Claude Monet Paintings 1840
- 1926
French Prominent Impressionist Painter
Water Lilies
Oil on canvas, 200.5 x 201 sm.
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
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OIL PAINTING: Water Lilies
At first, the Warerlilies drew less enthusiasm than misunderstanding. While some considered the work to be purely decorative, others were troubled by the absence of markers and boundaries. A critic evoked the physical malaise these aquatic landscapes caused. In 1932, another, Andre Lhote, wrote:
"For an artist, light only exists in color ... Simply see the artist's attraction for this phenomenon at the Orangerie: it has
caused Claude Monet to commit plastic suicide. The Ophelia of painting, his soul wanders without glory in the shroud of
waterlilies." Georges Clemenceau deeply admired the works of Monet, long before American artists of the 1950s, like
Pollock or Rothko, claimed inspiration from this artist. He saw in the Waterlilies an "inexpressible storm where, through the painter's magic, our eye is overcome by its confrontation with the universe". Marcel Proust, tied to Monet by numerous affinities, treated the masterpiece with finesse; "Here and there, on the surface, like a strawberry, a waterlily reddens:
a scarlet heart and white edges. Further on, the flowers grow in numbers and are paler, rougher, grainier, more crinkled
and hazardly dispersed in mounds so graciously that you would think they are floating astray, like the melancholic farewells after a festivity, with bubbly roses forming unraveled
garlands".
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