Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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464 words
Three years back there was a hugely successful and popular van Gogh exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Bremen. And this year they came up with another famous follow-up, an exhibition focusing on Monet, his wife Camille, and paintings of women at the time in general.
It’s called Monet and Camille and focuses around the painting of Camille in a green dress that the Kunsthalle bought for a significant amount of money very early on. That kind of painting was apparently considered to be revolutionary at the time because it was uncommon to paint people not representing anything like that. And at least Camille’s robe has a spectacular shade of green that’s very vivid and impressive.
But in total I didn’t like that painting too much. Not only did I dislike her posture –turning away from the viewer, which must have been en vogue back then – but I also missed the subtlety I saw in many of his others paintings there. Paintings which only contain a few lines but yet manage to contain a lot of detail. Paintings which look like just a bunch of random lines in a close-up but make perfectly detailed sense when seen from a distance. I really like that!
In some of the paintings of women outside, I also observed a certain fondness for parasols and the fact that those parasols seem to have different numbers of ‘edges’ in the different paintings. In particular, some of them seem to have an odd number, which seems unrealistic. But I don’t really care about the realism, I was just amazed to see a parasol which looks heptagonal in one of the paintings, which must be extremely rare. [related bickering]
In addition to the Monets, they had borrowed some Manets, Renoirs and Carolus-Durans from galleries around the world. All of those artists also painted women at the time. To give a fuller picture, they also included notes on fashion at the time with some drawings from fashion magazines (interestingly, complete with copyright notices or ‘reproduction interdite’ notes, even back then) and also photos from the 1860s. It’s amazing that they could do such photos back then and that they were preserved nicely. The photos I saw looked like their lenses had very little depth of field, so getting a really good shot must have required much more attention than it did today – particularly as you couldn’t simply delete and redo it immediately if you didn’t like the preview.
But my favourite painting came at the very end. And it wasn’t by Monet either. But by Whistler – called Arrangement in Black and Brown: The Fur Jacket. Very simple, nice and dark. Very cool.
Factoid to remember: The font they’re using at Kunsthalle for the exhibition is Frutiger’s Meridien.
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