The Story of Claude Monet’s Water-Lily Masterworks
Claude Monet, the celebrated Impressionist, gave us the defining view of French leisure and remains a perpetually bankable subject of museum blockbusters. “Les Nymphéas,” as his water lilies paintings were officially titled, are among art history’s greatest last acts. Compared with Monet’s earlier paintings, with their direct transcriptions of the countryside, the water lilies dispense with contours and boundaries and veer toward abstraction. They mark the advent of “all-over painting,” a phrase that was coined in New York in the 1950s, when Monet was abruptly rediscovered.