Seine River Cruise Travel Journal—Day 3

Monet's The Water Lily Pond
Monet’s The Water Lily Pond

What is Truth?

It is the question Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, and it is the question prompted by our visit this morning to Claude Monet’s home in Giverny, France.

We toured Monet’s home, his flower garden, and his famous water garden. Monet’s paintings of his water garden are famous.

Monet’s impressionism style is noted not for delineating the subject of his painting but for his use of brush strokes to create in the observer’s eye an experience of variations of light. In Monet’s Impressionism, the realism of the scene portrayed in the painting was subordinated to the subjective impression of the observer of the painting.

Impressionism was a movement away from classical realism and toward abstract art. Impressionism was followed by the progressively more abstract Post-Impressionism of Van GoghFauvism of Matisse, and  Cubism of Picasso, ultimately ending with the truly abstract art of Jackson Pollock, who would literally sling paint randomly onto the canvas. In the end, the object of the painting was lost and the observer’s subjective experience of the painting became everything. Continue reading “Seine River Cruise Travel Journal—Day 3”