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AP®︎/College Art History
Course: AP®︎/College Art History > Unit 6
Lesson 2: Modern and contemporary art- Courbet, The Stonebreakers
- Early Photography: Niépce, Talbot and Muybridge
- Manet, Olympia
- Painting modern life: Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare
- Velasco, The Valley of Mexico
- Rodin, The Burghers of Calais
- Velasco, The Valley of Mexico
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Cassatt, The Coiffure
- Munch, The Scream
- Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
- Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- The first modern photograph? Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Gustav Klimt, The Kiss
- Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss
- Analytic Cubism
- Matisse, Goldfish
- Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912
- Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier
- Käthe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht
- Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye
- Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow
- Stepanova, The Results of the First Five-Year Plan
- Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
- Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
- Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater
- Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas)
- Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (*short version*)
- Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (*long version*)
- Duchamp, Fountain
- Lam, The Jungle
- Mexican Muralism: Los Tres Grandes David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco
- Rivera, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park
- de Kooning, Woman I
- Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building
- Warhol, Marilyn Diptych
- Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden
- Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay
- Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks
- Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty
- Venturi, House in New Castle County, Delaware
- Basquiat, Horn Players
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Painting modern life: Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare
Claude Monet, La Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877, oil on canvas, 75 x 104 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris.
Video transcript
[music] We're in the Musée d'Orsay looking at Monet's canvas
"Gare Saint-Lazare." This is one
of several large train stations in the city of Paris, and it's really interesting
that we're looking at it in the Musée d'Orsay which is a renovated
train station itself. -We think about train stations as just an ordinary part of urban life, but in the late 19th century in Paris,
large train stations carrying masses of people
out to the suburbs, out to vacation spots,
these were new kinds of structures. -And they express their modernity not only through their function, but also through their architecture. Trains, at this point, were powered
by burning coal and creating steam, and that required large open sheds which were held aloft by iron all of which spoke of modernity. This was not the traditional architecture
of wood or of stone. This is a completely modern subject. -So this space looked modern,
and it's not just the train shed, but the apartment buildings
that we see beyond it that looked new. During the second half
of the 19th century, Paris was rebuilt. The old winding, maze-like,
congested streets were torn down and wide boulevards were built
with apartment buildings housing cafes and department stores catering to a new middle class,
an upper-middle class that had cash to spend
and the time and leisure to shop and to enjoy themselves in Paris. -And in a subtler way,
the idea of transportation itself, the idea of a place
where people of different classes mix is also itself modern. For so long,
French society had been rigidly ranked, but that's unraveling in the modern era and perhaps nowhere
more vividly expressed than in a public space
like the train station. -We often think
about impressionist painting as being about leisure, Renoir's "Moulin de la Galette,"
for example, where we see figures
socializing and dancing. -This is a working space, but look at this surface of this canvas. It's absolutely luscious. It's so drenched
with steam and light and smoke that it seems to almost dissolve
before our eyes. -It's difficult in some places to make out the architecture
of the train shed, because that steam hides it especially on the left
where those blueish lilac puffs of steam obscure that iron framework. -Light is pouring through the opening
at the top of the shed creating this prism of color that is playing across the steam within. In fact, one critic humorously said, I can't really see the paintings
for all the smoke that's emanating from these six canvases that Monet exhibited together each a play on the subject. -And it's not only
the architectural structure that's disappearing,
but the forms of the trains themselves. I mean, these are big machines that dissolve into light and atmosphere. -Well that's what Monet is interested in: pure color and pure light
in the optical play before him, rather than his empirical knowledge of the solidity of an iron engine. -We have to remember
that the Impressionists were positioning themselves outside of the academic establishment. This painting
and the group of other paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare were exhibited
at an impressionist exhibition which was independent
of the official exhibitions called salons that were sponsored by the Royal Academy, and so Monet is not giving us a painting that would be a view
of the Gare Saint-Lazare with a factual accounting
of what was in this station and what one knows of it,
but you're right, this optical experience
of light and atmosphere, this very subjective experience. -And Monet was not the only person
in his group that was interested in this subject. Manet had painted this subject
although in a very different way, and another important artist,
Caillebotte, had painted a scene from the bridge that we see just beyond the smokestack
of the locomotive. -What fascinates me too
is the degree to which Monet has reduced the figures themselves
to quick brushstrokes, and we can't make our faces. We can make out
a little bit of gestures or postures, but he's really reducing the human figure to these quick strokes of pain. The human figure
was the centerpiece of academic painting, and yet here
it becomes equal to the trains and to the architecture he’s painting. -And subservient to the main subject
of this painting: light and color. -Other impressionist artists,
like Renoir, will concern themselves
with the human figure within the light and atmosphere, but for Monet it is the landscape and here, an urban landscape
that is most important to him. and critics like Baudelaire had been calling for artists
to paint the beauty of modern life, and I think with paintings
like the Gare Saint-Lazare, Monet is taking up that challenge. Artists didn't need to paint
classical antiquity anymore. They didn't need to paint
biblical and history paintings. -They were creating a new beauty that was true to the new modern world
in which they lived. But for all our talk
about the sense of spontaneity, if you look at the surface,
this is a heavily worked canvas. Monet seems to be weaving color
across the surface. You can see the paint
has built up over time. There's no atmospheric perspective. The atmosphere is in the foreground
as well as in the background all of which makes it impossible
for us to forget that we're looking at paint on canvas. -Monet and the Impressionists
are creating a new visual language for a new modern world. [music]