Art: "The pain passes, but the beauty remains."

There are certain things that seem to belong to the past, and it can be both enlightening and slightly jarring to see them drifting into the modern age. For instance, occasionally we hear a scrap of recording of, say, Brahms playing his own music, or Mark Twain speaking, and we think, wait a minute, that’s right, Edison recorded sound a real long time ago. We confuse capability with common occurrence.

Open Culture has posted three films recently of French artists, the first shock of which is their very existence. But then again, Monet died in 1926, Degas in 1917, and Renoir in 1919. Film had been around since the 1890s. Why wouldn’t they be captured in motion?

The second shock is the men themselves, to see them as they really were. Monet is the easiest to take. Talk about your lion in winter. In his later years, CM moved out to Giverny and created his famous garden, the one you see mostly in all those lily pads. For all practical purposes he was the great man with a mission, and the money to make it happen. The thing about Monet is that, even while he was alive, he was ridiculously popular. There was none of this Van Goghish starving artist, sell-no-paintings-while-you're-alive business for him. I think he was already on calendars and napkins and tee shirts before World War I! And there he is in the film, smoking away, looking exactly the way a great artist should look. Could it be that he is the most popular artist of all time? I wouldn't bet against it.

The footage of Edgar Degas is a mere glimpse of an old man on the street. But read the text. He had begun going blind at quite a young age, and needed his models to tell him the colors on his palette. This, of course, explains his sculpture.

But the most amazing footage is of Renoir. His hands are so crabbed that his son has to put the brush between his fingers, but still, he painted almost to the end. And his late works, while maybe not as big in size as some of his more famous pieces, are every bit as controlled.

As they say, the more you know, the more you know. Seeing paintings in the museum is one thing (and a very good thing). Understanding the artist makes seeing the paintings even better. Of course, at some point the art stands without the artist, or at least we think it should. Does it matter if the artist was one-legged with an ear where his nose should be, or does it only matter that we look at the work and take it as the total sum of itself? There's no easy answers to that one.