Acknowledgments

Dombrowski, André

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Acknowledgments

André Dombrowski

Monet’s Minutes: Impressionism and the Industrialization of Time

The histories of Impressionism tend to take the instant as a given. This book rectifies this tendency by making time itself the key ingredient of Monet’s art, as rooted in period conceptions of instantaneity underexplored by art history. Despite its emphasis on all things quick, this text has been some time in the making: I started work on it in...

Author

André Dombrowski

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32177

Acknowledgments

The histories of Impressionism tend to take the instant as a given. This book rectifies this tendency by making time itself the key ingredient of Monet’s art, as rooted in period conceptions of instantaneity underexplored by art history. Despite its emphasis on all things quick, this text has been some time in the making: I started work on it in 2011–12, when first reading Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003) and realizing the degree to which his history of modern time overlapped with the history of Impressionism that I was then teaching. Roughly ten years later, I was finally happy with the ultimate form it had taken. Along the way, as with any academic book, it has shifted shape repeatedly, and I have incurred debts to a wide array of institutions and individuals.

The first chapter of this book was researched and drafted while I was a member of the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, at Princeton in 2012–13, funded by the Herodotus Fund, and the text was completed during a Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship at The Center (for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 2020–21, when the pandemic forced academic life online. Warmest thanks go to my fellow colleagues and the administrators at these institutions. My academic home, the University of Pennsylvania, has provided generous support for this project as well, in the form of a Weiler Faculty Research Fellowship that granted me a semester of teaching release, as well as a grant from the Charles K. Williams II Publication Fund that supported the subvention for the press and the cost of image reproductions. Other key institutions that were instrumental in my research are the Musée d’Orsay, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris; Fondation Claude Monet in Giverny; National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pennsylvania; as well as the Barnes Foundation and Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many others.

Aspects of this book were presented during several conferences and lectures, and for their helpful input I thank the organizers and audiences at the Aspen Art Museum; Barnard College; Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut; The Center (for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts); Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris; College Art Association (CAA) conference (New York, 2013 and 2019); Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Eikones/Universität Basel; Festival de l’histoire de l’art/Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), Fontainebleau; Graduate Center/City University of New York (CUNY); INHA, Paris; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Institute of Fine Arts/New York University; Kyoto Institute of Technology; McGill University; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen; Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nineteenth-Century Studies Association conference (Philadelphia, 2018); Northwestern University; Pennsylvania State University; Rutgers University; Städel Museum, Frankfurt; Tsinghua University and Peking University, Beijing; Universität Bochum; University College London (Tomás Harris Visiting Professorship Lectures, 2015); University of Delaware; Universität Hamburg; University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign; University of Michigan; Universität München; University of Pennsylvania; University of St. Andrews; Vassar College; Washington University; Wesleyan University; and Williams College.

My fascination with nineteenth-century French painting goes back to my training at the Courtauld Institute of Art, under the late John House, and at UC Berkeley, with T. J. Clark, both of whom instilled in me the belief that a painting based on nothing but an instant can still claim the highest forms of artistic and intellectual rigor. Their interpretive brilliance and passionate teaching when it comes to French modernism echo in every sentence of this book. Special thanks also to Hollis Clayson, who has patiently guided this text from start to finish, hearing more talks about it and reading more of its draft chapters than almost any other scholar. Her astute questions and kind words of encouragement along the way have meant more than she knows.

