No items in cart!

Country: France Germany Japan Spain United Kingdom United States --- Albania Algeria Andorra Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahrain Bangladesh Belarus Belgium Bermuda Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Canada Chile China Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Guatemala Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakstan Kenya Korea - Republic of Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Latvia Lebanon Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macedonia Madagascar Malaysia Malta Mauritius Mexico Moldova - Republic of Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Namibia Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Nigeria Norway Pakistan Panama Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Romania Russian Federation San Marino Saudi Arabia Serbia Singapore Slovakia Slovenia South Africa Spain Sri Lanka Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Tanzania Thailand Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vatican Venezuela Viet Nam Zimbabwe

Monet and the search of a reality that takes place "between the motif and the artist"

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was the most typical and the most individual Impressionist painter. His long life he dedicated to a pictorial exploration of the sensations which reality, and in particular landscape, offers the human eye.

But while Monet the painter was faithful and persevering in the pursuit of his motifs, his personal life followed a more restless course. Parisian by birth, he discovered plein-air painting as a youth in the provinces, where one of his homes, Argenteuil, has come to represent the artistic flowering and official establishment of Impressionism as a movement, with Monet as its creative leader.

In his endeavor to capture the ever-changing face of reality, Monet went beyond Impressionism and thereby beyond the confines of self-contained panel painting: in Giverny he painted the Poplars, Grain Stacks and Rouen Cathedral series in which he addressed one motif in constantly new variations. Here, too, Monet laid out the famous garden with its water-lily pond which he was to paint on huge canvases well into the 1920s. He thereby sought to render not reality as objectively experienced, but rather that which takes place "between the motif and the artist". In their open, merely tenuously representational structure and impressive scale, Monet's water lily paintings - created long before the currents of the contemporary avant-garde - point the way to the developments of the future.

About the Series:
Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features:

• a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist
• approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
• a concise biography