Claude Monet: Impressionism's leading light.

• Author: Stuckey, Charles F.

CLAUDE MONET was the leader of one of the most sweeping revolutions in the history of art--Impressionism. Along with Edouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, he made art address the previously unacknowledged, yet most commonplace, kind of visual experience--the glance. As it defines these artists' primary goal, the term "impression" signified the sensory information registered on the retina prior to thought of any sort. (The eye, for example, sees tiny black spots before it recognizes them as faraway pedestrians.

"When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever," Monet explained. "Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own naive impression of the scene before you." He later claimed that he wished he might share the experience of a blind person suddenly granted the power of sight.

For Monet and his colleagues, the basic truths of visual experience best could be recognized in the glance, even though its brief and fragmentary character was at odds with the accepted idea that great art should address eternal truths. However, representing the subject of this glance posed an impossible challenge for these artists. forced to recognize the discrepancy between the instantaneous moment required for perception and the longer time necessary to record manually its contents in pictorial terms.

While it extended the traditional norms of Realism in art, Impressionist truth became predicated on painting with unprecedented speed, using skipping, flickering brushstrokes that themselves revealed unexpected abstract rhythms and harmonies. At first debunked as childishly unskilled, the stenographic nature of Impressionist brushwork eventually gave license to new realms of automatic and purely abstract painting.

Within a decade of the historic first group exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874, many ambitious young artists--including Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat--sought to escape what seemed to them to be thoughtlessly virtuoso "retinal painting," descriptive of external facts. but disregarding fundamental invisible realms of feelings and intuitions.

Although Monet's works made after the mid 1880s, when more controversial avantgarde art had moved away from...