NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
Water Lily Pond by Monet Over the years there have been many respectable artists, however, one of the most famous of these artists Claude Oscar Monet always stood alone and was ultimately determined to follow his own solid road of experimentation and significant tradition of impressionism. With tiny, dabbing brush strokes Monet suggested infinity of objects, eternalized them, and put them beyond the instant forms. Monet created his water garden in 1893, enlarging and embellishing it at later intervals. As early as 1897 he confided to a journalist his idea for a circular room decorated with a horizon of water filled with water lilies. However, he soon stashed the studies for that grand decoration in his cellar and for the next 25 years concentrated on smaller versions of the pond, which, he said, is not even 200 meters around, but which awakens in you the idea of infinity (Stuckey, 31).
From regular observers point of view, Lily Pond series (1899 - 1900) is a representation of lush landscapes overflowing with exuberant vegetation crowding in on the flower-filled pond spanned by its wooden bridge. The light changes the palette from bright green and pale pink to sundown mauve and brown, but the point of view is virtually identical in all eight works. Between 1903 and 1908 Monet worked incessantly on his second series of water lilies. These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession, he wrote. It is beyond my old mans strength, but I still want to find a way to render what I feel. I destroy some, I start over...
and I hope that from so much effort something will develop (Stuckey, 36). For the first time, forty-eight paintings from this series were shown under the single title Water Landscapes at the Durand-Re gallery in 1909. Most of the Water Landscapes eliminated the surrounding greenery and focused on the pond itself - close-up views of diaphanous blue or turquoise water, with clusters of lilies floating on the reflections of trees, clouds and sky. Everything seemed to be in shimmering motion, and the dizzying effect is accentuated by the double perspective -- the lilies seem to recede toward the top of the frame, the reflections diminished toward the lower edge. Water and sky became one. In 1910 severe floods ravaged the pond.
Within the next two years, Monet's wife and elder son, Jean, died, and the artist began to lose the sight in his right eye. He did not work again until 1913, when a photograph shows him in his studio with two large water-lily panels, possibly the original 1897 studies, which he later refers to as old efforts found in a basement (Stuckey, 41). From the critical point of view, impressionism had traditionally been about painting the world as revealed through light and atmosphere. But during the 90 s Monet combined impressionism's scrupulous optical objectivity with more abstract and subjective impulses. Poplar trees and their reflections might run uninterruptedly from top to bottom edge of the painting, like mullions in a window, to remind spectators that the landscape view before them was painted on a flat surface. And true as they might have been to nature, the hot reds or purples washing over a grain stack were also chosen to express the artists feelings about what he saw.
These changes amounted to a shift from nature to culture, a move away from simply mirroring the world of appearances to creating a parallel world of art, of inner sensibility and pure painting. In this way, prefiguring developments in painting from Picasso's cubism to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, Monet in the 1890 s ceased being a strictly 19 th century artist and took a step toward the 20 th. Monet concentrated on three subjects during the last quarter century of his life: London, Venice and the horticultural marvel he created at his home in Giverny, outside Paris. Indeed, if garden with the Japanese bridge, willow trees and water lily ponds became his primary subject.
The Giverny paintings mark a further step away from the 19 th century aesthetic and into the 20 th. For while Monet continued to paint the natural world before him in true impressionist fashion, nature, in this case, was the product of his imagination. He was constantly re landscaping, replanting and in other ways tailoring his garden to his exact specifications before putting brush to canvas (Russell, 21 - 22). By this simple shift in viewpoint - substituting down for straight ahead - Monet reinvented landscape. Since its emergence as an independent subject in the 16 th century, landscape had followed the same compositional principle: earth (or water) and sky separated by a horizon line, which organized the picture and oriented the viewer at the same time. Eliminating the horizon was like removing the keystone from an arch.
The structure came apart, freeing Monet to reorganize it, to rethink the way landscape should look, much like his contemporary Rodin, who made free with human anatomy, combining and recombining figures and body parts in his sculptures. Simultaneously, in the water lily paintings, relationships change. The sky is not overhead but superimposed on the water, and it is viewed beneath eye level, not straight ahead or high up. Above and below, near and far exchange places.
