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.
