Monet's light

Eva Figes' Light is

[A] slim book—ninety-one pages in all, describing a single summer day in 1900—but an amazingly capacious one. As the subtitle promises, it’s set in Giverny, the place where Monet produced many of his best-known works, including his paintings of water lilies. These are among the most widely viewed and most often reproduced nature studies in the world. What the paintings don’t show, however, is the dramatic extent to which their subjects were in fact man-made. As numerous biographies have detailed, the father of Impressionism was an avid student of botany; he employed and oversaw a team of up to seven gardeners and imported seeds from around the world. The pond in which the famous water lilies grew existed only because he persuaded local authorities to divert a river, and his garden was as assiduously manicured as any aristocrat’s lawn. He was painting nature, but a nature constantly modified in the service of his artistic project.

Not too many people would remember Eva Figes: She was an English writer, who died last year at the age of 80. Figes is best known for her feminist treatise, "Patriarchal Attitudes," published in the 70's. The treatise ferrets out the sexism that Figes saw embedded in almost every aspect of Western civilization.

It's no wonder then that in the novel, Light, Monet, is recreated in the image of a patriarch. However, unlike her other works of fiction and non-fiction, Light isn't a crude vehicle of Figes' ideology; it is something more, as Figes makes it clear that the greatness of Monet's artistic accomplishments are not cancelled by the conditions of their production.

In Light, Monet is shown to be a callous husband and father, not fine-tuned to the emotional needs of the largely female members of his household. He was single-mindedly invested in the procreation of his art. Even where his own children were concerned, Monet fed them and clothed and sheltered them, but inevitably reduced them to a medium via which an aspect of his art would be refracted:

During lunch, he looks down the table at his stepdaughter Germaine and becomes absorbed by the interplay of light and shadow on her hair and gown—so much so that he momentarily forgets whom, exactly, he is looking at.

Monet's patriarchal attitudes are, if one could say this, luminous; he is shown to be in pursuit of "light," not crude power.