Also listed here for its large catalogue of reproductions is the Flickr website Claude Monet.Īdam, Georgina. Pissarro 2010 clarifies the attribution to a little-known Swiss artist of a presumed self-portrait of the painter. The financial stake of the Wildensteins, first Daniel and more recently his son Guy, in determining the authenticity of Monet’s paintings should also be borne in mind, and some attributions and rejected attributions remain controversial (see Adam 2016). Essays in the celebratory catalogue Claude Monet (1840–1926): A Tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff reveal behind-the-scenes elements of the production of the catalogue raisonné. The massive documentation of the biography of the artist, the public exhibition and criticism of his works, and the worldwide acquisition of his canvases by collections both public and private necessitated the formidable resources of the Wildenstein Institute, the research arm of the Parisian gallery that employed a large team of historians and archivists. Both editions are essential to obtain the most complete documentation and reproduction of Monet’s art. The laborious work of compiling the complete catalogue of Monet’s painted and graphic oeuvre of some two thousand items was first consolidated in the five largely black-and-white volumes Wildenstein 1974–1991 and then corrected and updated in the four full-color volumes Wildenstein 1996. The refurbishment of his home and gardens at Giverny and the exhibition of his final sketches and paintings at the Musée Marmottan Monet have made of these places shrines of art and tourism that attract thousands of visitors each year. The dispersed monumentality of Monet’s series paintings eventually coalesced after World War I in the mural decorations of Water Lilies, posthumously installed at the Orangerie, now one of the most visited museums in Paris.
The group held seven more independent exhibitions between 18, but by then Monet was already moving away from group exhibitions toward the solo presentation of ensembles of works at commercial galleries in Paris between 18, such as the Grainstacks, Cathedrals, and series of London and Venice. It was during this nascent stage of the Third French Republic that Monet incurred the ridicule of the critics for his now-iconic painting, Impression, Sunrise, which gave the movement its name. Such failures at the Salon may have encouraged Monet to organize in 1874 an independent exhibition along with his colleagues Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, and Morisot that has come to be known as the first Impressionist exhibition. However, Monet failed to complete for the Salon in 1866 or to have accepted in 1867 his attempts to achieve monumental representations of modern women and men engaged in public and private recreation. Monet achieved modest success at the principal art venue of the era, the Salon exhibition, with a pair of seascapes in 1865 and a large-scale portrait of a woman of fashion in 1866. Monet began his career during the Second French Empire as a Realist painter under the influence of the older artists Courbet and Manet whose common goal was the representation of modern life. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993). 139, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. The point of view espoused with regard to these divergent perspectives is that they all enrich the literature on the artist because “the interminable reinterpretations to which is legitimately susceptible change it only into itself” (p.
It is not possible to include every worthy item here, but the annotated entries will orient the reader to the most significant trends. Despite the international currency of Monet’s work, the scholarly literature since the mid-20th century is characterized by significant differences in interpretation from formalism to social history, feminism to psychoanalysis. Monet’s paintings command high prices at auction and his works are continuously featured in exhibitions around the world. Claude Monet (b. 1840–d. 1926) is the artist most closely associated with the term “Impressionism.” His paintings are among the most frequently viewed on the Internet, ranking fourth after Picasso, van Gogh, and Leonardo.