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  • Monet and his Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist's Life
  • K. Porter Aichele
Gedo, Mary Mathews . Monet and his Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist's Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. xi + 289. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28480-4

Monet and his Muse is as richly illustrated as the popular books featuring Monet's gardens at Giverny. Trained in psychology and art history, Mary Mathews Gedo writes from a psychological perspective, drawing on primary and secondary sources to offer fresh insights into paintings depicting Camille Doncieux, Monet's mistress and first wife. Published in the same year as Stephanie Cowell's novel Claude and Camille, Gedo's study shuns the allure of romantic fiction in favor of factual information and perceptive pictorial analyses written in jargon-free prose.

In a prologue devoted to Monet's character, Gedo constructs a psychological profile of an artist more inclined toward self-serving mythologizing than penetrating self-reflection. Monet's egotism is a key element in what Gedo perceives as a pattern of loss and replacement beginning with the death of his mother, followed by the loss of [End Page 147] his maternal aunt, then the two women he married, and ending with the solicitous attention of his daughter-in-law. A principal theme in Gedo's book is the professional relationship between Monet and Camille Doncieux, his model/muse. In her analysis of Camille (Woman in a Green Dress), 1866, Gedo observes that it is the model's dynamic pose as much as her fashionable ensemble that conveys the stylish elegance of the modern Parisienne. Citing Camille Doncieux's intuitive professional skills, Gedo makes the case that Monet's companion defined the role of the modern artist's model. As such, Gedo asserts, Camille Doncieux was not simply a muse in the traditional sense, but an equal partner in Monet's development as a figure painter. From Gedo's perspective, Monet's ambivalence about her status in this regard is reflected in the ambiguity of her pose and her enigmatic facial expression.

Whereas the 1866 painting was a critical success at the official Salon, La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume), 1876, was so controversial that Monet contrived to remove it from public scrutiny. Gedo interprets this puzzling painting as a double-edged parody of Eastern and Western artistic conventions. Framed by Japanese fans and wearing a blonde wig, Camille Monet adopted a pose reminiscent of the seductively arched stances of courtesans in the Japanese prints Monet collected. Gedo describes Camille Monet's theatrical costume as a prop in an elaborately constructed modernist conceit in which Monet and his spouse capitalized on the fad for Japonisme to poke fun at the coy eroticism of French academic art. If so, their private joke back-fired in the public venue of the critical press. Noting that Monet could have predicted critical responses to the sexual innuendoes of Camille Monet's pose, Gedo postulates that the ambivalence evident ten years earlier resurfaced, tempting Monet to paint his wife in a compromising manner.

In what Gedo calls "the fiction of paint," Monet also depicted his favorite model as Flora, Ariadne, and Venus, albeit not in their familiar mythological guises. When depicted as a 19th-century goddess, she is dressed in contemporary clothing and appears all but absorbed into her natural surroundings. Among the finest of these images is On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (The River), 1868, in which the model's full skirt commingles with the verdant riverbank. This painting also stands out in the context of Gedo's book for the distinctive way she uses technical and compositional analysis as a basis for probing the personal significance of Monet's paintings. With the assistance of artist William Conger, who reconstructed the under-painting detectible in X-rays, Gedo draws parallels between Monet's working process, his psychological responses to the conflicting demands of family and art, and an incident in Émile Zola's L'Œuvre. A similarly lucid technical analysis supports Gedo's interpretation of Camille Monet on her Deathbed, 1879. In Gedo's view, Monet's brushstrokes have the transparency of a "veil of water" beneath...

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