ГЕОЛОШКА ИСПИТИВАЊА И МОНИСТИЧКО ЈЕДИНСТВО У СТВАРАЛАШТВУ КЛОДА МОНЕА
GEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS AND MONISTIC UNITY IN THE ARTISTIC WORK OF CLAUDE MONET

Summary/Abstract: Claude Monet’s impressionistic landscapes were his personal response to the sensations of nature. In French artistic creation, the theory of evolution deepened the desire to understand changes in nature. Studious observation of its phenomena, atheism, search for material experience, but also close friendships with members of the political left in the Third French Republic, directed the naturalness of Monet’s interest in the evolution of life in the world. In the early eighties of the 19th century, during a stay in the Norman town, Etretat, Monet created a series of seascapes that reveal not only a fascination with the beauty of rocky landscapes and the relationship between light and the subject of painting, but also an exploration of the erosive features of limestone cliffs, as indicators of geological and evolutionary history. At the end of the nineties, when Monet lived extensively in Giverny, in addition to Lamarck’s and Darwin’s theories, Haeckel’s theory of monism became popular in France. The painter incorporated it into compositions with water plants and water lilies. After the Universal Exhibition of 1889, where they were exhibited for the first time, Monet began to grow multicolored water lilies in the garden of his house in Giverny. Since then, they have become his favorite motif, with which the artist expresses the idea of infinity and Haeckel’s law of unity and the common substance that pulsates in all organisms and drives evolution. This paper will investigate the influence of evolutionism on the artistic and scientific analysis of natural phenomena in the painting of Claude Monet.

• Details
• Contents