I have been visiting L'Orangerie.
From Héléne Cixous The Last Painting or the Portrait of God
"And what is a painter? A bird-catcher of Instants./ 'I will have to work very hard to render what I am looking for: the instantaneous impression, paricularly the envelope of things, the same all-pervading light.'/ Monet, in 1890, is the one who said that: what I am looking for, instantaneousness... the same light spread throughout, the same light, the same light."
"Who could write: 'Is my theme the instant? my life theme. I try to keep up with it, I divide myself thousands of times, into as many times as the seconds that pass away, fragmentary as I am and precarious the moments. It may be Clarice Lispector, it may be Monet."
"Ah! If I were Monet. I would fill your house with mimosas, with wisteria, with poppies. with palm trees. With straw. Only their fragrance would be missing."
"I am toiling away at the rate of six paintings a day. I find it terribly difficult to
catch all the colours of this country; at times, I am appalled at the kind of
colours I have to use, I’m afraid my colours will seem terrible and yet I have
considerably toned them down: this place is drenched in light . . . But how
happy I am here because each day I can find the same effect again, catch it and
come to grips with it.17
That was Monet."
[when I searched for texts containing references to Monet on my computer, the following came up.]
What Color is the Sacred, Michael Taussig:
135: "Europeans bought slaves in exchange for Indian textiles, such as the famous Guinea Cloth dyed that brilliant, deep, dye-fast Pondicherry indigo from the Coromandel coast of Eastern India. Let one example as provided by Robert Harms suffice: almost 33 percent of the monetary value of the trade goods in the hold of the French slave ship, the Diligent, as it sets out from Nantes for Whydah on the Slave Coast of West Africa in 1731 was fabric from the east coast of India."
136-7: "Furthermore, plenty of the slaves bought with color were put to work in the New World cultivating and processing indigo, the dye which at times in the Caribbean islands and Central America surpassed the monetary importance of sugar, even in eighteenth-century Haiti, 'the pearl of the Antilles,' from where it was shipped to France so as to color Napoleon's Grand Armée shipped to Haiti to fight the slave revolt."
137-8: "Of course Marlow is sickened by the terms of trade, the rubbishy cottons being in European monetary terms but a fraction of what the ivory would be sold for in Europe."
161: "And what beautiful money it was, being used as such in the spice trade in the islands of the Dutch East Indies. Following the Portuguese and the Dutch sixteenth-century strategy of finding ways of getting into the long-established Asian trade between Asian ports, the British East India Company swapped cottons dyed in India for spices in the Malay archipelago where, because the economies were not monetarized, cloth from India was used instead, a process repeated in Africa with the European trade in slaves."
From Deleuze/ Guattari Percept, Affect, Content
"Through his admiration of Pissaro and Monet, what Cézanne had against the Impressionists was that the optical mixture of colors was not enough to create a compound sufficiently 'solid and lasting like the art of the museums,' like 'the perpetuity of blood' in Rubens."
"Monet's house finds itself endlessly caught up by the plant forces of an unrestrained garden, a cosmos of roses. A universe-cosmos is not flesh. Neither is it sections, joined up parts of planes, or differently oriented planes, although it may be constituted by the connection of every plain to infinity. But ultimately the universe appears as the area of plain, uniform color [l'aplat], the single great plane, the colored void, the monochrome infinite. The French window, as in Matisse, now opens only onto an area of plain, uniform black. The flesh, or rather the figure, is no longer the inhabitant of the place, of the house, but the universe that supports the house (becoming)."