Monet/Rothko

This comparison of the works of Monet and Rothko provides exhilarating new insight on these pioneers of abstraction and masters of color.

Recent research on late impressionism has highlighted the surprising correspondences between the work of impressionist paragon Claude Monet and that of abstract painters such as Mark Rothko.

This book offers an unprecedented dialogue between the paintings of Monet and Rothko, two artists who explored the frontiers of abstraction. It explores the uncanny similarities between their works, painted almost half a century apart, as well as the significance of the differences between the master artists’ styles. Monet conveyed the immediacy of his impressions of nature, while Rothko plunged the viewer into the depths of colors that he superimposed and interwove.

And yet this book—originally conceived to accompany an exhibition at the Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny and illustrated with sixty chromatically organized reproductions—reveals an undeniable relationship between their pictorial universes, challenging the viewer’s perception of abstraction and modernity. This confrontation, contextualized through the analysis of renowned critics, sheds new light on the oeuvre of two of the greatest masters of painting and offers fresh insight into the essence of what makes their works so inherently original.

Cyrille Sciama is a groundbreaking curator of the Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny in France. Pierre Wat is a French art historian and art critic. Cécile Debray is a French museum director, art historian, curator, and specialist in modern and contemporary art in painting. Géraldine Lefebure is a historian of nineteenth-century art and specialist in Claude Monet’s drawings.