By Seo Dong-shin
Staff Reporter
For centuries, Western painters used to focus on bringing the real world onto canvas as exact as they could. Their own view of the world seldom mattered, not to mention the capricious nature of the ever-changing light.
That was until Claude Monet (1840-1926) and the advent of Impressionism, an important breakthrough in the history of art that signaled the birth of modern art in the late 19th century. Its beginning and development are largely credited to the prolific French painter, whose famous 1872/1873 work ``Impression, Sunrise'' rendered the seminal movement its name.
Breaking away from the conventions, impressionism led painters from drawing ``what there is'' to ``what they see there is,'' thus bringing much more boldness and soul onto the canvas.
Light is color and color is light for Impressionists. By capturing the moments influenced by momentary light, impressionists brought the concept of time into the paintings _ a terrain defined only by the concept of space before. For this purpose, many of them chose to paint in the open air, observing the changing light of nature, rather than in indoor studios.
Monet especially explored this nature of light through his series of works on the cathedral of Rouen and haystacks. No other painter conducted the task of catching the changes light bestowed on an object as thoroughly as Monet, who thus created eternity out of the fleeting impressions of instant moments.
The ``Water Lilies'' series, meanwhile, were painted over three decades after Monet moved to a house in Giverny, a village west of Paris, in 1883. Spending the rest of his life there, Monet revamped the garden and worked a pond there. He focused on painting dreamy still life landscapes, including those of water lilies on the pond. Out of about 2,000 paintings Monet left behind, some 350 are believed to have been painted during his Giverny days, and 200 of them are about water lilies.
As cataracts started to affect Monet's vision in the 1910s, his reddish paintings of later years increasingly bordered on the abstract. They came to influence other seminal art movements of the 20th century, including the abstract expressionism best represented by American painters Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, and Dutch Willem de Kooning.