CLAUDE MONET

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a French painter who is considered to be the founder of Impressionism, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy. This art movement encouraged expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to painting outside (en plein air), which was quite innovative at the time, and a radical departure from the widely accepted practice of painting inside in their studios. In that sense, Monet could also be seen as one of the precursors to urban art, except that most of his urban landscapes were about nature. Just like Banksy, Claude Monet  was quite a revolutionary character in his own time.

Monet’s beautiful paintings of Giverny are today considered a benchmark of established taste and crown jewels from a historical art perspective. Yet, at the time Monet was building his reputation during the 1860s and into the 1870s, he was considered a radical. By recording everything he saw and conspicuously refusing to omit ‘ugly’ scenic disturbances in his painting, his works sought to reflect the changing landscape of Modern France as the Industrial Revolution made its impact on the traditional landscape genre. This was controversial and seen as an affront to contemporary taste, a departure from the past, and this revolutionary perspective is amplified through Banksy’s reworking more than a century later. Echoing the way in which Monet translated the French landscape, complete with evidence of the encroaching Industrial Revolution, Show me the Monet presents a dialogue on the impact of the corporate world on our environment and the sacrifices made at the expense of so-called ‘human progress’.

Show Me The Monet

Show me the Monet is among the most iconic paintings of Banksy’s provocative oeuvre. It is an extremely rare, entirely hand-painted canvas that helped secure Banksy’s position as one of the most controversial and decisive social commentators of our time. Banksy repurposes a famous image in western art history: Claude Monet’s career-defining view of the Japanese footbridge in his water garden at Giverny. 

With its tongue-in-cheek pun of a title, Banksy’s painstakingly observed re-painting delivers a complex dialogue about some of the most prescient issues of our time, such as the environment and the capitalist landscape of this contemporary moment, not to mention the art establishment and its ongoing identity crisis. With a sumptuously rendered orange traffic cone and a thickly textured shopping trolley disrupting the romance of Monet’s Impressionist masterpiece, Banksy’s version becomes a twenty-first-century tipping point instead of a timelessly idyllic scene. Delivered with the ironic dead-pan immediacy of a punchline, the underlying conceptual complexity at stake here belies its humor.

As a work of art, Monet’s waterlilies are near the apex of artistic achievement. In choosing to appropriate and rework these works, Banksy challenges modern civilization in a single image. His ironic manipulation includes half-submerged shopping trolleys and a traffic cone that present an affront to an icon of art history while also building on Monet’s radical legacy as a painter of Modernity. Banksy uses Monet's work to explicitly pass commentary on our time, an age of hyper-capitalism and waste. Using a heavy dose of irony and humor, Banksy’s work harbors a greater social agenda.

The Birth of Impressionism

The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of Monet's painting Impression, Soleil Levant (translated as Impressions, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by a group of artists as an alternative to what was called the Salon de Paris, one of the precursors of the large art fairs familiar today.

In the early 1880s, Monet lived in Giverny, France, where he purchased a property and began a vast landscaping project which included the lily ponds that would eventually become the subjects of some of his best-known works. He began painting the water lilies, also called Nympheas in 1899, first in vertical views with a Japanese Bridge as a central feature, and later in a series of large-scale paintings that would occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life. Claude Monet painted no less than 250 Nympheas of all sizes. Some have sold for record prices at public auction and are now in museums all over the world.

Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many different times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons. As such, Monet can also be credited as the source of Andy Warhol's numerous series of repetitive subjects.