2015/07/03 by Nina Athanassoglou‐Kallmyer · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Aesthetics #Art #Art history #Art, Politics, and Modernism #Computer science #Ephemeral key #Epistemology #Friendship #Impulse (physics) #Literature #Naturalism #Painting #Period (music) #Philosophy #Sociology #Visual Culture and Art Theory #Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation
paper · doi:10.1080/00043079.2015.1023158
openalex publication_date 2015/07/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Claude Monet's thirty-eight paintings of Belle-Île's western coast (1886) were hailed by critics as signaling a groundbreaking shift whose serial conception, abstracted aesthetic, and “savage” tenor transcended Impressionist naturalism, announcing a new, antimodernist, and primitivizing manner. The period's evolving pantheistic and proto-phenomenological ontologies awash in notions of “wholeness” and “universality,” and the painter's friendship, initiated on Belle-Île, with the critic Gustave Geffroy, who shared such views, provide a context for understanding Monet's transformation, from the late 1880s on, from reportorial transcriber of ephemeral reality to dedicated seeker of its underlying essence, its perennial truth.