Two Haystacks/ Claude Monet

The haystacks were neutral receptacles for light. But that was their point, for Monet wanted to show fifteen of the infinite varieties of light effect that could be drawn from a motif at different times of day, in different weathers. Each haystack was meant to be seen as a sample of something both commonplace and endless, that could blot up all the inspection and discrimaination a human eye can bring. "Eternity in a grain of sand/ and Heaven in a flower."

Camille in a Green Dress/ Claude Monet.

Camille or The Woman in a Green Dress(1866)

This was one of the paintings by Monet that brought him to fame. The choice of a rear viewpoint, a standard device of the small scale colored fashion print flouted portrait conventions. This, together with Monet's handling, with its abrupt transitions from dark to light and the most schematic treatment of the face, made nonsense of any traditional understanding of portraiture.

Water Lilies/ Claude Monet

'Waterlilies' is the most popular series of Monet's paintings. Here the artist is not only using brush strokes in an Impressionist techniques; he also makes it rich in contemplative mood. The paintings can hence be said to be a long introspection of a drowned, reflected world, in which no sky is visible except by reflection; the water lilies fill the whole frame.

Monet's 'Water Lilies' are close to the ideas of his contemporary, the poet Stephane Mallarme, on poetry. In these paintings, emptiness matters as much as fullness, and reflections have the weight of things. Mallarme conceived of poetry as being structure of words 'and' absences:

"The intellectual armature of the poem conceals itself, is present - and acts - in the blank space which separates the stanzas and in the white of the paper: a pregnant silence, no less wonderful to compose than the verse itself." Mallarme further continues-

"To conjure up the negated object, with the help of alllusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence, involves an understanding which comes close to the act of creation."

Mallarme's "negated object", the symbolist sense of reality lurking behind its semantic veils is also the world as glimpsed in Monet's lily pond.

Women in the Garden

'Women in the Garden' by Claude Monet.

The Impressionist painter, Claude Monet evolved a method of depicting form by accumulating a mass of brush-strokes which are reconstructed and completed by the spectator to produce the effect he is suggesting. This again was a vital new element in art: the realisation that the viewer has to participate, that he has to build his understanding of a painting, just as he 'reads' a landscape. This attitude was essential to the future of art. It was only because Monet destroyed the old, limited, arbitrary concept of immutable form that the painters of the 20th century were able to build new visual structures.