Art Bytes: Aimee Marcereau DeGalan

The Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Senior Curator, European Arts at the Nelson-Atkins discusses our current fascination with immersive art experiences and how Claude Monet was one of the artists leading that charge many, many years ago.

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Lately, my Instagram feed has been blowing up with this attraction in Las Vegas called The Sphere. Maybe you've heard about it. The entire facade is 360 feet tall. It's shaped. I mean, of course, like a sphere fitted out with more than a million LEDs that completely transform it. Inside there's a screen that wraps around the audience. It's said to be the largest screen in the world. The animations, plus the light show completely take the audience into the experience for a couple hundred dollars. You're transported pretty much out of this world. People have always been fascinated with this type of experience. I remember going on class trips to the planetarium and there are tons of immersive experiences out there. Check out a Mad Hatter Tea Party or you can run with the dinosaurs. Get involved in a zombie battle. There's even an immersive experience for fans of the TV show The Office with one that you even get a Dunder Mifflin employee badge. And of course, there are art experiences like Meow Wolf, which they call the first Multiversal transit station serving Earth. That is really out of this world. Area 15 offers alternate reality rooms and sense altering rides. Super Blue Miami is a warehouse packed with interactive art. Why are we so drawn to experiences like this? Yes. They're memorable. Yes, they're transformative. And yes, they allow you to completely engage both intellectually and emotionally. And they're a great escape from the real world. But this is not a new thing. We've been doing this for over 100 years. Impressionist artist Claude Monet decided to upend the art world by inserting nature into larger than life paintings. Before that, you'd see a huge battle scene or a story from the Bible or a myth in a painting that completely covered a wall. But nature? Not so much. Monet saw nature as large scale. He felt embarrassed by it, so he wanted others to feel the same. That's why he started painting those monumental pictures of the water lilies at his home in Germany, France. How did audiences back then react to it? Spoiler alert. Not very well. Welcome to Art Bytes, a podcast from the Nelson-atkins Museum of Art, where we take you beyond just the art on the walls and into the stories of the artists and the ideas behind them. I'm your host, Kathleen Layton. Today I'm talking with Amy Marcello de Galan, the European arts curator at the Nelson-atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. About Claude Monet, his struggle to be understood good, how he broke down barriers, and why a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder is not always a bad thing. Welcome, Amy. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. So, Claude Monet, I mean, did he invent the panorama all that long time ago? Believe it or not, it actually started around the 1780s. So about 100 years before he starts putting his brush to canvas to depict these large scale water lilies. So he was sort of copying someone else in a way, but he took it to the next level as only someone like Claude Monet could. Okay, let's back up. Who started this panorama thing? So there is an apocryphal story about an English artist, Robert Barker, who was in a debtor's prison in the 1780s, had a lot of time on his hands and he was sitting in a cell that was illuminated by a tiny slit at the ceiling with a shaft of light coming down. His cell had curved walls and he suddenly thought about this idea of illuminating a scene from the top on a concave wall that that distortion created this sense of a lifelike illusion. And he thought, When I get out of here, I'm going to take this idea, work on it, patent it. And he eventually had this nature at a glance patent that he developed, and 360 degree paintings came out of that. You're kidding. So he invented this panorama that we see. He did indeed. And it became a phenomenon in London and Edinburgh and Paris and even made it to the States. So people were loving it then. People loved it, but they very different from what Monet ended up doing. Okay, so what was he doing? So these traditional panoramas were, as you mentioned, 360 degree panoramas of battle scenes myth. And they really kind of came out of this militaristic tradition of looking at a battleground that was going to be waged or a land that was going to be conquered. It was an early form of entertainment. You paid a price. You entered at the bottom, you ascended a staircase, you looked around from a viewing platform. And so this was very prescribed way of looking at something 360 degree view. These things were completely encircling you. Monet's idea was a little bit different. Still looking at something in the round, but instead of looking at something from a prescribed distance, he wanted you to get up close. Instead of looking at a landscape that was through a window plane or a picture where you had a vanishing point. Monet took all of that away. He took. He put you right in the water of the pond. He changed the viewing distance. You could get up close. You could look at the texture of the brushwork. But the idea was the same, immersing you completely in nature. So was it Monet's objective to immerse the viewers of his paintings? Very much. I think he really wanted to surround people with nature, but not in the traditional sense. He wanted to remove that horizon line to make you literally just become a part of nature, which was different than what those traditional panoramas were doing. You were viewing nature, you were viewing a scene. But with Monet, you were literally almost in it. He didn't start out by painting huge canvases like this, though, so he came to this idea. Walk us through that. So. That's right. He he was painting on a much smaller scale earlier in his career. Around 1907, he starts to do some of these water lilies vertically on a traditional easel that you would hang on a wall. And he was really experimenting with gradually eliminating these representations