Customer Reviews

The Masterpiece (Oxford World's Classics)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Here is a book which truly and accurately describes the life of an artist and his relationship with the world, his friends, his lover, and, most importantly, himself. It is a book of passion and the attempt of an artist to break through the boundaries set upon him and to come to grips with his own limitations. I could hardly put the book down at all once I'd begun reading it as Zola's prose is a joy to behold and a work of art in itself.

Zola shares with us a deep and intimate relationship he had with Paul Cezanne and Baptistin Baille. "The Masterpiece" is a story about a brilliant and talented young painter Claude Lantier who has many ideals of what a masterpiece should be. Unfortunately, the public fails to appreciate/understand his vision. His pieces are ridiculed and laughed at the exhibition year after year. Claude retreats to the countryside but fails to create a painting that lives up to his expectation. Suffering mental breakdown, his wife and son Jacques become the ultimate sacrifice of his obsession with his arts. Zola tells Claude story and yet at the same time, portrays the bohemian lives of artists in the 19th century Paris quarters. He also shows many sides of other artists who lived in that period. A Journalist turned novelist Sandos (himself), as Claude's best friend; Fargerolles, equivalent to modern days "commercial artists"; Bongrand, whom I suspect to be the character for Pissaro (just my guess); Dubuche (modeled after Baille), the former art student who later despises bohemian lives when he joins a prestigious architectural firm; Mahodeau, the starving artist; Jori, the desperate journalist which would be known as "the tabloid reporter" in today's world and a few others. Zola's story is true and relevant in real life today. A true master in naturalism, Zola has done it again! An excellent portrait of the art world, it has a great unexpected ending as well. The story is quite depressing but I love it!

I must disagree with the reviewer who said that The Masterpiece would be hard to like as a woman or as an American! I am both and I loved it. Partly this is because of Zola's whole series of books in which you meet characters you knew before or their children or relations--I loved that Claude was related to Etienne, the hero of Germinal, as well as Gervaise from The Dram Shop. It gives you the sense that you already know something of the genetic makeup (fragility, instability, whatever) of the character before the plot even begins. It was captivating to feel that Zola was giving more reign to his own voice as an art critic and to the specific things he loved and found problematic about Impressionism. Of course it is terribly depressing in the end; but how many Claudes must go down for every Renoir or Monet who rises to the top? Seems very realistic to me--and it's Zola, so you have no illusions that anyone will be happy in the end. I might even give it four and a half stars if I were allowed.

L'Oeuvre (aka The Masterpiece) tells the story of Claude Lantier, a gifted but unorthodox artist scratching out a bohemian existence in Paris. Claude's innovative painting style is years ahead of its time. It frustrates him that he is not getting the acceptance from the cultural establishment that he feels he deserves. Determined to create a masterpiece that will earn acclaim in the annual Paris salon exhibition, he becomes obsessed with his art, abandoning his friends, his family, and his sanity.
This is the 14th book in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and one of Zola's most autobiographical novels. Claude is a surrogate for Zola's childhood friend Cézanne, and Claude's best friend Pierre Sandoz stands in for the author himself. Zola vividly depicts the bohemian lifestyle of his young adulthood in Paris. Claude, Sandoz, and their gang of artist friends struggle to make their fortunes as painters, writers, sculptors. They enjoy each other's camaraderie, encouraging and challenging one another over drinks in a cafe where they debate the meaning and value of art. The reader can't help but share in the excitement of their contagious determination to change the world. As an artist myself, I found Zola's vivid description of the annual salon exhibition--the submission process, the back room politics governing the selection of works, the opening day festivities--particularly fascinating. As the young men grow up, they drift apart somewhat and begin to lead more settled, adult lives. Claude's love interest, Christine, takes on a larger role in his life, and becomes an equally prominent character in the novel. Zola delves deeply into the dynamics of Claude's marriage, and the toll his art takes on the relationship.
The least interesting scenes of the book are the extensive descriptions of the "masterpiece" itself. The specifics of the work don't add much to our understanding of the artist's obsession. Though this book engages the reader from the beginning, it falters towards the end as it becomes more and more divorced from reality. In order to prove a point about the intrinsic inseparability of art and artist, Zola exaggerates Claude's compulsion until it defies believability. Despite these few complaints, overall this is an excellent novel and a great window into the artistic world of Paris at a time when exciting changes took place. Zola fans will find it a valuable read, as will anyone interested in the art world of turn-of-the-century (last century, that is) France.

