Monet and the Fear of a Black Communard Planet
In 2014, I wrote about Claude Monet’s famous painting Impression, Sunrise (1872) and climate change. I argued that its famous color was not a sensory refinement of the artist but a shift produced by the refracting coal smoke generated by the steamships all around. In turn, its modern aesthetic had subsequently served an anesthetic, rendering climate catastrophe into modernism.
That analysis didn’t go far enough. Looking at it again now, I see a painting that engages with fears of a Communard—which was then also to say Black—planet. In registering the change in atmospheric light, Monet was not being an ecologist ahead of his time. He was trying to master—gender and race overtones intended—modern change the year after the 1871 Paris Commune had opened the door to a very different future, only for a violent repression to close it again.
Returning to France after the destruction of the Commune, Monet looked out of his window and was disoriented by what he saw. Subsequent art history has stressed what have come to be understood as the modernist aesthetics of Impression, neglecting its strangeness, even in terms of his own work. Monet’s famous “eye” was not a dispassionate machine but was in all senses reactionary, while remaining modern.
My evidence for this position comes not from textual sources but from Monet’s painting of the period, which was quite unlike any of his other work. And a contemporary artwork by Ja’Tovia Gary, who has also seen the fear at the heart of Monet’s world.
Red Suns
I’ve been thinking about this since June when I stepped outside and saw the sun as a small red dot. The ash from the Canadian wildfires was refracting so much light that I could look right at the sun at two in the afternoon. I had a flash of recognition. The sun I was seeing looked like the small red sun in Impression, Sunrise. The “sensation” I was experiencing was not the beauty so often associated with the painting, so much as the uncanny (Unheimlich, unhomelike). Earth is no longer “home,” if—and it’s a big “if”—home connotes safety.
Monet is never considered a political artist. He absolutely was, though: he was a “bourgeois” artist in both senses. He was a city dweller and a person aligned with the capitalist class. Monet left France to escape the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and, unlike Manet, showed no sympathy for the Commune (although he did visit the Communard artist Gustave Courbet in hospital).
My sense now is that Monet responded to the uncanny red shift of coal ash with emotions ranging between nervousness and fear. These were the “sensations” his Impression was designed to capture, even if he would never had been able to articulate them. That’s why he painted.
Revolutionary blackness
There were two related anxieties at work. Were the very visible modern means of energy production in somewhere like Le Havre harbor on a smoggy morning going to mean a new social order? Second, for those aligned with the Versaillais “party of order,” who shot an estimated 25,000 Communards once the city was retaken, the Commune had meant “Paris in the hands of the blacks.”
What did that mean? There were certainly Black people in the Commune. The radical Louise Michel described a conversation between herself and an African veteran of the papal guard while both were on guard duty. In response to her question, he defined the experience of Communard life as “reading a book with images.” In this relation of the visible and the sayable, there was a Communard countervisuality.
The sense of the Commune as “black” further expressed the conservative fear of the end of always already racialized social hierarchy. Always close to mind was how the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) had abolished slavery, expropriated all overseas property, human or landed, and defined all who remained in the island, regardless of ancestry or skin tone, as “Noir”: black.
Against that inclusive revolutionary blackness, the historian Thomas Carlyle, who coined the term “visuality” in English, defined the French Revolution as “chaos,” in which “dim masses, and specks of even deepest black, work in that white-hot glow of the French mind, now wholly in fusion and confusion.” Bad as this was, it paled next to Haiti, which was “Black without remedy.
In 1867, the future Impressionist Antoine Guillemet wrote to the Puerto Rican painter Francisco Oller that “[17]93 in painting” was coming. 1793 was the moment in the first French Revolution of the sans-culottes, the urban radicals, the execution of Louis XVI, the end of the Academy of Painting. All of it was “black.”
Now, the Louvre would be burned, said Guillemet, turning art history into ashes. A few years later, the Commune was declared by a Committee of Public Safety, in direct echo of 1793. But it was the Palace of the Tuileries that the Communards burned in their retreat, ashes of a different social order.
With all those sensations at work, Monet retired to his hotel room in Le Havre in order to paint his now famous view. By climbing the stairs to look out over the port from above, Monet was claiming something half-way to Carlyle’s “heroic” viewpoint, that of the general reviewing the battlefield. Carlyle’s hero was a king or aristocrat, offering the multitude the one right they had—the right to be led.
Monet was no Rimbaud, on strike with the Commune. His painting expressed a nervousness about the modern, perhaps the anxiety known in the period as “neurasthenia,” attributed by neurologist George Beard in 1868 to the stresses of modern civilization. What did this visibly new world hold in store for a white bourgeois like Monet, as he peered out of his hotel window?
To respond to the inevitable counter that there is no evidence for this cathected mediation of the uncanny, I’d say that there absolutely is. It’s not a letter from Monet explaining how his painting was about the fear of a Black planet. It’s a painting entirely unlike anything else he ever painted.
Coal Capitalism and Chaos
Shortly after Impression Sunrise, Monet visualized the new coal-fueled capitalism and its smogs in his small, intense painting Unloading Coal (Musée d’Orsay, c. 1875).
It’s a very uncharacteristic painting for him, engaged as it is with the means of extraction, distribution, production and circulation. A line of coal barges from the mines in the north of France crosses the picture space from the bottom left to the right middle ground. Coal, the product of this primary extraction is carried off the barges by workers.