of horizon lines, getting closer up to the subject. We know he was painting from boats when he was in the river sand. And so we've got a lot of pictures before this point where he's in the water and this just keeps he just keeps taking it to the next level. And the idea for the painting around comes, I think, in the late 1890s where he started to think about wanting to surround people in nature. And he gradually gains more and more. I mean, it was a big move for him to do this. It was really completely revolutionary. And so he would exhibit a couple of things. Critics would detract from what he was doing. He would go back to the studio. He would destroy a lot of things. You mentioned obsessive compulsive at the beginning. He would paint 4 to 6 canvases at a time to capture the light, destroy some of them, paint over them. And it was just this gradual process of painting, painting, painting and creating. But he got larger and larger in scale, ultimately creating a new studio to accommodate these large pictures. So he was exhibiting them at this time. What was the public saying? What were the critics saying? The critics were mixed. A lot of people didn't understand at all what he was doing. They were so gestural and so loose and the bold colors were present that people started to challenge whether or not he was an impressionist. It was an impressionist not of nature, but of his own mind. It became more of an interior kind of thing of what he was doing. A lot of people just were baffled. They didn't understand at all what what he was trying to do. So what were the Impressionists trying to do as a group? You know, I think as a whole we think about impressionist as capturing light, the transitory effects of light, and that's why he would work on multiple canvases at the same time to create that mood and capture that fleeting effect of the ephemeral nature of of light. And I think with Monet, he took it to that next level by getting looser and just more gestural with his brushwork. The color palette becomes really bold and rich, and it takes us away from having any sensibility of where we are in that nature that we are in it. We have no horizon lines, no sense of scale. We're immersed in the nature itself. And he took that and then painted it on a much, much larger scale. And that idea of being immersed so that there is no horizon line that was really kind of the rub where the public was concerned right there looking at these things that they don't really know what their place is in that. Exactly. So no one had done that before. All of his colleagues were painting in this loose, gestural way, capturing the fleeting effects of light. But no one had done what Monet did, which was to eliminate where you were within that landscape. And how did he capture that? He built a new studio, got money to buy larger canvases and put these canvases on easels and moved them around and just started to paint on a much, much larger scale, became becoming more gestural and completely losing himself in in nature. I mean, this is the backdrop of World War One. There's a lot of turmoil going on around him. And for him, he really took solace in nature and he was hoping that this gift, this grand action which was going to ultimately go to the state, would allow people to also find solace in being surrounded in nature. He actually stood in the water painting some of these paintings. Isn't that right? Well, he did. We know he had a boat and he paid it from a boat. But for the water lilies, landscapes, he reportedly would go out and dust some of the water lilies off to make sure that they were going to capture and reflect the light in the way that he wanted. But he he did. He would go out at four in the morning sometimes to paint to get certain types of light. And he very much was a part of it. You wonder about someone who is really obsessive compulsive, which it sounds like he was. And he's painting over and over and he's painting on top of his own paintings. How is anything ever finished? Well, that's a great question. And for him, they never really were finished. His friends were begging him to give the pictures to the state. And he had agreements after agreements, deadlines after deadlines, and he was never satisfied. He completely would paint over things, scrape and remake and he had those canvases in his in his studio at his death. And so that's why the date of our painting, 1915 to 1926, he was still working on them. And we know from X rays underneath how many layers and different kinds of conceptions of that composition were there. It's incredible. How many paintings did he do of the water lilies? Well, he worked on them for over 30 years. So there are hundreds of them. And so he was, I mean, completely immersed in this whole idea. And he did these again and again and again. He must have had some idea how he wanted these to be exhibited to an audience. He did. And that was that was the crazy thing about it. He had dreams about how he wanted to exhibit these things. I mean, it does take off on this idea of the panorama and exhibiting something in the round. And it was that rotunda scale, the panorama, something seen in the round, that idea of illusion ism. Monet knew that these large scale canvases required a purpose built room. They wouldn't just sit on a flat wall as you normally would look at art. They needed to have a concave wall and a purpose built space, just like these rotunda were for the earlier panoramas. And he dreamed about this. Did he write that in his letters? He did. He he he had this idea of exhibiting something in the round, and he started working with an architect to design a space specifically for this panoramic view of his work. So in a way, he caught the fever of the panorama. Ania Panorama mania, Panorama mania. It's a great word. People. People caught the bug. And in a way, even though it was about 100 years later, it was in Monet's own way. I mean, it was it was not the traditional landscape. It was this completely blown out, modern way of looking at landscape that people weren't quite ready for. So he had this idea of the large array, which is in Paris and and exhibiting these in the round. And then did people finally say, wow, these are fantastic. One would hope that that would