediate surroundings, as he painted the people and places he knew best. His first wife, Camille ( 2002.62.1), and his second wife, Alice, frequently served as models. His landscapes chart journeys around the north of France ( 31.67.11) and to London, where he escaped the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Returning to France, Monet moved first to Argenteuil, just fifteen minutes from Paris by train, then west to Vétheuil, Poissy, and finally to the more rural Giverny in 1883. His homes and gardens became gathering places for friends, including Manet and Renoir, who often painted alongside their host ( 1976.201.14). Yet Monet's paintings cast a surprisingly objective eye on these scenes, which include few signs of domestic relations.

Following in the path of the Barbizon painters, who had set up their easels in the Fontainebleau Forest ( 64.210) earlier in the century, Monet adopted and extended their commitment to close observation and naturalistic representation. Whereas the Barbizon artists painted only preliminary sketches en plein air, Monet often worked directly on large-scale canvases out of doors, then reworked and completed them in his studio. His quest to capture nature more accurately also prompted him to reject European conventions governing composition, color, and perspective. Influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, Monet's asymmetrical arrangements of forms emphasized their two-dimensional surfaces by eliminating linear perspective and abandoning three-dimensional modeling. He brought a vibrant brightness to his works by using unmediated colors, adding a range of tones to his shadows, and preparing canvases with light-colored primers instead of the dark grounds used in traditional landscape paintings.

Monet's interest in recording perceptual processes reached its apogee in his series paintings (e.g., Haystacks [1891], Poplars [1892], Rouen Cathedral [1894]) that dominate his output in the 1890s. In each series, Monet painted the same site again and again, recording how its appearance changed with the time of day. Light and shadow seem as substantial as stone in his Rouen Cathedral ( 30.95.250) series. Monet reports that he rented a room across from the cathedral's western facade in 1892 and 1893, where he kept multiple canvases in process and moved from one to the next as the light shifted. In 1894, he reworked the canvases to their finished states.

In the 1910s and 1920s, Monet focused almost exclusively on the picturesque water-lily pond ( 1983.532) that he created on his property at Giverny. His final series depicts the pond in a set of mural-sized canvases where abstract renderings of plant and water emerge from broad strokes of color and intricately built-up textures. Shortly after Monet died (a wealthy and well-respected man at the age of eighty-six), the French government installed his last water-lily series in specially constructed galleries at the Orangerie in Paris, where they remain today.

Auricchio, Laura. "Claude Monet (1840-1926)." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cmon/hd_cmon.htm (October 2004)

House, John. Monet: Nature into Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Tucker, Paul Hayes. Claude Monet: Life and Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

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Claude Monet (1840-1926) | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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Monet found subjects in his immediate surroundings, as he painted the people and places he knew best.

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Becoming Modern, Khan Academy

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Introduction to Modernism

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The Dead

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"Upon all the living and the dead"... The final scene of John Huston's "The Dead", adapted from James Joyce's unequaled masterpiece. Simply one of the best pieces of writing of all times.

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The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf (Part 1 of 3)

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The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf (Part 2 of 3)

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The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf (Part 2 of 3)

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By Daniele

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The following is a short biographical examination of the life and works of James Joyce. It runs less than 7 minutes.

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Daniele

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Despite this choice, Conrad's assumption of a British identity was complex. Conrad's writing, at least, was never inherently 'English', but is rather littered with figures who cross national borders, de-stabilize accepted identities, and embrace the heterogeneity of global cultures -- all this despite the occasional ideological misgiving that have since provoked accusations of racism and pro-imperialism. Conrad's career in the maritime industry took him across seas to numerous continents, and his travels across a globalized world provided him with a huge reservoir of experience upon which he drew when he turned to his writing career in the second half of his life, from the 1890s until he died in 1924. Conrad's novels, short stories and novellas are set in locations as various as South America, the Belgian Congo, Russia, London, and Singapore, and many never move beyond the deck of the ship upon which his characters are enrolled. However, it is interesting to note that Conrad's two careers, maritime and literary, never really overlapped -- Conrad only started writing after he had almost entirely given up his practical job, and once an established author, he never worked on board a ship again.

Writing style

Whether due to his multi-linguistic capacity and his late coming to the English language (Conrad didn't speak English fluently until he was in his twenties), or to the international nature of his early life and experience, Conrad's most distinctive and striking feature is his writing style. Any newcomer to Conrad will be immediately struck by his winding, indirect, tautological, and sometimes frustratingly ambiguous narrative structure. Adjectives are placed stutteringly, punctuation positioned awkwardly, and first readers will find his prose hard-going. But with Conrad, perseverance is the key: after a short while it starts to become clear that the stuttering, awkward syntax is not the work of someone struggling to get to grips with the English language, but in fact someone who is a master of it.

