Monet and Other People

Abstract

Beginning in the 1850s, French theorists explained the subjectivity of art with a parable. Two painters paint the same landscape, each copying exactly what he sees. When they compare their works, they are astonished to discover that the paintings are different, from which they conclude that no two people see the world the same way. Unbeknownst to most critics and largely forgotten by historians, this hypothetical was real. Claude Monet and his fellow impressionists really did paint side-by-side, yielding artworks that ask us to compare their views of the same scene. But while many of the resulting works are incredibly famous, the practice itself has been taken for granted, discussed only in passing and in reductively biographical terms. For Monet, painting alongside others focalized the tension between copying and creating, between individual and group, between the world as it is and the world as it appears. It concretized broad social issues such as originality, individuality, and sexuality, which Monet probed practically via his relation to his fellow artist. By attending to side-by-side painting, we can turn from the universal, static, and unwieldly category of society to work more particular, dynamic, and practical.