There are few themes in the history of modern art as celebrated as Claude Monet’s Nymphéas. The very mention of the Impressionist movement invariably conjures images of the lushly rendered water lilies that Monet began painting in the late 1890s and refined until the last years of his life. Executed in a kaleidoscopic palette of jewel-toned purples and luscious blues, energized by the touches of white, pink and yellow used to describe the namesake flowers, the present Nymphéas is an exceptional example of Monet’s deft ability to translate fleeting atmosphere and the protean effects of light into paint. Nymphéas stands as the forerunner of a specific series of water lilies typified by more elaborate backgrounds featuring the nuanced reflections of trees along the opposite bank of the pond. It is precisely on account of the way Monet uses the pond as a technical device to blur the boundary between the real and the reflected that the work takes on its distinctly modern inflection. In its close cropping and all-over painterly effect, the work likewise marks a radical, early foray into abstraction, one which would prove a decisive stylistic inroad for the Abstract Expressionists who, following in Monet’s footsteps, would come to transform the idiom of modern art thirty years later.
A Legacy of Beauty: The Collection of Sydell Miller Evening Auction will take place on 18 November in New York.
