MONET, THE DIFFICULTY OF THE FAMILIAR

The lilies are the easiest part to see. In Claude Monet’s Nymphéas bleus (1916–19), now at the Musée d’Orsay, pale flowers punctuate a field of blue and green. Around them, dark trails of reflected foliage descend across the water. The flowers locate its surface; the reflections open another space within it. There is no bank on which to stand, no horizon against which to judge distance. Monet has painted a place he knew intimately, while leaving the viewer uncertain of how to inhabit it.

A century after his death in 1926, Monet’s paintings are among the most recognizable images in modern art. The very familiarity of the water lilies, the Japanese bridge, the changing light can make it easy to overlook the labor required to see them afresh. Returning repeatedly to these easily accessible motifs exposed unexpected complexities: painting became not simply a means of recording, but a way of discovering what sustained observation might reveal. In the railway station, the stacks of wheat beside his house, and eventually his own garden, Monet found that knowing a place failed to settle what could be seen there.

At the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1877, these complications arose amid the machinery of everyday life. Monet painted 12 views of the station, a terminus he knew from his journeys between Paris, Normandy, and the suburbs. In the National Gallery’s The Gare St-Lazare, the roof’s dark framework encloses pale clouds of steam. Trains and passengers emerge through the vapor with different degrees of definition. The station makes a landscape of its own emissions: the machines help produce the atmosphere through which they become visible. An environment of timetables and scheduled departures is rendered through effects that could scarcely hold their shape — the atmosphere obscuring an otherwise orderly world.

Near Giverny in 1890–91, the stacks of wheat offered a subject that, unlike the trains at Saint-Lazare, remained firmly in place. Built to protect the harvested grain before threshing, they were substantial products of agricultural work that stood in a field adjoining Monet’s property. He painted them through the changes of the seasons and in various types of weather, observing how their recurring forms registered differences in illumination. Across the series, a stack’s bulk could gather weight, soften, or become inseparable from the color of the air surrounding it. Recognition of the object became only the first step of looking.

The work was slow. Writing to the critic Gustave Geffroy on October 7, 1890, Monet complained that sunset overtook him and that his dwindling pace was driving him to despair. What he wanted to render was “instantaneity,” above all the enveloppe, the light shared by everything in the scene. He worked on the canvases outdoors and in his studio, revising them over multiple sessions. Technical examinations by the Art Institute of Chicago reveal changes to the stacks’ dimensions and positions, evidence of the sustained reconstruction behind an apparently fleeting effect. Fidelity to an encounter required the freedom to recompose it.

When 15 of the stack paintings were exhibited together at Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery in 1891, repetition also became a condition of viewing. As gallerygoers carried an impression from one picture to the next, each canvas made the others feel less conclusive. Here were several persuasive accounts of a familiar object, none capable of exhausting it. Comparison extended the painter’s repeated encounters into the spectator’s own experience.

At his home in Giverny, Monet went further, constructing the very conditions to which he would return for the next three decades. In 1893, he acquired land across the road and railway from his house and began creating his water garden. He obtained permission to feed the pond from a branch of the Epte and planted colored water lilies ordered from the Latour-Marliac nursery. What became a daily subject depended on considerable planning, property, horticultural expertise, and the work of gardeners. The apparent simplicity of a pond concealed an elaborate undertaking, designed and maintained to provide Monet with an endlessly evolving subject.

There, Monet could direct the planting, expand the basin, and alter the available views, but the resulting reflections remained subject to wind, weather, and growth. Water brought different distances into a single field of vision. Leaves rested on its surface while trees entered it as inverted images. In Nymphéas bleus, these relationships remain legible even as the brushstrokes unsettle them. The eye moves between recognizing a place and following the gestures through which it has been painted.

That intimacy of observation eventually acquired an architectural scale. For the great panels of his final years, Monet began building a large studio in 1915. There, as his eyesight deteriorated from cataracts, he worked across several canvases, returning to them over years despite increasing difficulties with his vision and color perception. The eight compositions installed in the Orangerie in 1927, after his death, extended the pond around the spectator in two oval rooms. Looking required bodily adjustments: turning, approaching, withdrawing, letting one area pass beyond vision while another came into view. A subject close at hand had become an environment through which visitors moved.

This transformation would prove consequential for a generation of artists whose paintings contained no recognizable garden. After a period of prolonged indifference to Monet’s Orangerie installation, the rise of Abstract Expressionism encouraged a reassessment of his late work. In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art in New York became the first U.S. institution to acquire a monumental Water Lilies panel. For artists increasingly concerned with color, gesture, and scale, Monet offered a precedent for painting that could unsettle familiar ways of seeing, organizing an experience without relying on clearly bounded objects. His influence traveled through individual artists, exhibitions, and the arguments of critics discovering new uses for an older art.

For Mark Rothko, the connection concerns the capacity of color to establish an encompassing space. His suspended, softly edged fields engage the viewer at close range, making distance and duration part of their effect. Rothko visited the Orangerie in 1966, when his mature language was already established and his chapel project in Houston was underway. The chapel, opened in 1971, likewise makes painting an environment entered by the spectator. The kinship between Monet’s work and his own lies in the relationship between the painted surface and the person before it: color becomes an atmosphere one occupies, extending beyond the description of any particular place.

Monet’s legacy was also evident in the critical language surrounding Philip Guston’s abstractions, which were associated with “Abstract Impressionism,” although the art historian William Seitz disputed the claim that they derived from Monet. In Painting (1954), now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, short, thick touches of paint gather into a loose pink and red formation against a pale ground, suggesting a form on the verge of dispersal. The comparison reveals how the luminous instability of Monet’s landscapes offered a way of understanding painting increasingly detached from recognizable subjects.

With Cy Twombly, the influence is more explicit. Kirk Varnedoe connected Twombly’s green paintings for the 1988 Venice Biennale to the water imagery of late Monet. Now in the Menil Collection, Untitled (A Painting in Nine Parts) evokes light and reflections through green acrylic. Twombly worked with his fingertips and hands, completing the nine parts in less than 48 hours. He translated Monet’s exploration of atmosphere into a radically different pace and physical method. What endured was the possibility of making atmosphere palpable across an ensemble, allowing the viewer to experience color and movement before identifying an object. A garden pond had helped open painting toward sensations that could survive the disappearance of its flowers.

That history gives particular force to what Monet offers in an image-saturated present. Recording ordinary life has become almost as routine as living it. Images preserve where we were and what happened, making experience available for storage and circulation. Monet’s series suggests another demand that repetition can place upon an image: to reveal the inadequacy of what we thought the previous one had settled. The same subject, encountered again, can expose how quickly recognition is substituted for attention.

His paintings continue to make that demand. In Nymphéas bleus, slender glimpses of unpainted canvas at the edges interrupt the scene, and the pond gives way to the fabric on which he painted it. Looking closely brings the making back into view. The flowers we identified so readily remain suspended among marks that keep changing their relationships as our attention moves. A hundred years on, Monet leaves the world available for another encounter, with less certainty that we have already seen it.