Conrad as Modernist writer

It is this shifting narrative style, that resists the simple linear development of the popular realist novels of the preceding century, that has marked Conrad out as a distinctly Modernist author within an accepted literary canon. Conrad's stylistic experimentation enables him to interrogate, reevaluate and question perhaps his most recurrent thematic interest: morality. However, though early literary critics turned to Conrad as a sort of moral sage, his fictional interrogation of morality, on closer inspection, rejects outright the simple preaching of moral sentiments and 'truths'. Conrad is instead interested in setting up fictional scenarios in which an apparently obvious set of values, or accepted belief system, is thrown into question -- Conrad forces his readers to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge, and the historical and geographical specificity of their values and behavioural habits. In doing so, he exposes their relativity and, most importantly, their fragility.

Conrad as Post/Colonial Writer

With regard to his thematic preoccupations and literary styles Conrad can certainly be considered a Modernist writer. However, I would argue that Conrad's work can be more suitably inserted into the genre of Post/Colonial Writing (though, like many authors, it is more likely that he shifts between two, if not more, retrospectively imposed themes). Why might this be? Conrad's sceptical critiques and literary interrogations of distinctly Eurocentric conceptions of morality and tradition does not come from within the metropolitan, bourgeois cityscape that was the home of so many self-fashioned, high Modernist authors (think of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, or several members of the Bloomsbury Group). Instead, they emerge from colonial settings, underdeveloped environments, from contact zones in which colonizing and colonized cultures clash and conflict, such as in , and Nigger of the Narcissus. The exploration of the ramifications of a global imperialism upon the metropolitan centre writes the marginalized space into the very heart of the Empire. Conrad's literature is not simply colonial. The consistent ambivalence of his prose towards the imperial project marks the beginning of a century-long literary interrogation of what it is to exist in the colonies -- what it is to realize that an Empire apparently convinced of its power is in fact slowly entering the period of its decline and fall. That Conrad's most famous novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), has been taken up and re-written by several now canonical postcolonial authors, such as Nigerian author Chinua Achebe in his Things Fall Apart (1958) and Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in his The River Between (1965), is a testament to the post/colonial nature of Conrad's fiction.

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Despite this choice, Conrad's assumption of a British identity was complex. Conrad's writing, at least, was never inherently 'English', but is rather littered with figures who cross national borders, de-stabilize accepted identities, and embrace the heterogeneity of global cultures -- all this despite the occasional ideological misgiving that have since provoked accusations of racism and pro-imperialism.

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Alla fine dell'Ottocento il potente sovrano del Belgio s'impadronì del cuore dell'Africa e ridusse in schiavitù le popolazioni indigene, uccidendo e mutilando milioni di persone

"L'orrore! L'orrore!". Sono le ultime parole di Kurtz, uno dei grandi personaggi letterari del Novecento uscito dalla magistrale penna di Joseph Conrad nel libro Cuore di tenebra. Kurtz non è un "animo candido"; sulla palizzata davanti alla sua capanna sul grande fiume aveva conficcato le teste di alcuni indigeni uccisi, eppure di fronte a ciò che accade nella foresta pluviale del Congo non può che mormorare: "L'orrore! L'orrore!".
Falso filantropo
Le terrificanti visioni che sconvolgono Kurtz sono le immagini di un genocidio poco conosciuto, quello perpetrato tra fine Ottocento e inizio Novecento da Leopoldo II del Belgio. Un sovrano subdolo e crudele, che passava per essere un filantropo e che invece fu artefice di uno dei più grandi misfatti della storia recente. Nel 1885 Leopoldo II riuscì a impossessarsi di un immenso territorio (76 volte più grande del Belgio) ricoperto di foreste nel cuore dell'Africa − il bacino idrografico del fiume Congo − grazie a un'abilissima campagna di pubbliche relazioni, nel nome della promozione di ricerche geografiche e scientifiche, della lotta ai mercanti di schiavi arabi, e della diffusione della civiltà e del progresso.