This novel, I mean, despite all the 'faint praise' four-star reviews. I had the advantage, I confess, of reading it in French, but my wife read this translation and thought it was adequate.

The English title, however, isn't entirely adequate. The original - L'Oeuvre/ The Work - could refer to a single painting or just as well to the Works of a painter or to the Vocation/Work of being an artist. There are two characters in this novel who are consumed by their Work, the writer Pierre Sandoz and the painter Claude Lantier. The narrative focuses on the painter, Claude, whose genius is recognized only by his few closest friends, whose paintings are rejected and ridiculed by the public, and who in fact is pathologically unable to finish work, to express that genius to his own satisfaction. Claude's "Work" is a tragic failure in the end. But beyond the story of poor Claude, this novel is a profound depiction of the Artist -- any artist on any art -- and his/her agonistic consummation in The Work. Reading this novel with empathy will offer you two life-choices: 1) to be double-darn grateful NOT to be an artist, or 2) to be unable to imagine that Life is worth living if you are NOT an artist.

It's a wordy book, but artists are wordy people. There are chapter-long conversations that do not advance the plot, but rather serve as manifestos of Zola's literary aspirations, and of the aesthetics of the Impressionist painters who were his contemporaries. If those Impressionists are among your own artistic favorites, you will be thrilled by Zola's animation of them. If not, you may be bored. Me, I find that there are more boring readers in the world than boring books. One of those conversations, outdoors, between Claude and Pierre, amounts to Zola's 'prospectus' for his life work, the twenty novels of the "Rougon-Macquart" series. Pierre says:
"I know now exactly what I'm going to do in all this. Oh, nothing colossal, something quite modest, just enough for one lifetime even when you have some pretty exaggerated ambitions! I'm going to take a family and study each member of it, one by one, where they come from, what becomes of them, how they react to one another. Humanity in miniature, therefor, the way humanity evolves, the way it behaves... I shall place my characters in some definite period that will provide the milieu and the prevailing circumstances and make the thing a sort of slice of history... I shall make it a series of novels, say fifteen or twenty, each complete in itself and with its own particular setting, but all connected, a cycle of books...."
The character Pierre was just beginning his first novel, which would start him on a career of success, but foxy old Emile Zola was back-filling here. L'Oeuvre was the fourteenth of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, published in 1886. The twentieth -- Le Docteur Pascal -- would appear in 1893, four years before William Faulkner (America's great family-cycle novelist) was born.

Claude, Pierre, and their friends in the novel are "Bohemians" and The Masterpiece is a tangy, slangy, slightly lurid portrayal of the Bohemian lifestyle, that social and sexual freedom which lured artists and writers to the Paris of the mid-19th Century. Zola's books were shocking to his contemporaries, even in France but especially in Victorian England and America. Not only did he describe sexual relations explicitly but he removed them from questions of morality. Worse yet, he blatantly asserted the 'truth' of that horrid man Darwin! Zola was the first novelist of note to treat humanity as subject to evolutionary constraints, the first novelist of modern sociology. To my mind, Zola still seems a radically 'modern' writer.

That 'Bohemian' Paris, don't you know, is the Paris we all want to visit! The Paris we hope to see as tourists! That's another glory of Zola's Work; it's the closest we can come to a time machine. The descriptions of Paris -- of its streets, parks, crowds, passions in the 1800s -- are superbly evocative, even in the English translation. The hapless Claude, in the novel, is obsessed with the image of Paris that he aspires to paint on a canvas "as big as the Louvre". Claude's brief 'happiness', with his adoring wife and without the need to paint, takes place in the countryside, but Claude can't escape his obsession with Paris and its life of The Work. Eventually, Paris and L'Oeuvre consume him. His wife, for whom both the fictional author Pierre and the actual author Emile feel enormous affection and comprehension, falls victim to L'Oeuvre as tragically as Claude. Zola's portrayal of women in this novel and others, by the way, has been denounced by some as disparaging to women. I absolutely disagree. His women are flesh-and-blood real, complete in themselves, plausible, and every bit as admirable and/or despicable as his men.

