How to Paint Water Lilies Like Monet in 14 Minutes “Monet, rejected by critics in the 19th century for being too radical, was now being criticized in the 20th century for not being radical enough.” It would take a later generation of artists - including American painters like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock - to see his last works as “a logical jumping-off point for abstraction,” and the space that houses them as “the Sistine Chapel of impressionism.” World War I has passed out of living memory, but “the world’s first art installation” it inspired Monet to create has lost none of its power. When these Water Lilies were revealed to the public, mounted in their own specially designed gallery in Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie (arranged by close personal friend Georges Clemenceau), Monet was dead - which may, in part, explain the critics’ willingness to deride them as the work of an artist who had lost his powers. (“He could hear the sound of gunfire from 50 kilometers away from his house in Giverny as he painted,” notes Payne.) Time and space was forgotten, as soldiers were enveloped in a sea of mud, surrounded by waterlogged and surreal landscapes, which covered their field of vision.” The Great War, as it was then known, still raged on when the septuagenarian Monet began these works. Those battlefields “had no beginning or end, and no horizons. Monet declined to include a horizon line in any of them, leaving viewers in “a vast field of unfathomable nothingness, of light, air, and water,” at once peaceful and reminiscent of “the battle-ravaged landscape along the western front.” These eight large-scale canvasses constitute “a war memorial to the millions of lives tragically lost in the First World War,” argues Great Art Explained creator James Payne. And yet, once viewed that way, his final Water Lilies paintings - belonging to a series that, in reproduction, speaks to many of no more harrowing a setting than a doctor’s waiting room - can hardly be viewed in any other. When one considers which artists most powerfully evoke the horrors of trench warfare, Claude Monet is hardly the first name to come to mind.
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