Zeynep Münteha Kot
In the 1870s, when Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro abandoned their studios and carried their canvases into nature, their intention was not to distance themselves from reality. On the contrary, in these paintings we witnessed a reconfiguration of reality itself. In Impression: Sunrise, what Monet did was to depict the port of Le Havre—its steamships, small boats, and rippling surface—yet what appeared on the canvas were not the objects themselves, but momentary visual impressions of them. The ontological line that runs beneath this painting can be traced to the “diversity of sensory givenness.”
“no past
tomorrow—scattered wind
carried on the feathers
of ravens and figbirds
hovers for a moment in mid-air
then you fall again”
In 1872, Claude Monet returned to the Normandy coast where he had spent his youth. The hotel he stayed in overlooked the port of Le Havre. The French painter observed the harbor at sunrise, at sunset, in the darkness of night, and in the morning fog. Within the harbor, there was an element that did not belong to it—yet one that unraveled it, gave it meaning, set it free while also holding it captive. Monet began to pursue this elusive element: as the orange sun rose over the fishing boats, steamships, and sailing vessels, illuminating the harbor, the fogdescended—leaving behind only faint silhouettes of smokestacks and masts.
The battle between sun and fog is a battle between orange and gray; it finds tranquility in blue, and thus the harbor returns to itself. The Industrial Revolution is a hazy gray, the calm morning is blue, life is orange, and man is gradient black. What makes a thing what it is, is not its form, but its color—and what gives color its essence is light. Everything we see seems to have been carved from a great mass of light and then poured onto the earth. And just as light never stands still but moves in perpetual motion, so too do people and things. Therefore, time must be halted in the moment, and human thought in the impression. We cannot grasp reality itself, but only its appearances—and even then, only for a moment. This is why the painter must work not in the studio, but wherever he encounters his subject. When Monet and the other Impressionists abandoned their dark studios for this very reason and transformed every place into a studio, it first signified a shift in palette: dark colors disappeared. With the dominance of the moment in painting came a second change—the monochromatic structure of objects was broken. Brown turned into blue, green, and yellow; shadows transformed into strokes of blue, purple, and green. Contours dissolved and gave way to the vibrations of light. Third, linear perspective was left behind in favor of atmospheric perspective. Distance was rendered with cool colors, nearness with warm ones. For what mattered was not what weknew, but what we saw. All of these changes were in pursuit of capturing the moment—and within the moment, there was not knowledge, but only impression.
The journey of Impressionism, which began with Impression: Sunrise (1872), painted from the window of the Amiraute Hotel overlooking the Port of Le Havre, continued with Monet’sBreaking Waves (1881), where he once again observed the sea, and Nervia Valley (1884), where he depicted the mountains of the Italian Riviera. Impressionism, of course, did not remain confined to nature. Monet also painted the Rouen Cathedral (1892–1894), whileRenoir and Pissarro captured flickering lights over bustling crowds using broken brushstrokes. Because these painters defied the established rules of composition and conventional laws of perspective, they were compelled to organize and finance their own exhibitions. The first of these initiatives took place in 1874 at the studio of the photographer Nadar, featuring works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Sisley, and Pissarro. This exhibition is often referred to as the Salon des Refusés (Exhibition of the Rejected). Art critic Louis Leroy mockingly titled his review of the exhibition “The Exhibition of the Impressionists.” Yet thedispute ultimately resolved in favor of the Impressionists, and the prestige of art criticism began to fade.
A work of art can be described in such terms. And likewise, it will undoubtedly reveal much about the time and place in which the artist lived, the artistic movement they embraced, and even details of their personal background. Yet behind all these layers, an ontology seeps through—one that ultimately seeks to govern them. Why does the artist approach the subject-object in a particular way? How the painter composes the subject and transfers it onto thecanvas, which techniques or materials are used, what palette or perspective is chosen—all of these are extensions of that specific approach. Therefore, every artwork offers a uniqueresponse to the question of the relationship between the self and the other. For instance, is there lation ship between subject and object epistemic or semantic? Do we encompass things, or do they encompass us? Put differently: is this relationship the result of the things acting uponus, or our structuring of them? And is the final product truly knowledge, fiction, or representation? What is the proper path to approach things—through sensation or through reason? In the background of whatever answers we might give to these questions, the spirit of the age (Zeitgeist) speaks. For the artist and the thinker operate within a specific slice of time and space—within a particular conception of being. While the voice of the Zeitgeist speaks without interruption, the movement of the artist or thinker is not bound by necessity—in other words, there is no determinism here—and the work that emerges is a product of original thought. Even so, we cannot help but observe with amazement that the history of art transforms in parallel with the history of thought. What accounts for this parallelism between the philosopher’s approach to their object and the artist’s approach to their subject? It is when we pose this very question that the ontological dimension of the artwork begins to unfold.