I'd love to do an experiment in 'perception' with this novel, using two groups of readers. One group would read it "cold", with no prefaces or critiques telling them what to expect. The other group would be aware of the common critical assumptions that The Masterpiece is autobiographical and that Claude was intended as a partial portrayal of the painter Paul Cezanne. It's true that Zola and Cezanne were boyhood and lifetime friends, coming from the same city of southern France. It's very likely that Zola drew details of his novel from real-life experiences, including experiences borrowed from the life of Cezanne. And it seems to be true that Cezanne was somewhat offended by L'Oeuvre when he read it. But Claude Lantier is NOT Cezanne! And if Zola intended him to be Cezanne, he flagrantly misunderstood and misrepresented his friend. The paintings that Claude in the novel hopes to exhibit -- paintings of monstrous scope -- are nothing like Cezanne's. In fact, the one painting that Claude exhibits in the Gallery of the Rejected (an actual historical exhibit) is far closer to Manet than Cezanne, by its description. Cezanne's recognition was slow coming, but it came in full measure; Cezanne was NOT a frustrated failure, not at any time even in his own mind. The portrayal of Claude's self-destructive obsessive-compulsive personality could be taken as prophetic; the next generation of painters did include Vincent van Gogh, after all. In general, Zola understood writers and the aesthetic aspirations of writers far more clearly than he understood visual artists and their aesthetic preoccupations. That, I think, is the only weakness of this novel; Zola presumes to speak for painters too freely. One might also carp at Zola's depiction of the writer Pierre Sandoz; he "goes easy" on himself, if indeed Pierre is a self-portrait. Pierre is modest, brave, and above all loyal throughout. I can hardly believe Zola himself was so lovable.

One more 'pleasure' plucked from this English translation. Here's the description of the feast Pierre and his charming wife prepare, for the last uncomfortable reunion of their Bohemian circle of artist-friends:
"They were both fond of exotic dishes, and on this occasion decided on oxtail soup, grilled red mullet, fillet of beef with mushrooms, ravioli a l'italienne, hazel-hens from Russia and a truffle salad, as well as caviar and kilkis for hors d'oeuvre, a praline ice cream, a little Hungarian cheese green as an emerald, some fruit and pastries. To drink, simply some decanters of vintage claret, Chambertin with the roast and sparkling Moselle as a change from the same old champagne with the dessert."

A thousand devils, my friends! I was born in the wrong century!

This book is most likely overlooked as compared to some of Zola's other novels due to the fact that it includes many incidents and themes drawn from his previous works. Zola tends to include "courtesans" in most of his books, and this is no exception; with a scene in which the main chracter (Claude) has a nightly adventure with Mathilde (one such courtesan). About twenty pages dealing with this incident seem transcribed directly from his previous work Nana. Other such examples exist, which may have helped keep the book from universal recognition as compared to others. Another "discrepancy" being detrimental overrall is the ending which, although emotionally packed by naturalist standards, still is in some ways unfulfilling. A reader gets the impression that no other way existed for the book to end, and in fact the best climaxes are about halfway through the work. Misfortunes abound, yet individual incidents do not so much sadden and shock by themselves, only when taken with the rest of the book (it must be the "naturalist technique"). What was most enjoyable about the entire novel is not so mcuh the act of creating as its effect upon Claude (a painter) and his relationship to his wife (Christine), which ranges from idylls during summer to a secluded winter atmosphere. Most of the themes in the book are grand; anything from what makes a genius to the change in people and landscapes over time. Some have charged The Masterpiece with attempting to undermine the Impressionist art movement of the time and to show the failings existent in its practitioners. This must seem absurd, if only for the fact that Claude (said to based upon Zola's friend Cezanne) is described with more sympathy than any other tragic hero of Zola's I have ever read of. In fact, if one reads this book, one feels as though one truly understands Impressionism. Here, we have Claude explaining to his wife why he has used the color blue when painting a tree. He shows her a spot where the sun's light is distilled in such a way as to appear blue. And in fact, many other such modern concepts are explained by Claude to the benefit of Impressionism. All in all, the ending may be unfulfilling precisely because Zola must have thought too well of this particular hero and there truly was no other way, with as much didgnity, to end his existence. Read this novel (to fully appreciate it) before reading other more famous works by Zola. Many modern readers may not appreciate the main message of the book: That genius must be chaste.

