Word: monets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Claude Monet was 86 when he died: a driven old man, almost blind with cataracts, preyed on by terrible fits of depression. "Age and chagrin have worn me out," he wrote to his friend Georges Clemenceau, former Premier of France. "My life has been nothing but a failure, and all that's left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear." Painters have often guessed wrong about their achievement; none guessed worse than Monet. He is, in fact, the only Impressionist other than Manet and Seurat whose work has consistently seemed relevant and useful...
Prophetic Figure. Seventy years ago, Monet posed all the queries that are central to informal, painterly abstraction while working on his haystacks, cathedral facades and lily ponds-and solved most of them. He is the Cézanne of Abstract Expressionism, like him a prophetic figure who was much greater than what he foretold. This fact was recognized by the "rediscovery" of Monet that took place in New York in the late '50s (a feast considerately laid on for the return of a Prodigal Father who had never actually been away...
...many thousand canvases produced in the last 20 years have echoed the muscular writhing of brush marks, the suffusing, arbitrary color and the dense, pasty, almost edible pigment that Monet, in 1918, incorporated into The Willow? In a study of African lilies growing beside his pond, the "modernity" of Monet's vision becomes even more pronounced. There is no horizon line; the fragment of reality he chose tips and squashes itself against the picture plane. A whole historical style is predicted in the vibration and flicker of yellow light on the water, the excited scribbles round the lily pads...
There is an edge of smugness in the view of Monet that attributes his claim on our eyes to his modernity, we are prone to use the past as gratification, and think it good because it made us possible. But Monet did not labor for the sake of Philip Guston or Sam Francis. His actual greatness resides in the way in which he marked, and then transcended, his own cultural perimeter. He provoked Impressionism rather as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon provoked Cubism; and the crucial encounter here was with an older painter, Eugene-Louis Boudin, whom...
...motif, en plein air. Painters like Constable and Turner had done this before but in watercolor; Courbet had done parts of his canvases on the scene and finished them in the studio. But the invention of ready-mixed oil paints in tubes made it possible for Boudin, and Monet after him, to carry through an entire painting in this way. Boudin's influence on his incomparably more gifted disciple was strong, and it can be seen as late as 1870 in the pearly sky, sand and sea of Camille Monet and Her Cousin on the Beach at Trouville...