Part 2

​The Garden at Sainte-Adresse (1867, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) by Claude Monet depicts an informal scene of four people enjoying the ocean view amongst a pristinely manicured seaside garden terrace. While its flowers and shrubbery seem rich with a bacchanal life, this space has been formulaically landscaped. Crisp edges form clear boundaries of concrete and green grass. A circle of grass and flowers is mathematically centered to the square of the patio. In the center of the work a woman, wearing a flowing white dress with pink ribbons stands against the foliage-filled lattice railing with her parasol. The woman faces away from the viewer toward a gentleman in a black top hat, a brown leisure suit and a walking cane. In the foreground a well dressed man in a grey suit with shiny shoes, a walking stick and a tan hat is sitting on a cane-backed arm chair. His patriarchal age is assumed by his grey-white beard. Seated next to him is a woman with a white parasol and a cream dress that flows over either side of her arm-chair. The two are presumed to be the artist’s father and his sister. The group bask in the sun as they watch the great feats of technology in the brilliant emerald sea. A short distance from the terrace a small boat with three white sails, one large and two smaller to either side, remind the contemporary viewer of leisure hours of the past, in contrast to the large fleet of steam boats that nearly dominates the paintings horizon line. For Monet in 1867, the steam boat was the notable pinnacle in marine technology. The wispy clouds of the lilac sky, like the ocean and the terraced garden, span the entire width of the painting creating three distinct bands. The clarity of the bands or stripes is accentuated by the two vertical flag poles on either side of the couple at the railing. The flag poles fly the flags of France and Le Havre. Aesthetically, however, they create distinct crosshairs forming crisp right angles with the ocean’s horizon. This scene of calculated aesthetics and flat bands of space is a nod to the artist’s study of geometry in nature and the techniques of Japanese wood block prints. Monet himself said this work is a “Japanese painting with flags.” The flag poles also invite vertical movement in the space. Through The Garden at Sainte-Adresse Monet captured the essential balance of tradition and modernity in a cultural context, juxtaposing the sail boats with the modern industrial steamer and the crisp geometric forms and lines of the flag poles. Still, the key subject is human life, people who have the advantages of technology, the time and means to enjoy the leisure of a fresh afternoon basking in the sun. From the clear narratives of Monet, Manet and Renoir, artists of Modern Art sought to move away from the realistic depiction of natural life. The bleak realities of life and the looming world war in the first decade of the twentieth century in Europe sparked an abstraction in art.