Description
Book SynopsisThis revolutionary interdisciplinary study argues that Monet's artistic practices and choices were the direct result of his political stance as a nineteenth-century
libre penseur, a position characterized by radical republicanism, a progressive social agenda, and fierce anticlericalism. His efforts to create a style reflecting his personal political code led him to produce paintings proclaimed by like-minded free thinkers as a science being constantly perfected (Gustave Geffroy), that is, emphasizing only observable phenomena in the immediate present through scrupulous, insistent on-site observation, capturing the raw data of sensations and sensory experience, and purporting to record a world free of embedded meaning. Darwin's world similarly comes with no prepackaged reassurance of humankind's privileged place in it; it is instead a space in which all varieties of organisms and species compete for limited resources in a struggle for survival. The Darwinian model of nature appea
Trade Review«Claude Monet was a free thinker and a secularist. Did such commitments matter to his painting? This is the question that Michael J. Call addresses through a close reading of the artist’s oeuvre. The result is a beautiful evocation, oftentimes lyrical, of Monet’s understanding of humankind’s place in time and nature.»
(Philip Nord, Princeton University)
Table of ContentsContents: The Triumph of Secularism – Republicanism and Science – Claude Monet, Free Thinker – A Scientific Style and Its Interpreters – The Demise of Anthropocentrism – Time and Mortality – The Search for Harmony – The Painted Garden.
