Monet in the 20th Century

Yale University Press, 304 pages.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Claude Monet was a figure of national importance in France, the patriarch of impressionism and the country's foremost landscape painter. This richly illustrated book examines for the first time the rich body of work that Monet completed from 1900 until his death in 1926, a period during which he was enormously productive, increasingly wealthy and ever more venerated. The paintings which crowned Monet's career included over 500 views of London, Venice and his gardens at Giverny. These paintings are almost signature canvases, especially the famous Water Lilies. However, they also presented him with enormous challenges: his London pictures took almost four years to complete, as did his Venice views, and his garden paintings, much more diverse than is generally known, became a persistent obsession. This book sets Monet's challenges and achievements within personal and historical contexts and carefully reconstructs his painting campaigns. It also assesses his public persona and considers his personal and professional strategies. What unfolds is a complicated story of an ageing artist determined to create a new art.
This book is the catalogue for a new exhibition that celebrates the achievement of Claude Monet after 1900. It includes essays on the evolution of Monet's work after 1900, its relationship both to his earlier work and to contemporary critical and artistic developments, and the subsequent cultural and critical concerns which have shaped the more recent reception of his late work. It will open at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on 23rd September, 1998 and run to 3rd January, 1999, before opening at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on 21st January 1999.