Modern Art Masters
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"Monet is only an eye -- but what an eye!"
"Monet is only an eye -- but what an eye!" exclaimed Cézanne, praising his impressionist colleague with faint damnation.
Yet, freshly examined, Monet Poplars at Giverny is far more than an optical exercise. The public had been correct in finding Monet's forms fuzzy, vague, his colors unnatural; but wrong in assuming at first that these heresies were a denial of art, and later, in being reconciled to them by quasi-scientific explanations about light and vision. For Monet was an artist as well as an eye. Having, perhaps unintentionally, helped liberate form and color from visual facts, he was in the late 1880s moving toward an art of semi-abstraction in which the important reality would be his surface textures and shimmering color.
 Redon's inspiration
"My originality," wrote Redon, "consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible." Apparitions haunt his obscure world of dream and night. In The Day, through a barred window set in the restless darkness of a room, an ordinary tree is touched by mystery and enchantment.
Much of Redon's inspiration was literary and three series of lithographs, his most ambitious graphic work, illustrate Flaubert Symbolist drama The Temptation of St. Anthony. The disquieting image at the left is a literal accompaniment to a line of Flaubert's text.
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