If we were to divide the journey of philosophy—from Ancient Greece to modern Europe—into broad thematic categories, accepting the risk of generalization, we would find three distinct conceptions of the “thing.” The first significant answer to the question “What is a thing?” is: “a substance that bears qualities.” A particular house is what carries width, adobe structure, and whiteness. Likewise, when I describe myself by the fact that I write poetry, the profession I practice, my ethnicity, gender, or physical traits, there exists a Zeynep—or a human essence—that extends beyond the sentences formed. Aristotle would call the former a first-order substance, and the latter a second-order substance. For Plato, however, only the second qualifies as true substance. If a thing is indeed substance, then in order to access it, we must abstract it from the qualities attributed to it. Since this cannot be done through the objects themselves, the task falls to the mind. Philosophical schools that determine thet hingness of a thing through thought may correspond, in art history, to the Classical or Neo-Classical schools. For although painting, during the Hellenistic period, began to shift from theintellectual domain toward the sensory in terms of subject matter, it still remained distant from sensory reality.
We can identify two pivotal moments in the shift of representation from the object of the human mind to the objects of the external world: Caravaggio and Gustave Courbet. Accompanied by a strong critique of Raphael, this shift was aimed squarely at what is real. The rejection of idealization—so prevalent in Classicism and Romanticism—by the sepainters was, in essence, a rejection of the conception of the thing as a bearer of qualities. Intheir view, properties and the substance that carries them coexist in a composite manner and are transferred to the canvas without any idealization or abstraction. Thus, there is non arrowing in the selection of characteristics. When painting a portrait, unique expressions, intense emotions, or disproportions are not excluded.The philosophical counterpart to this tendency can be found in Aristotle’s concept of the thing as formed matter (hylemorphism). Ifa thing is formed matter, then it is impossible to abstract being from essence, thought from sensation, imperfection from the idea of perfection, or matter from form. In realist works that correspond to the hylemorphic model, we see both a striving to reach a purely rational reality beyond the sensory, and at the same time, a commitment to depicting the subject-object exactly as it is. The fork in the road between Naturalism and Realism lies precisely at thissubtle distinction. The Impressionists accompanied the Realists in their move away from the“ideal” toward the “actual,” and they were particularly influenced by the Barbizon School. Yet, we are struck by the remarkable persistence with which the relationship between the artist and the subject-object remains at the surface level—that is, within the aesthetic and sensory realm.
In the 1870s, when Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro left their studios and took their canvases into nature, their aim was not to distance themselves from reality. On the contrary, in these paintings we witnessed a reconfiguration of reality. In his painting Impression: Sunrise, whatMonet did was to depict the port of Le Havre—with its steamships, boats, and rippling surface—yet what appeared on the canvas were fleeting visual impressions of all the seobjects. The ontological line beneath this painting can be traced to the “diversity of sensory givenness.” This diversity may be interpreted as a Summe (sum), a Ganzheit (totality), or a Gestalt (form). But in any case, the thing is sensory, and only accessible through sensory experience. The thing—or the port of Le Havre—is nothing more than a synthesis composed of the subject’s sensations, and nothing beyond that.
If, when Monet opens and closes his eyes, the harbor remains where it is—if the arrangement on the rippling water is still intact, and the masts, smokestacks, and industrial ships have not yet disappeared into the hazy air—if nothing beyond what he is accustomed to seeing has changed in that fleeting instant, this persistence might lead him to the thought: “The entire scene exists independently of me.” But this is not proof—it is belief, and it has no equivalentin terms of impressions.We can observe David Hume’s skeptical stance toward reasoning that ventures beyond the senses in this painting’s insistence on being rooted in the moment, staying within sensation and impression, and turning away from the external surface or form of the object in favor of light and color. Therefore, the Impressionists’ removal of dark tones from their palette should not be regarded as a natural consequence of painting outdoors. What is at stake here is a particular conception of being—one that dissolves forms, that is, essences.
Until that time, shadows had been painted in black or dark brown. When the Impressionist stransformed them into blue, green, and purple, this signaled the loss of color contrast—and with it, the disappearance of contours that had once been defined through that very contrast. What we were witnessing was the replacement of the noetic (cognitive) with the aesthetic(sensory), the substitution of reason with the eye. But can one truly dispense with formal elements altogether? Is it really possible to sacrifice the noetic entirely for the sake of the aesthetic? When we depict not reality itself but only its appearance, or when we confine our conception of reality to phenomena—are we, in fact, speaking of absolute limits? Hume claimed that the idea of the self does not exist, because we have no impression that coincides with that idea. Indeed, a person cannot observe themselves apart from perception. So, what is it that gives us our sense of self? Hume locates this possibility in memory. The human mind, he suggests, resembles a theater stage on which countless actors appear one after another, each with different arrangements of subject matter. What is particularly striking is that this stage is not a concrete object and remains closed to perception—a claim that resonates with what Hartmann calls a “bottom-up metaphysics.” In other words, the assumption of a boundary remains precisely that—an assumption. Viewed in this light, the empiricists’ project of deriving their conception of the thing from the sensory realm and keeping it confined there seems to have failed. Recognizing this failure, Kant would reintroduce the principle of causality—which Hume had rejected for not remaining within the realm of impressions—as a category of the mind. Similarly, the final generation of Impressionists, who had once left the studio to paint their impressions, eventually returned to it to explore color studies, optical phenomena, and the laws governing them. These steps back may suggest that things are, perhaps, closer to us than our senses—that even in moments when we believe we are engagedsolely with their sensory aspects, the things themselves (ding an sich / نفس الامر) continue to seep into this domain—and to speak.