The pathos of Emile Zola’s searchings was controversially directed against concepts that rejected the function of knowledge of reality for literature and art, argued that they were incompatible with life and were inherently hostile to it. The writer devoted the novel The Masterpiece to the condemnation of these inconsistent subjective-idealistic views.
The plot of The Masterpiece some real events and facts from the life of the writer and friends of his youth - Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet and others were used. The content of the novel is connected with the controversy that in the sixties the writer led in defense of a group of talented painters. He published his articles about impressionists of these years in the collection My Salon.
The novel The Masterpiece Emile Zola begins with a story about how the three provincials - painter Claude Lante, writer Pierre Sandoz and future sculptor Louis Dubuche gathered in Paris.
World Envy and rivalry were unknown to them, being poor, they despised money and the bourgeois. Entering the fight young enthusiasts experienced their talent in hard work. Sandoz was absorbed in the fulfillment of a long-standing dream to create a poem that would embody the whole history of mankind, its past, present and future. Dubuche day and night worked on his sculpture.
Claude, the painter, was inspired by the idea of capturing the universe in “canvases” in all the unique diversity of its manifestations and colors, in movement and time. In his image Zola wanted to show the artist’s struggle with nature, his creative impulse and quest in work of art, the efforts of blood and tears to create flesh, fill it with life. Constant battle and permanent defeat.
Years of searching, painful creative struggle do not bring Claude the desired success: his paintings are rejected by the Salon. The artist resorts to enhancing the intensity of colors, to whimsically chosen color combinations, he uses the hitherto unnoticed nuances, the vibration of light, its constant fluidity. But all attempts of Claude to grab and capture on the canvas "unique moment", ever-changing life are fruitless. The hatred of people whose established tastes have been touched, the malice of envious and mediocrity finally broke his will. But the point is not the physical death of Claude Lantie, which ends the novel: the artist died in Claude much earlier. In the frantic quest for new ways in art, in an effort to recreate nature on the canvas more real than it is, he came to deny life itself: “Nothing exists outside of painting, and the world should perish!”
Zola’s attitude to impressionism was not once and for all established. He passionately supported impressionist artists in the sixties - seventies, when they entered into life, woke up minds. The ideas of the Impressionists were akin to the aesthetic views of Zola himself. Later, however, the paths of the Impressionists and the creator of Rougon-Macquarts diverged. In the eighties - nineties, subjectivism prevailed in the works of impressionist artists. Driven by the desire to capture the elusive "appearance of sensation", they were carried away by the formal side of painting, a demonstration of their virtuosity in the transfer of color and light.
The novel The Masterpiece immediately after the publication caused lively debate. Progressive critics saw in the book a true story about the fate of art in the world of owners, about the miserable fate of artists, about the monstrous exploitation of their talent.