The figures are notably different to their “black” counterparts, as one critic put it, in the Boulevard des Capucines (1874), exhibited alongside Impression. In Capucines, some figures are just a brushmark, while others evoke the frock coats and gowns of Parisian society. In Unloading Coal, the workers were closely observed. They are all thin. They carry full baskets one way and empties the other. Some of them even seem to be wearing white. But their subordination to the labor is complete, although they seem to be watched over by two figures on the furthest boat.
From here, the coal is transported by means we cannot see to factories like the ones in the background, pouring out smoke. Here the modern iron bridge, and the commodities being transported across it, were produced. The bridge is, as it were, a “higher” level of existence, one dominated by commodities and artificially lit. This hierarchy racialized the scene into antinomies of domination and dominated.
The two spaces of what Benjamin called phantasmagoria — production and consumption — were linked into one visualized system, given coherence by the overall subdued yellow hue, the product of coal smoke. A gaslight, visible sign of human dominance over nature, can be made out on the bridge at top left, but even if illuminated, it had no chance of cutting through the smog.
Just as with Impression, Unloading Coal was visualized from an unusual midair viewpoint, interpreted by art historian Richard Thomson as being the view from the window of a train as it crossed over the river Seine. Monet turned the moving image seen from his train, often taken to be the precursor of cinema, into a still. This freeze-frame visualized the modern from the point-of-view of a would-be bourgeois. His viewpoint is accordingly solidly above the laborers, but not above all the layers of the social.
This odd little painting seems to be asking whether it would be possible to contain and control the modern processes of extraction, production and distribution it visualized without further “chaos.” Chaos was the alternative to visuality according to Carlyle. For Monet and other returning Parisians, chaos was not a concept—it was the Commune.
Smog becomes steam
By 1877, Monet had a solidly comforting answer—the modern could be contained, aestheticized and even anesthetized. In a series of paintings at the Gare Saint-Lazare, backed by the railway company, the Chemins de fer de l’Ouest, Monet now saw the engine of modernity as a benign white force. Its smoke was no longer refracting or yellow but billows in white clouds with indigo shadows.
The Third Republic was secure, the Communards were dead or deported, and smog had become Japoniste. Appropriately, the twelve paintings in this series are now dispersed to museums worldwide, “priceless” commodities all.
In the period, Manet could see a different version of Paris. In his 1878 painting Rue Mosnier Decked with Flags, he depicted the national holiday called to celebrate peace. While the bourgeois now traveled the city safely by cab, a disabled man hobbles along the street. Behind the fence to the left were piles of rubble from buildings cleared to make way for the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Who has the right to this city, who has the right to look?.
Giverny Suite (2019)
During the sweltering heat of the past week, I took shelter one day in the Museum of Modern Art to see Ja’Tovia Gary’s three-channel video installation Giverny Suite. The viewer is confronted with large screens on three sides of a rectangular space. Directly facing is a screen covered in ornamental picture frames in the French Empire style, breaking up the flatness of the projection and giving a visual cue to Gary’s anticolonial project.
On left and right the screens tilt into and away from the wall. In short, this is not a conventional perspectival space or the comforting illusion of the darkened movie theatre. Gary’s question is simple: “do you feel safe?” The women she spoke to on New York’s 166th St. mostly answered in terms of bodily safety in the street. She also asks if they feel safe “in the world.” The uncanny red sun is nothing if not a sign that we are not safe in the world. Unevenly and unequally unsafe to be sure, but there are no exemptions.
Gary montaged together archive footage of Fred Hampton with documentation of Carnival, Black Lives Matter video, Josephine Baker and her own interviews. The “frequency” of this assemblage, to use Tina Campt’s term, comes from a bravura performance by Nina Simone of the standard “Feelings.” The key in which she sings is her declaration: “I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that.”
And interspersed among all that, alongside Gary’s drawing directly onto the film, are scenes of the artist at Monet’s Giverny. Standing barefoot, often looking directly at the camera, Gary asks us to imagine the conditions that produced a situation that demanded paintings like Monet’s. These included the violent suppression of the Commune, the rise of fossil fuel capitalist industry and the bourgeois state.
Seen from Gary’s perspective, Monet’s famous garden was created to ensure a sense of safety, warding off the chaos inherent to modernity. Safe for whom? Gary’s answer comes when she is shown in long shot, reduced to a small figure amidst the sea of green, standing on Monet’s instantly recognizable green bridge, screaming. This assemblage is the counterpoint to Monet’s white sight, shown in the whitest of white cubes.
No spectators in the hour or so I was there advanced into the space beyond a back line created by the placement of a three-person seat. Ten feet or so in front of that is what I might call “hostile furniture.” Just as city architects make public space hostile to unhoused people, so has Gary denied museum goers the comfort of an Empire sofa, which tilts sharply as if in frozen in the act of being overturned, a revolution not yet completed.
MoMA advise you to go upstairs three levels to see Monet’s Water Lilies after seeing Giverny Suite. So I did. In the small room where the work is housed, most people were taking photos, so it was hard to see the art. As I tried to look, I kept hearing Simone end her song with a long drawn out “For you,” because Simone’s question, and with it Gary’s was: who are you, you who watch and listen? Above all, the paintings now echoed with Gary’s scream.