In my story, “The Glass Slipper,” the stark contrast between Picasso’s cubism and Monet’s impressionist art forms plays a major life-changing role for our protagonist, Ashleigh Edwards, an art-history doctoral student in London. She is doing her thesis on Monet’s art, which she adores.
When she visits The Glass Slipper (a bridal boutique), she notices her favorite Monet, “La Méditerranée,” hanging on the wall. As Ashleigh observes it, she thinks, A million points of light, like sparkling gems, are dancing on the water. She feels uplifted by the pastels, the airy sense of the art, and the extraordinary way Monet depicted the sunshine flowing toward the sea.
When she returns to her future townhouse, Ashleigh is surprised to find an original painting by Picasso hanging in the anteroom. She is jarred by the painting’s fractured figures, leaving her in a dark and dismal frame of mind. She is quite familiar with Picasso’s art, and cubism, in particular. She detests this genre and much of the work of this artist. From this point, her life begins to take a radical new direction.
In “La Méditerranée,” the artist intently focused on the relationship between land and sea. Monet painted it in 1888, when he was on a working vacation on the verdant shores of Antibes, in the South of France. This seaside location boasts a rich, deep-blue sea, enhanced by particularly clear conditions due to the mistral wind, for which this region is known. Throughout his career, Monet explored the quality of light as it flowed into water; the deeply saturated hues he found in the Mediterranean were ideal for such endeavors.
Monet’s work, particularly the art he completed on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in 1888, showcases the light, gentle beauty of light, sea, and sand. As he wrote to his wife, Alice, while he was on that working vacation, “What I will bring back from here will be pure, gentle sweetness: some white, some pink, and some blue, and all this surrounded by the fairylike air.” (Quoted in J. Pissarro, “Monet and the Mediterranean,” 1997)
Early in the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso was a father of cubism, in which geometric shapes present fractured figures (including people) in unnatural, abstract states. In his cubist art, Pablo Picasso analyzed, broke apart, and reassembled objects and people from multiple perspectives. And the surprise Picasso becomes a catalyst to open Ashleigh’s perspective as she comes to comprehend her life choices, where she has come from, and the new direction she needs to take.
Sources:
- “Impressionism”, Wikipedia
- “Cubism”, Wikipedia
- Pissarro, Joachim, “Monet and the Mediterranean,” 1997
