Word: monet
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...little Rembrandt self-portrait etching, nothing in the haul could be resold on the open market, or even in its shadow line. With the Vermeer, resale is all but inconceivable, although famous stolen paintings do sometimes get sold: the very picture that named the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet's Impression: Rising Sun, was stolen from the Marmottan Museum in Paris by armed robbers in 1985 and is believed to be in Japan...
Slow reflection governed all his work. The pressure of the motif was sublimated in the demands of the painting. Monet also made quite conscious gestures to art history. His series of poplars near his house in Giverny -- their slender, stately trunks along the banks of the Epte reflected in the water and forming an almost abstract palisade, the S shape of their bushed-out tops strung along like a festive garland -- pays homage to French rococo, Fragonard in particular. Like his lyric images of a stretch of the Seine from 1896 to 1897, the paintings show how unrelentingly conscious Monet...
...climax of this show is, inevitably, the Cathedrals, Monet's repeated views of the west front of the Gothic Cathedral of Rouen: art about art. Between 1892 and 1895 he produced 30 of them; ten are lined up in Boston. Some critics have shied away from them as pictorial near absurdities, Gothic rendered as melting ice cream, architecture without a line anywhere. It would be hard to argue this for long in front of the paintings themselves. How could such an endlessly complicated form as this Gothic facade, with all its peaks, hollows, spires, bosses and moldings, be so fully...
...Monet's power to evoke substance through paint was as strong as Rembrandt's. The next 100 years would be full of art about art, but one may doubt whether any of it quite equaled the level of intelligence and passion -- both seizing the motif and respectfully deferring to it -- that is figured forth in Monet's Cathedrals...
...With Monet's later paintings, ripeness...