Monet

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

Facts

Monet

Heinrich, Christoph
Softcover, flaps, 18.5 x 23 cm (7.3 x 9.1 in.), 96 pages, $ 9.99

Events (1 items)

Exhibition
Venedig - Von Canaletto und Turner bis Monet
September 28, 2008 - January 25, 2009
Fondation Beyeler, Baselstr. 101, 4125 Riehen / Basel, Switzerland Tel.: +41-61-645 97 00, Germany

Reviews (1 items)

Monet is one of my favourite artists. We have a painting called Poppyfield i think it is very insparational
Emma, United Kingdom

See also (10 items)

	Cézanne One of the founding fathers of modern art (reissue in a new format)
	Monet TASCHEN's 25th anniversary - Special edition! Strokes of genius: the magic of Monet
	Cézanne Paul Cézanne - The extraordinary artist's major works and his theories of painting and colour
See all (10 items)