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_Monet _
By: MJones
Claude Monet was born in Paris, France on the 14th of November 1840. When
Monet was 5 he moved to the town of Le Havre for the majority of his youth.
Monet was considered to be undisciplined and unlikely to make an achievement
of his life by his parents and teachers. His father owned a wholesale grocery
that Monet showed no interest in inheriting. He was only interested in
painting. By the age of fifteen he was receiving commission from his works. He
later grew to become one of the greatest influential impressionist painters of
all times. Monet was the leader of the impressionist movement. He influenced
art by trying to paint his personal spontaneous response to outdoor scenes or
events. Earlier artists had also painted outdoor studies rapidly, almost in
shorthand. They used such studies as notes for more elaborate pictures
painted in the studio. Monet was the most important of the artists who first
allowed their initial impressions of outdoor scenes to stand as complete
works. Monet painted directly from the object in order to record visual
sensation more accurately. He was especially concerned with the effect of
outdoor light and atmosphere. Impressionists recorded their own sensations of
color, and the outlines and solidities of the world as interpreted by common
sense melt away. The impressionist emphasis on the prime reality of sensation
in the process of apprehending nature or the world had its parallel in the
work of contemporaneous scientists, philosophers of science, and psychologists
who asserted that reality is sensation and that knowledge could be based only
on the analysis of our sensations. The Impressionists sought to create the
illusion of forms bathed in light and atmosphere. This goal required an
intensive study of outdoor light as the source of our experience of color.
Shadows do not appear gray or black, as many earlier painters thought, but
seem to be composed of colors modified by reflections or other conditions. In
painting, if complementary colors are used side by side over large enough
areas, they intensify each other, unlike the effect of small quantities of
mixed pigments, which blend into neutral tones. Although it is not strictly
true that the Impressionists used only primary hues, juxtaposing them to
create secondary colors (blue and red, for example, to create purple), they
did achieve remarkable brilliant effects with their characteristically short,
choppy brush strokes, which so accurately caught the vibrating quality of
light. Scientific studies of light and the invention of chemical pigments
increased artistic sensitivity to the multiplicity of colors in nature and
gave artists new colors with which to work. Special luminance was achieved by
using new pigment colors like viridian green and cobalt violet (both invented
in 1859) and cerulean blue (invented in 1860). These pigments, applied with
newly available flat bound brushes, often were placed on the canvases covered
with a base of white pigment (white ground), rather than with the brown or
green tones favored by earlier artists. Monet had a fascination with light
that led him to paint several series of pictures showing the effect of
sunlight on a subject. The apparition of color challenged him everywhere:
gardens, fields in bloom, cloud-mottled skies, and rivers with sailboats,
seaside resorts, and rocky coasts. For example, Monet painted the view of a
cathedral and also a haystack under changing atmospheric day to explore the
optical effects of changing light and color. In 1883, Monet settled in
Giverny, there he purchased a home in the country. Here he painted the garden
scenes and the well-known water lilies. Monet carried the color method
furthest. Monet called color his day-long obsession, joy and torment. One
among many successful results of his obsession with color is the huge canvas
Luncheon (Decorative Panel). A blaze of light, vibrating with granules of
spectral color, transmutes a suburban garden into a sunburst, the picture
giving off its own light. The radically eccentric composition places two
ladies at the extreme upper right, and a small boy (the artists son Jean), at
the extreme lower left, almost invisible in the bright glow from the tea-table
cloth. The luminous space that opens up between the figures is a field fro the
play of color particles, seeming to gather into light, then dissipate. That
spacious area joins the space of the observer, placing us in the garden. This
is a form of framing scene constant in all Impressionist design. For Monet the
phenomenon was color, and his laboratory was the out-of-doors. In this
instance, it is his garden at Argenteuil, where he often painted in the
company of Manet and Renoir.
Word Count: 765
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