MONET CLAUDE

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was the most typical and the most individualImpressionist painter. His long life he dedicated to a pictorialexploration of the sensations which reality, and in particular landscape,offer the human eye. But while Monet the painter was faithful andpersevering in the pursuit of his motifs, his personal life followed amore restless course. Parisian by birth, he discovered plein-air paintingas a youth in the provinces, where one of his homes, Argenteuil, has cometo represent the artistic flowering and official establishment ofImpressionism as a movement, with Monet as its creative leader. In hisendeavor to capture the ever-changing face of reality, Monet went beyondImpressionism and thereby beyond the confines of self-contained panelpainting: in Giverny he painted the Poplars, Grain Stacks and RouenCathedral series in which he addressed one motif in constantly newvariations. Here, too, Monet laid out the famous garden with itswater-lily pond which he was to paint on huge canvases well into the1920s. He thereby sought to render not reality as objectively experienced,but rather that which takes place "between the motif and the artist". Intheir open, merely tenuously representational structure and impressivescale, his water lily paintings - created long before the currents of thecontemporary avant-garde - point the way to the developments of thefuture.