Claude Monet (1877) Gare St-Lazare [oil on canvas] Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

This work nearly splits the abstraction scale in half but favors realism. The rough brush work, combined with absolute reliance on muddied colors, create an invented textural binding effect and qualifies this work as process art. For the time, the application of abstraction is severe, and is consistent with a specific set of impressions inspired within the observer: thick, dirty air, perhaps a chill, and formal choices that impress the unnecessary fast-paced nature of urban life more than the view of the city center itself. This somewhat unexpected application of brushwork is stabilized by Monet’s formal distribution of energy and “weight” on the canvas. 

Monet’s use of value and diminishing size create a seamless sense of spaciousness in the low-key foreground and strong spatial order in the high-key background. A strong and unique depth-establishing measure is to blend values from area-to-area, shape-to-shape. The repeating vertical and horizontal forms moving in from the sides, top and bottom build a sense of convergence. Blues, greens and oranges create a split-complementary color scheme, favoring cool colors, which develop ample negative space and solid forms mostly on purity blends.

Monet uses nearly absolute reliance on muddied color, consistent and rough texture and on-canvas blending to set up one of the greatest strengths of this composition, the division between fore- and backgrounds. This is based on relatively sharp transitions from dense to light value and a shift in color. This masterpiece is effective at its intended purpose of impressing on a viewer who may never have experienced a bustling urban center the impact it would have on the senses, to include hearing and smell, but it does so in neither an aggressively cynical or idealized manner.

What is made clear in this work is Monet’s obsession with “recording light” in favor of a perceptual representation of the subject. This is clearly seen in the interplay between gaseous and solid forms, the heavy use of atmospheric perspective, severely minimalized yet evident modelling and a reduction of human forms and interactions to no more than a handful of brushstrokes. Monet has layering lessons to teach; the one I personally place in high regard is to remain true to what is seen, unaffected by prior knowledge, and therefore expectations, of the subject being rendered.