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This revolutionary interdisciplinary study argues that Monet's
artistic practices and choices were the direct result of his
political stance as a nineteenth-century libre penseur, a position
characterized by radical republicanism, a progressive social
agenda, and fierce anticlericalism. His efforts to create a style
reflecting his personal political code led him to produce paintings
proclaimed by like-minded free thinkers as "a science being
constantly perfected" (Gustave Geffroy), that is, emphasizing only
observable phenomena in the immediate present through scrupulous,
insistent on-site observation, capturing the raw data of sensations
and sensory experience, and purporting to record a world free of
embedded meaning. Darwin's world similarly comes with no
prepackaged reassurance of humankind's privileged place in it; it
is instead a space in which all varieties of organisms and species
compete for limited resources in a struggle for survival. The
Darwinian model of nature appears to have influenced Monet's
artistic production increasingly as his style evolved over several
decades. In opposition to post-Renaissance art that privileged the
human presence in both representation and the viewing act, Monet's
later paintings create a sense of virtual and visual equality among
all observable phenomena. The human - and the viewer, by extension
- is thus represented as neither separate from nature as a
disengaged observer nor superior to it but rather co-equal with all
other organic life forms surrounding it. This approach, while
echoing Darwin's admiration of nature and its laws, also reminds
humankind of its own fragility and the hard choices it must make to
avoid extinction.
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