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Claude Monet: Artists
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Claude Monet's name is synonymous with the Impressionist style. The movement was named after a painting he completed in 1872 (Impression - Sunrise) was derided by an art critic, labelling the group of artists the Impressionists.
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Claude Oscar Monet was born in Paris in 1840. He studied art as a teenager and became a well-known artist and a founder of the Impressionist Style of art. He painted and drew simple landscapes using oil paint or oil pastels.
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Monet was one of the chief organizers and exhibitors at the first Impressionism Show held in 1874 at Nadar’s Studio. A few of the thirty artists were: Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Berthe Morisot and Eugene Boudin. The common thread for the artists was rejection by the Salon judges and opposition to official art.
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Following in the path of the Barbizon painters, who had set up their easels in the Fontainebleau Forest (64.210) earlier in the century, Monet adopted and extended their commitment to close observation and naturalistic representation. Whereas the Barbizon artists painted only preliminary sketches en plein air, Monet often worked directly on large-scale canvases out of doors, then reworked and completed them in his studio. His quest to capture nature more accurately ... prompted him to reject European conventions governing composition, color, and perspective. Influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, Monet's asymmetrical arrangements of forms emphasized their two-dimensional surfaces by eliminating linear perspective and abandoning three-dimensional modeling. He brought a vibrant brightness to his works by using unmediated colors, adding a range of tones to his shadows, and preparing canvases with light-colored primers instead of the dark grounds used in traditional landscape paintings.
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Monet returned to France from London in 1872 and settled in Argenteuil (a town on a picturesque stretch of the Seine, eleven kilometres from central Paris), where he lived until 1876. His contemporaries Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet and Alfred Sisley joined him and, for a time, Argenteuil became a hub of artistic activity. It was during this time that Monet created some of his most characteristic paintings. In order to observe the effects of sunlight on water more closely, Monet often worked from a boat-turned-studio. In Argenteuil, the rust-red boats, painted in contrasting colours to the blue water and sky and the green water plants, are depicted surrounded by shimmering light – perhaps the true subject of the painting.
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Monet followed the Haystacks with a Rouen Cathedral series (1892-1894). With their heavy encrustations of paint that capture flickering light and shadow, the works challenged accepted understandings of impressionism. The cathedral façade virtually dissolves, and an objective rendering no longer seems to be Monet’s goal. With this series, critics began to relate Monet’s work to the symbolist movement, in which artists used color to achieve a highly individual and subjective interpretation of a scene.
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