Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...painting, two great landscapists, Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, are twin bridges between the 19th century and our own. As Cézanne's work provoked cubism, so Monet's looked forward to abstract expressionism. Today the role of landscape in art has shrunk. But the most ecstatic perceptions of experience and the most radical discoveries about the language of color and shape that these sublime artificers made were developed from their landscape motifs. Cézanne's was the Provençal countryside around Aix. Monet's was a garden at Giverny, about...
...French artist has ever been in his own lifetime-eventually died, the garden had become one of the most complete environmental expressions of a man's taste ever to be constructed. Monet created his own motif in order to paint it in tranquillity, and the paintings were art about art-self-reflexive, but imbued with an intense veneration for nature...
...garden became an exquisitely balanced artifact: rose arbors, willows, iris beds, raked paths, wisteria, a Japanese bridge and-most rewarding of all to the painter-ponds and water lilies. For the last 20 years of Monet's life, his "harem of nature," as Art Historian Kirk Varnedoe elegantly calls it, needed the services of six gardeners. After his death it began to decay. By 1966, when Monet's only surviving son-the reclusive Michel-died, the place had been closed to visitors, a shambles of rank growth and silted-up ponds. Recently, with a large grant from...
...mark the event, Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art has put on a sumptuous show titled "Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism." It contains 81 paintings-a third of them lent by the Musée Marmottan in Paris, all of them images from the garden. We see, lined up, the different versions of each motif that Monet so obsessively worked at, in every possible variation of light, laboring to divide nuances into further nuances and stabilize their intervals with the devotion of a particle physicist: the poplars, the haystacks, the rose-twined tunnel of the arbor...
Monet gave impressionism the dignity of classical art, though by the turn of the century he was no longer an impressionist in the sense of working outdoors, directly from the motif. Whether his canvases, he remarked, "are painted from life or not is nobody's business and of no importance whatsoever." They were in fact painted from memory-but the span of memory was as short as the walk from the pond to the studio. In his genius for rendering evanescence within a monumental structure, Monet became a master of le temps retrouvé: the most Proustian of painters...