Why Monet Matters, or Meanings Among the Lily Pads

FAIN: FZ-231455-16

James H. Rubin
SUNY Research Foundation, Stony Brook (Stony Brook, NY 11794-0001)

The writing of a book placing the well-known art of a popular artist in literary, cultural, historical, and philosophical context to deepen understanding and appreciation of modern art in general.

Few painters are as famous as the great French Impressionist Claude Monet. He is a staple of the museum exhibition circuit, and few masters bring higher prices. His house and gardens in France, with their placid lily ponds, are among the most visited sites in Europe. Using this popularity to attract the widest audience, the book will offer ways of thinking beyond surfaces when looking at modern art. Monet’s Water Lilies appear above all to be a call to visual experience. Their scale and aesthetic presence suspend thoughts of the outside world and its conflicts. Yet when one realizes that these works were made in a period of social and political turmoil-regime changes, the Dreyfus Affair, and WW I—questions must arise about the context—personal, cultural, and historical—in which an artist creates such sumptuous fantasies of nature. By revealing those conditions, it is possible show how Monet’s work—a harbinger of American abstraction—appeals to something deep in modern consciousness.

Associated Products

Why Monet Matters: Meanings Among the Lily Pads (Book)
Title: Why Monet Matters: Meanings Among the Lily Pads
Author: James H. Rubin
Abstract: A study of Monet's great Water Lilies cycle of paintings, placing them in the context of Monet's times, including his own development and ideas about art, as well as various contemporary currents in painted decorations, earlier art, literature, philosophy, gender, and the politics of his time. "Everything that has not before been said about the Water Lilies," building on what has already been said, and so often.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: http://www.visualities.net
Primary URL Description: my web site
Access Model: purchase from Penn State Press
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: forthcoming
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Monet's Water Lilies: Seeing with the Body (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Monet's Water Lilies: Seeing with the Body
Abstract: Three versions of the same lecture in 2017 and 2018. How Monet's paintings were conceived to immerse the entire body in the sensuous experience of the world via the generous and physical application and substances of pigment.
Author: James H. Rubin
Date: 1/15/2017
Location: Basel, Switzerland; Postdam, Germany; Tulane University, New Orleans

Monet (World of Art) (Book)
Title: Monet (World of Art)
Author: James H. Rubin
Abstract: A monograph on the famous Impressionist painter, Claude Monet, suitable for both a general audience, students, and scholars, containing a lively and original account of the artist's ground-breaking practice from his early caricatures to his late paintings of water lilies and his famous gardens at his home in Giverny, France.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://www.visualities.net
Primary URL Description: Realism and Impressionism James Henry Rubin, author's web site with C.V.
Access Model: Purchase only--most museum bookstores, or order from publisher on line.
Publisher: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., London
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780500204474
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---