I have been nearly nowhere, but I have seen everything \u2014 or at least a representation of everything. Does the difference matter?<\/p>\n
This question came to me when I visited San Francisco\u2019s de Young museum a few weeks ago to see its newest exhibit: \u201cMonet and Venice.\u201d A friend and I braved the early April showers and sharp wind to Golden Gate Park, where we entered a large glass door before descending into the de Young\u2019s underbelly as docents welcomed us to the exhibit.<\/p>\n
I was struck by the grand display of Claude Monet\u2019s paintings. Dozens of bright, dreamy waterways and cityscapes hung on dark walls, accompanied by museum labels. The exhibit, which wrapped around in a mazelike pattern, took us through a full experience of his creative projects, starting with his earlier paintings of France to the works of his predecessors and contemporaries, and finally to the star of the show: his Venetian series.<\/p>\n
I felt like I was peering into a world I could never access otherwise. One of the reasons I am such a fan of Monet is his style of impressionism. His paintings contain no harsh lines or overly saturated colors, and each one looks seamlessly blended despite the visible brush strokes and dots that build up each scene. In effect, each painting looks plucked from a particularly clear dream, creating a realistic yet uniquely atmospheric rendition of the places Monet saw.<\/p>\n
I was wondering about how well these hazy, dreamlike paintings represent Venetian reality when I recalled an essay I had read earlier called \u201cThe Decay of Lying\u201d by Oscar Wilde. In this essay, Wilde posits that life is a mirror that reflects realities depicted in art. This idea is summed up in a famous line that you\u2019ve probably heard before: \u201clife imitates art.\u201d Another piece of this essay I found interesting comes after the famed quote, when Wilde writes, \u201cA great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.\u201d<\/p>\n
The idea is a bit abstract, but once it appears in your own life, it\u2019s suddenly everywhere. For example, I am an English major, but I have never been to England. I have never seen what a writer sees when talking about the Tube or Dover\u2019s chalk cliffs, or felt how an artist feels painting the soot of the city as it settles on the River Thames. In all honesty, I am not well-traveled. But I know cities through the eyes of the artists who have mused about them. I understand so many corners of the world as beautiful places, desolate places, fascinating places and mundane places \u2014 skylines home to all sorts of life, frozen in paintings and books, photographs and films.<\/p>\n
What I mean to say is that I know places I have never been \u2014 even places that have never been at all \u2014 because of art. But of course, there is nothing like the real thing, and I often wonder how many of my perceptions about the world are accurate, given that I consume so much of it through art.<\/p>\n
From Wilde\u2019s point of view, art is no more a reflection of life than it is the essence of reality. There is the artist\u2019s work, and then there is life chasing after it. But is art really a vessel of reality that life tries to capture? At the museum, I stumbled across an informational placard that seemed to pose an answer to this question, one that stuck with me during and after the trip, all the way to the creation of this article.<\/p>\n
The placard reads: \u201c(Monet) became increasingly preoccupied with what he called the enveloppe: the ephemeral, colored atmosphere that surrounded and transformed his motifs. As he explained, \u2018Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat\u2026 I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house, and the boat are to be found \u2014 the beauty of the air around them\u201d<\/p>\n
As I read the statement, I realized that somehow, more than a century ago, Monet grappled with the question I had been asking myself about whether representations of reality are just as valid as reality itself.<\/p>\n
From Monet\u2019s words, I gathered that he believed the purpose of art is to capture how a place is experienced. The enveloppe then becomes another term to describe the feeling of reality. Objectively, Monet paints the bridge, but really, he paints the experience of the bridge. If you were to see the bridge in real life, perhaps it would be essentially the same as seeing the painting. Maybe it doesn\u2019t look the same, but it feels the same. And the feeling is what we take home with us; it is what we remember without needing to look again.<\/p>\n
This brings me to the question of whether life imitates art, as it reflects the feeling captured in the reality that art represents. Returning to Wilde\u2019s words, it seems Monet has created a \u201ctype\u201d through the enveloppe. In that case, does life attempt to copy the enveloppe? If it does, is it true that life inherently imitates art?<\/p>\n
I went home thinking about this. I sounded a little crazy asking my friends if they think life is like an enveloppe. One asked me what I was trying to accomplish by pondering such useless questions \u2014 angels on the head of a pin and all that. I\u2019m not really a philosophical person \u2014 at least not the type to pretentiously debate random theoretical abstractions. But the concept kept nagging at me. I feel like I see moments of life imitating art all the time, which I think is important because it reminds me how the experience of sharing art, and sharing space with art, brings people together.<\/p>\n
For instance, I recently saw a viral video containing images of people recreating Gustav Klimt\u2019s \u201cThe Kiss,\u201d a 1909 painting depicting a couple pressed together, their bodies oddly contorted. Here, life literally imitates art. But this happens in more subtle ways, too.<\/p>\n
Whenever a friend tells me she posted something specifically for the guy she\u2019s talking to, I think of Gatsby and the green light. A child\u2019s finger reaching for his father\u2019s on BART is almost like Michelangelo\u2019s \u201cThe Creation of Adam.\u201d And the story of \u201cFahrenheit 451\u201d exists all around us, in every person mildly addicted to their screen.<\/p>\n
Maybe life imitates art because it is a sort of enveloppe itself. Yes, we experience the important parts of life in set intervals of time \u2014 class, work, events. But maybe life really happens in the atmosphere of these moments, in the experience of our realities. Life is what you think about on the bus ride to the grocery store, watching people rotate in and out. Life is the things you see on the walk to class. Life is what you feel just before you fall asleep.<\/p>\n
Maybe everything I\u2019m talking about can be summed up in a Tuesday evening I spent watching the sky from the base of the Campanile alongside an assortment of fellow sunset chasers. Clouds puffed over the horizon in a bluish blur, turning the Golden Gate Bridge gray with shadow as the sky blushed just behind it. I saw the scene and thought of Monet\u2019s paintings, that pink-and-blue palette, the airy, blurred quality that made his work look like shadowy dreams. San Francisco was imitating art before my eyes. And though I have been to few places beyond my beloved Bay Area, there I was: engaging in a Monetian experience in a city the artist himself had never seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have been nearly nowhere, but I have seen everything \u2014 or at least a representation of everything.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2308,129447,3767,184,71905,71899,129450,129455,129453,11917,2985,129452,129446,129448,6547,129454,102697,50610,101,103,102,104,106,105,129451,129449,6646],"class_list":["post-307968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-art","tag-art-museums","tag-bart","tag-bay-area","tag-claude-monet","tag-de-young-museum","tag-dover","tag-fahrenheit-451","tag-gatsby","tag-golden-gate-bridge","tag-golden-gate-park","tag-gustav-klimt","tag-impressionism","tag-life-imitates-art","tag-london","tag-michelangelo","tag-oscar-wilde","tag-paintings","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-the-campanile","tag-the-decay-of-lying","tag-venice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}