Le Grand Tout: Monet on Belle-Île and the Impulse toward Unity
Claude Monet's thirty-eight paintings of Belle-Île's western coast (1886) were hailed by critics as signaling a groundbreaking shift whose serial conception, abstracted aesthetic, and "savage" tenor transcended Impressionist naturalism, announcing a new, antimodernist, and primit...
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| Published in: | The Art bulletin (New York, N.Y.) N.Y.), 2015-09, Vol.97 (3), p.323-341 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Claude Monet's thirty-eight paintings of Belle-Île's western coast (1886) were hailed by critics as signaling a groundbreaking shift whose serial conception, abstracted aesthetic, and "savage" tenor transcended Impressionist naturalism, announcing a new, antimodernist, and primitivizing manner. The period's evolving pantheistic and proto-phenomenological ontologies awash in notions of "wholeness" and "universality," and the painter's friendship, initiated on Belle-Île, with the critic Gustave Geffroy, who shared such views, provide a context for understanding Monet's transformation, from the late 1880s on, from reportorial transcriber of ephemeral reality to dedicated seeker of its underlying essence, its perennial truth. |
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| ISSN: | 0004-3079 1559-6478 |