In Claude Lantier, Zola achieves the pinnacle of artistic creation. The tortured soul of Lantier is beautifully depicted in a novel which rivals, in its descriptions the artist's creation itself. The question of heredity is also challenged in Claude's ultimate fate. I loved it and for anyone who is at all interested in Art history of the nineteenth century this is a definite must.

A human need for perfection was never described better: The attempts, The difficulties, the pain of the soul and the boby... The specific plot relates to Art but it brings a massage that is true for every human creation that might become to one's absession. Reading this book takes the reader on an amazing journey that begins as fine arts and crosses the lines to a tragedy. A full CATARSIS. recommanded :)

Zola's novel of art in mid-C19th France, it was first translated into English in 1886 as part of the "Rougon-Macquart" series which included "L'Assomoir" and "Germinal", is a study of Bohemian Paris.

"The Masterpiece", as it is entitled in English, is a fictionalised account of the Impressionist circle around Paul Cezanne. Zola, who had become an eminent art critic, turns his skills as a forensic commentator on France of the Second Empire and its emerging avant-garde art circles, creates a stunning story of the misunderstood artist whose desire to create the ultimate painting is thwarted by his own timidity and the intolerance of the art world which was unwilling to accept the revolutionaryu art forms of the young men who rebelled against the Salon.

Such was Zola's writing that Cezanne, upon reading the novel, broke off all friendship with the novelist who had supported his creativity in his critical writings.

This translation by Ernest Vizetelly brings all of the grittiness of Zola's writing to the reader. His brief preface includes ancilliary materialof interest both to the general reader and to those interested in the art world of the period.

It has been difficult to obtain a good English translation of the novel and this attempt can be lauded in all of its components.

This book is most likely not as well known as some other of Zola's novels due to the fact that it draws too much upon subject matter from his previous works or fails to elaborate upon some themes expressed. Zola tends to include a "courtesan" in almost all his novels, and this is no exception; with one incident pertaining to the main character's adventure with one such courtesan named Mathilde included which could very well have been transcribed from Nana. Other such examples abound, therefore to a certain extent this book has some unoriginal incidents included which are detrimental overall. Another "discrepancy" is the ending, which is in many ways unfulfilling, although emotionally packed by naturalist standards. It is as if there was no other way to end this book which also happens to contain most of its best cliamxes about halfway through. Otherwise, the book is a great read; with the most enjoyable passages relating to Claude (a painter and the main character) and his relationship with his wife. Of course, misfortunes abound, but described in a such a way (it must be the "naturalist" technique) that they don't so much sadden the reader individually, but only after the book is read and taken as a whole. Most of the themes in the book are grand, anything from what makes a genius to the change produced in people or landscapes during the space of a few years. Some have charged the book with attempting to undermine the Impressionist art movement of the time and to prove the flaws existent in its practitioners. This must seem absurd, as the portrait we get of Claude (said to be based upon Zola's friend Cezanne) is the most sympathetic of any tragic hero of Zola's I have read of. And, in fact Zola even uses impressionistic techniques to describe scenery, and one feels as if one understands impressionism by reading this work. In one instance we have Claude explaining to Christine (his wife) why he has included blue when painting a tree. He shows her the spot where the sun's light is distilled blue and extols many such modern ideas. All in all, the unsatisfying ending could be caused by Zola's affection for this particular hero and he simply didn't know how to have him end his existence in a more dignified manner.