Claude Monet and Edouard Manet

This is a formal analysis of two works; Claude Monet’s The Rue Montorgueil and Edouard Manet’s The Rue Mosnier with Flags. Both of these works depict the Festival of 30 June 1878, which took place in Paris, France. Both of these avant-garde artists have rendered two different pieces of the same event, implying different meanings through style and depiction. Being Impressionists they created works that described feeling and emotion over detail, as a sort of opposition to Realism. Monet’s piece boasts a blazing color and high use of repetition to create this street as a space of high activity, implying celebration in this working class area. However Manet has depicted the scene as a more somber and tense one. He brings a more advanced side of avant-gardism to the table, successfully doing so through the tension he leaves the viewer within.

Manet doesn’t purposely try to leave the viewer tense though, he wants the viewer to create their own answers to what’s going on in the scene before them. This is where we see the more advanced side of avant-gardism, as compared to with Monet. Monet has shown the Rue Montogueil in a colorful pallet of mostly blues, reds, and whites. The flags that are hanging off the buildings seem to blend in a sea of color, and travel back into the vantage point of the painting as a blur. The next thing the viewer notices is the people in the street, mostly wearing dark blue with a few wearing white. Dark blue was the color of the working class clothing, which we also see in the subject of Edouard Manet’s piece. This piece expresses happiness and celebration of this street, with the viewer looking down onto this street. He was more concerned with expressing the happiness and vitality within this scene, rather then Manet’s portrayal of a more desolate but perhaps interesting scene.

Edouard Manet was more concerned with the deeper notions of why the people were celebrating, and therefore depicted a different street and scene on that same day. Rather then showing a large mass of people as Claude Monet had, Manet rendered only a few human subjects, with a main subject in the left foreground. This is portrayed perhaps as a, amputee war veteran, clad in dark blue, and using crutches to walk into this bleak street. This street, brightest right in the middle ground of the piece, has few people on it but dominates the space of this environment. This adds to the bleak emptiness of this piece, leaving the viewer wondering about a synopsis or perhaps situation of what is going on. Manet has seemingly depicted this street at the same high eye level as Claude Monet did in his piece.

Although both these artists had similar ideas, their depictions differ highly between happiness and somberness. As Claude Monet’s piece boasts celebration and exuberant happiness, whereas Edouard Manet has shown a more inauspicious scene. Both these Impressionist artists have specifically tried to express these different feelings through their work, with Manet using a more complex aspect of the avant-garde.