Claude Monet : Life and Work, with over 300 Illustrations, 135 in Colour / Virginia Spate

Provides an in-depth look at the French Impressionist's life and work, analyzing his paintings and examining the evolution of his style

Serving as both an indispensable critical analysis of Monet's paintings and a stunning album, this ravishingly illustrated study presents Monet (1840-1926) as an artist who tried to fashion a personal wholeness within a fragmented, rapidly changing society. Spate, an Australian art historian, demonstrates how Monet's paintings enact the contradiction between natural time and the mechanical time of technological society. The recluse of Giverny created a beautiful garden, which he then recreated in paintings of sensual plenitude that offered protection from an alienating public sphere. In his last works, the Water Lilies series, Monet, struggling against blindness, admitted disintegration and the ravages of time into his self-enclosed world. In portraying reality as a succession of moments of color, "this most bourgeois of artists" became an endless experimenter whose canvases point to a longed-for harmony between the viewer and an unspoiled nature.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Australian scholar Spate (fine arts, Univ. of Sydney) provides a careful study of almost 3000 surviving letters of Claude Monet, infusing this biography with a critical assessment of his paintings. The artist's dedication to plein-air painting is ably documented. We see him progress from realism to light to the abstraction of light in his work as Paris and its surrounding suburbs are transformed by politics, war, and the industrial age. There are 300 illustrations, with 135 in color, and several detailed pages showing water lilies bleed to the edge of the page. The bibliography is extensive and the index entry, "Monet, Oscar Claude," contains a chronology as well as major descriptive subheadings, such as "Attitudes and Tenants," "Garden," and "Light," making this a desirable reference source. The level of discussion is attuned to the specialist and advanced student of Impressionist art. Overall, an achievement worth noting.
- Ellen Bates, New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.