SPOTLIGHT: Arts, Poetry and More

This lecture focuses on Claude Monet, the pioneer and leader of French Impressionism (the 1860s-1900), a painting style that emphasized changing atmospheric effects with luminous color harmonies. We will discover how the Impressionists’ efforts to capture nature’s transient effects were grounded in scientific theories of light and color. Monet also typifies how the Impressionists broke with traditional artistic techniques to capture the experience of modernity–at once fleeting and ephemeral, in contrast with stultifying subjects and slick finish of academic art.