At the University of Pennsylvania, in the Department of the History of Art, the Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies, and the Arthur Ross Gallery, I have benefitted from the advice of many colleagues, and I would like to single out for special thanks: Shira Brisman, Kathy Brown, David Brownlee, Huey Copeland, Julie Davis, Ivan Drpić, David Eng, Andrea Goulet, Sarah Guérin, Lothar Haselberger, Ann Kuttner, Michael Leja, Lynn Marsden-Atlass, Bob Ousterhout, Christine Poggi, Eve Troutt Powell, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Heidi Voskuhl, Liliane Weissberg, and Mantha Zarmakoupi. The many conversations I have had about this project with Kaja Silverman proved especially momentous; her warnings about not letting the more humdrum and regulated aspects of time take center stage were not always heeded, but necessary nonetheless. Furthermore, I want to thank David Young Kim, whose friendship has sustained me over the years of writing this book: he has taught me how important it is to see meaning in details, and to trust in the fact that all art is first and foremost a form of poetic license and should be treated as such. Finally, I thank all my students at Penn, for the far too many lectures about Impressionist time they endured and helped shape in turn. My conversations with Will Schmenner on the topic have been especially meaningful, and so have the interactions with my PhD advisees Jalen Chang, Lindsay Grant, Anna Linehan, Nick Rogers, and Miriam Stanton. My special thanks to Jalen and Miriam for their extraordinarily thoughtful help with the proofs. For their indispensable administrative assistance, I thank Darlene Jackson and Libby Saylor, and for help with image scanning, Constance Mood and Michael Carroll.

Many other colleagues and friends have contributed to my work, both directly and indirectly, and I acknowledge our conversations about Impressionism and beyond: Scott Allan, Bridget Alsdorf, Elise Archias, Carol Armstrong, Caroline Arscott, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Emily Beeny, Sarah Betzer, Yve-Alain Bois, Gavin Butt, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Liz Childs, Thom Collins, Cat Dawson, Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Terry Dolan, Nina Dubin, Sarah Evans, Michelle Foa, Paul Galvez, Dario Gamboni, Tamar Garb, Romy Golan, Marc Gotlieb, Maria Gough, Cordula Grewe, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Gloria Groom, Stéphane Guégan, Katie Hanson, Christoph Heinrich, Anne Higonnet, Ann Hoenigswald, Mary Hunter, Nancy Ireson, Kimberly Jones, David Joselit, Laura Kalba, Simon Kelly, Homay King, Marine Kisiel, Betsy Scott Kleeblatt, Felix Krämer, Matthias Krüger, Brigitte Krutein, Katherine Kuenzli, Léa Kuhn, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Ségolène Le Men, Nancy Locke, Maria Loh, Martha Lucy, Sharon Marcus, Michael Marrinan, Félicie de Maupeou, Anne McCauley, C. C. McKee, Neil McWilliam, Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach, Jeremy Melius, Ara Merjian, Esther da Costa Meyer, David Misteli, Silke Mohrhoff, Allison Morehead, Mary Morton, Kimberley Muir, Denise Murrell, Takanori Nagaï, Bibi Obler, Sylvie Patry, Paul Perrin, Ulrich Pfisterer, Todd Porterfield, Alex Potts, Chris Reed, Chris Riopelle, Anna Gruetzner Robins, James Rubin, Olivier Schuwer, George Shackelford, Richard Shiff, Susan Sidlauskas, Debora Silverman, Paul Smith, Änne Söll, Andrew Stephenson, Alison Syme, Jennifer Thompson, Richard Thomson, Ralph Ubl, Allison Unruh, Anne Wagner, Martha Ward, Jayne Warman, Pamela Warner, Ittai Weinryb, Margaret Werth, Ortrud Westheider, and Marnin Young.

I also thank the two anonymous readers for their immensely insightful comments. For the care and intelligence with which they brought this text toward its final shape, my editor at Yale University Press, Katherine Boller, along with Alison Hagge, Sarah Henry, Raychel Rapazza, and Elizabeth Searcy, deserve high praise and my warmest thanks. For the superb copyediting, I thank Laura Hensley; for the excellent proofreading, Kati Woock; for the outstanding index, David Luljak; for the exquisite typesetting, Tina Henderson; and for the beautiful design, Julia Ma and Miko McGinty.

Last but not least, I am grateful for the fact that I can always count on the support of my family in Germany—Rolf, Karin, and Sascha Dombrowski, as well as the Weber family—an awareness I never take for granted. This book is dedicated to my husband and fellow art historian, Jonathan D. Katz, who never signed up for a prolonged encounter with Impressionism, nor the vicissitudes of time, yet generously lent his keen eye and brilliant mind to the many iterations of this text he helped enhance. The instant is rarely the temporality that long-term affection is built on, yet love at first sight can also endure for more than a quarter of a century.

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