be what they would say. And a few people got it. A few people. Critics were commenting on the experience of viewing them. They really saw it as this, they call them liquid landscape. So the idea of this merging water, subject of the water landscape, Monet hung them very low. He was very specific. Every single detail he attended to. So the height of the landscapes of the water scapes, 24 inches off the ground, they were six and a half feet tall. They were seamlessly displayed all the way around. He was very specific about the lighting, just like the panoramas with the skylight. These had a skylight also. But the the idea was that there was no shadow. So there was this umbrella kind of above them that soften the light. It was very specific. He very much controlled the environment, which was a whole new thing for a fine artist to do and to think about. But again, they're so different than what other artists were doing at that time. What other artists were the hot artists? So there are a lot of American artists. Thomas Cole did these panoramic exhibitions in New York, but again, these were traditional landscapes. You had a sense of where you were, you had a horizon, you had a sense of a single point perspective. Monet threw that out, threw that out completely. It was they were disorienting. And I think that in a way, he was modern. Before his time. People didn't know what to do with them. They were disoriented. They were a gift to the state, and people were thinking that they were the worst gift ever. We have to remember, of course, that these were not donated until after his lifetime are not exhibited, rather until just after his death. He you know, as we said, he was a perfectionist. He was working, working, working. And they weren't finally exhibited until afterwards. So he didn't hear this critic criticisms, but people just didn't know what to do. I mean, modern art at that point in the 1920s was Picasso or Braque or modernism, and very different, very different. They didn't know what to make of an 80 year old's ramblings of loose gestural landscape. It wasn't what they thought of as a dappled, sunlit, typical impressionist picture. It was kind of chaotic. It was chaotic. It was completely a chaos of color merging seamlessly between viewer and artist and picture plane, and people didn't know what to do. And so when was he finally appreciated? So history has a way of catching up to itself. And these were exhibited in 1927 and not a lot of people went 1944. The Marjorie was hit with a bomb as part of the war, and it fell into disrepair. It was closed and it didn't reopen until 1952. At that moment, Andre Masson, an artist, went and visited and for him it was this absolute magical moment and he called it the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism. It was as if he was seeing it for the first time and connecting all these dots that Monet was trying to realize 25 years before, 30 years before, and all of a sudden the world was ready for it. Abstract Expressionist artists had just started to think about painting on a large scale, and critics from America flocked over their artists, too, and saw these and thought, my gosh, this is what we're trying to do. This is what we're trying to figure out. And an 80 year old man, 35 years before us was on course. He was. He started what we're trying to do right now. And it was this moment for so many artists and critics that it it's it's spawned this Monet revivalism. So all of a sudden artists and people in museums took late Monet's work seriously. But it took a while for us to all catch up. Wish he could have heard all of that praise. We we wish he could. And it was that moment that the Nelson bought their own water lilies. It was this revivalist moment in the fifties with the Museum of Modern Art leading leading the charge, and 1955 buying the first large scale water lilies. And we started conversations in 1956, St Louis, Cleveland. All of us jumped on and bought Lake Monet for the first time, so pan around mania was reignited, Pantera mania was reignited. And how does it affect art today? How are we looking at this today? You know, I think that's a great question. In terms of the the through roads and the threads that started so long before, it's that whole idea of is there really anything new and what is it that we can draw on from the past that's informed our present? I think that, you know, these panoramas of the 1790s, in a way they were the early iPhone panoramas. I mean it's, it's a phenomena that we're still, I think, completely in love with and fascinated by that idea of seeing something in the ground and being immersed and being part of it. Well, the immersive art experience we see all the time now. pretty much everywhere. We've got an immersive Van Gogh experience. There's an immersive Monet experience, as would Claude Monet go to that experience if he were here today. I think if it were if it were his pictures, he certainly would go. He you know, he was a kind of a curmudgeon. He he was aware of things. He very much was aware. You couldn't escape it. You could not escape the Pantera mania that was coursing through Europe. So he would have been aware of that, but he might have gone begrudgingly and sat in the corner and kind of looked at the whole idea of spectacle. But from that idea, Born was Born, his idea for this grand decoration to completely surround people in his own way to to enact his own form of dominance over the landscape, to sort of create his own new visual, modern language that he took from that idea of the panorama and make it all his own. And we're still doing it today, and it's immensely popular. It's crazy how popular it is. And I think I think that part was something that no artist could deny wanting to be a part of. And I think that that was it was Monet shot. It was that was his way of putting his his stake in the sand of this is what he's going to do and he's going to do it in a big, bold, beautiful way. And maybe we'll see his show at the Sphere at some point in Las Vegas, maybe. You never know. Thank you so much for joining us and giving us some more information about being transported by art and immersed by it. I'm Kathleen Layton and you've been listening to Art Bytes. We'll see you next time.