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Claude Monet: Lights
built 634 days ago
Despite frequent periods of financial anxiety, Monet never lacked buyers for his work, and by the 1890s his sales were strong, especially in the United States. The culminating honor of Monet's career was the installation in the Orangerie des Tuileries, a museum in central Paris, of monumental paintings of water lilies, on which he had worked for more than a decade preceding his death. In these works reality seems to dematerialize as he expresses the interplay of color, light, foliage, and reflection in a tangled mass of brushstrokes.
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Monet's preoccupation with reducing all visual experience to terms of pure light became an obsession. When his young wife died he was horrified to find himself analyzing the nacreous tints of her skin in the early morning light. As he continued to paint, wishing he could have been "born blind in order to gain his sight and be able to paint objects without knowing what they were," as he began more and more to develop the ability to see light and nothing but light, light became like a corrosive substance eating away the objects bathed in it.
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Monet moved to Paris in 1859, where he met and befriended Pissarro and Edouard Manet. He married in 1870, and in 1871 settled in Argenteuil. He fixed up a boat with an easel and painted his way up and down the Seine River, capturing his impressions of the interplay of light, water and atmosphere.
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The water-lily paintings supplied the motif for Monet's last work, a series of large decorative panels. But in these hugely expanded canvases, with large brush strokes, the forms of nature are difficult to distinguish. If the painting are regarded as representations of lilies and water with ripples and glancing reflections of light, they never become more than great inchoate masses of opalescent color arbitrarily cut off on four sides by a frame. But if they are regarded as abstract arrangements of color applied in directed strokes, they gradually loose coalesce. One movement of strokes across the canvas is revealed as a check or buttress to another; a system beginning in one section and seeming to vanish will reappear elsewhere.
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Monet was exacting about his work and was known to wait for the light to change to his requirements before even so much as painting in a background. He was immensely practical in his pursuit of the correct light, which led him to devise extraordinary methods of getting what he wanted within the limits set by nature, man and paint. When he painted "Women in the Garden" (1866-67; Musee d'Orsay, Paris), the height of his canvas (over ten feet) required the digging of a trench so the painting could be raised or lowered on pulleys, allowing Monet to reach it.
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Scope: Monet was perhaps considered to be one of the greatest impressionists. He was preoccupied with the fall of light and how he would portray this on his canvas. He made use of vibrant color in his water garden and water lily paintings.
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