Per raggiungere i suoi scopi, reclutò il più celebre esploratore del suo tempo, Henry Morton Stanley, che percorse il fiume e stipulò centinaia di contratti ingannevoli con capitribù locali e mise le basi per la costruzione di un sistema di stazioni che facessero da collettori delle ricchezze della foresta che attraverso il fiume potevano giungere ai porti sulla foce e da qui in Europa.
Servi del caucciù
Ma che cos'erano a quei tempi le ricchezze della foresta? Ce n'era una, ambitissima dall'industria dell'epoca, una resina che si ricavava incidendo la corteccia dei cosiddetti alberi della gomma e si raccoglieva in recipienti messi ai piedi del tronco. Era il caucciù, che, grazie alla scoperta del processo di vulcanizzazione, era destinato a diventare il precursore della plastica. Per ottenere il controllo di questa materia prima strategica, re Leopoldo organizzò un vero e proprio regime commercial-militare fondato consapevolmente sul terrore.

Occorreva manodopera per raccogliere il caucciù e trasportarlo fino al mare, così tutti gli africani furono obbligati a raccogliere quella resina senza alcun compenso. Ogni villaggio doveva consegnare agli emissari del re-filantropo una certa quota del prezioso prodotto vegetale: chi si rifiutava, o consegnava quantità minori di quelle richieste, era punito duramente, fino alla mutilazione: gli veniva tagliata una mano o un piede; alle donne, le mammelle. Contro i ribelli si ricorreva all'assassinio, a spedizioni punitive, distruzioni di villaggi, presa in ostaggio delle donne.
Crudeltà disumana
A fare il lavoro sporco erano circa duemila agenti bianchi, disseminati nei punti più importanti del "regno" di Leopoldo: molti di essi erano malfamati in patria e malpagati in Congo. Ogni agente comandava truppe di mercenari (sedicimila in tutto) e un certo numero di nativi armati, presi da etnie diverse e dislocati nei singoli villaggi, per assicurare che la gente facesse il proprio dovere. Se la quota era inferiore a quella stabilita, si ricorreva a fustigazioni o mutilazioni. Era il metodo del terrore, tanto efficace quanto diabolico.

Tutto questo accadeva nello Stato Libero del Congo, così Leopoldo aveva chiamato il "suo" possedimento. Il risultato fu che, secondo calcoli attendibili, nell'arco di un ventennio morirono circa dieci milioni di persone, direttamente per le amputazioni o per le violenze, o indirettamente per epidemie o per fame. Sì, per fame. Perché un'altra forma di punizione per chi non riusciva a portare le quantità volute di caucciù era la distruzione dei raccolti o addirittura dei villaggi. E portare la preziosa resina nelle quantità volute diventava sempre più difficile, perché le piante adatte, visto lo sfruttamento intensivo, si trovavano sempre più lontano dal fiume e molti villaggi non riuscivano a onorare le richieste.
Testimoni coraggiosi
Nell'agosto del 1908, poco prima di cedere ufficialmente la propria colonia personale al governo del Belgio, Leopoldo II fece bruciare per otto giorni consecutivi la maggior parte dei suoi archivi. "Regalerò ai belgi il mio Congo, ma non avranno diritto a sapere ciò che vi ho fatto", disse. E, oltre alle carte ridotte in cenere, ridusse drasticamente al silenzio i testimoni scomodi. Fu così che una parte importante della storia della dominazione europea in Africa venne cancellata.

A gridare al mondo ciò che accadeva in Congo furono un pugno di eroi - giornalisti, esploratori, missionari o diplomatici - che fecero nascere il primo movimento mondiale per la difesa dei diritti umani: Edmund Morel, reporter e politico britannico che per primo indagò su ciò che accadeva in Congo; George Washington Williams e William Sheppard, due neri americani, il primo giornalista e il secondo predicatore cristiano, che smontarono la figura da filantropo di re Leopoldo; Roger Casement, console britannico in Congo, che raccontò in patria ciò che vedeva. Senza dimenticare Alice Seeley Harris e suo marito John Harris, due missionari audaci che all'inizio del Novecento girarono la foresta congolese con la Bibbia in una mano e la macchina fotografica nell'altra. È grazie al loro coraggio se oggi possiamo pubblicare le immagini-shock di quell'epoca. Quei preziosi testimoni denunciarono all'intero mondo il regno del terrore di Leopoldo II, fermarono la carneficina dei popoli indigeni e liberarono Kurtz dai suoi incubi.

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Storia: le atrocità di re Leopoldo II in Congo

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Alla fine dell'Ottocento il potente sovrano del Belgio s'impadronì del cuore dell'Africa e ridusse in schiavitù le popolazioni indigene, uccidendo e mutilando milioni di persone di Raffaele Masto "L'orrore! L'orrore!". Sono le ultime parole di Kurtz, uno dei grandi personaggi letterari del Novecento uscito dalla

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Conrad's work

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Struggling with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness? Check out our thorough summary and analysis of this literary masterpiece.

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Joseph Conrad