Solid matter dissolves into strokes of pigment or a reflection, or hovers somewhere on the indeterminate surface of water. Spectators find themselves looking up and down, at and through simultaneously. Organized this way, landscape offers the viewer no sure anchors, no way of comfortably projecting himself into the depicted world as is possible in conventional landscape. Monet's water lily paintings have more in common with the great baroque church ceiling paintings, where the heavenly throng cavorts freely, unfettered by gravity and other physical laws, than with the work of Rembrandt, Constable or anyone else in the Western landscape tradition (Russell, 53). Usually entering the exhibition room of water lily paintings, spectators usually feel disoriented, even weightless. For some reason the vertically formatted paintings (others are square and round) actually induce a sensation of vertigo, one reason, perhaps, a contemporary critic accused Monet of painting landscape upside down.
Monet's shift in viewpoint also had a transforming effect on the tone of landscape, making what had always been an emblem of the public realm oddly private. In these landscapes spectators are strangely sealed off, as if a door has been shut, confining them in a space where the wider world is perceived but not directly experienced. It makes for an introverted, contemplative, dreamlike world, one far removed from the bustling Parisian streetscape's of the impressionist vie moderne of the 1870 s (Russell, 71). Of all these series, none, of course, can rival the Water Lilies, which consumed Monet for nearly 25 years. A reverse Narcissus, he gazed into the waters of his small pond and glimpsed not his own reflection but a mirror image of the clouds and treetops around him.
At first the pictures were fairly realistic, a precise transcription of fugitive moments; it can be derived from the shallow depths of the pond and the upside-down clouds reflected on the waters glassy surface. Over time, however, all outlines dissolved, and by 1920 Monet was painting mural-sized pictures in which water lilies, clouds and subaqueous grass are made to mingle in radiant blurs of tint and atmosphere that would later be lauded for their near abstractness. It is, of course, the water lily paintings that have assured Monet's reputation as a forerunner of modern art. In the 1950 s, Monet enjoyed a brief vogue when the water lily pictures were linked to the urgent painterly gestures of New Yorks abstract expressionists.
In 1959, the Museum of Modern Art acquired one of the largest (and blurriest) of the water lily pictures and critics insisted it was somehow a precursor of the all-over drip pictures of Jackson Pollock. Today, however, abstract painting no longer commands the interest that it should, and the latest claims on Monet's behalf have little to do with his pioneering efforts in that direction. Instead he is praised for his seriality - for challenging the idea of a work of art as a unique, one-of-a-kind object. In 1990, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston devoted a show exclusively to the subject of Monet's series paintings, and it became fashionable to say that he anticipated everything from the fuzzy rectangles of Mark Rothko to the pop flowers of Andy Warhol to the minimalist cubes of Donald Judd.
From personal point of view, I have always found these claims on behalf of Monet's modernity rather forced, and remain unconvinced that Pollock or Rothko looked very closely at Monet's work. While he did coat his forms in a layer of fog, fog does not equal abstract painting, which instead of merely veiling forms makes them move in space. Monet, in the end, was a painter of landscapes, and for all his radical aspects, he belongs more to the 19 th century than to our own. He believed that everything worth seeing can be seen with your eyes. He saw the light, and painted it.
He was one of the first artists to work from nature and actual sunshine, but also one of the last, reminding us that in our day visions invisible to the eye have dominated art. Bibliography Stuckey F. Charles F. Monet: Water Lilies, Hugh Later Levin Associates, NY, 1988 Russell, Vivian. Monet's Water Lilies, Hodder Headline Australia, Melbourne, 1998 web - resource of Monet's paintings, exhibitions, and museum shows web - gallery of Monet's art prints
Free research essays on topics related to: modern art, 25 years, 19 th century, jackson pollock, point of view
Research essay sample on Water Lily Pond By Monet
