My two favorite periods in western European painting are the Italian Renaissance and the Impressionist/Post-Impressionist period. On the Impressionist/Post-Impressionist period, my favorite works are the mature works of Cezanne and Van Gogh and the great late series paintings of Monet.
I read not that long ago that someone compared Monet's series paintings to commercial mass production.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Monet's great late series paintings, for me, are more like Buddhist meditation.
The same theme, repeating over and over... Om Om Om Om... you begin to drift off into a beautiful serenity... the world before your eyes can't hurt you anymore, it is now a beautiful artwork, a pretty picture to pass before your eyes... you are now living in beautiful serenity. Nothing can hurt you.
That's what Monet's series paintings are for me. Buddhist meditation.
And a similar spiritual depth runs through the mature work of Cezanne and Van Gogh. Van Gogh's wheat fields and starry night... Paul Cezanne's landscapes... Paul Cezanne's bathers, a dreamlike Utopia... all have the same spiritual depth as Monet's later series paintings.
Paul Cezanne started it. He had reached his mature peak in the 1870's, with the mentorship of the great Pissarro, his own experiments and the stimulation of being part of the Imressionist community alongside Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and Degas. As part of the same Impressionist circle as Pissarro, Renoir, Monet and Berthe Morisot, surrounded by all these brilliant painters, having learned extensively from the father of the Impressionists, Pissarro, having experimented extensively, in the beginning of the 1870's after the Franco-Prussian war Paul Cezanne turned to landscape painting and found his highest genius. Pissarro and Monet had already reached an incredibly high level as great masters by this time, but Paul Cezanne, in my mind, in his maturity had now exceeded them all, with a style of abstract spiritual depth, dreamlike quality and vivid solid realness- like a dream that is more real than reality, not less, and with the meditative spiritual depth that Monet would later achieve with his great late serieses, and the mystic spiritual rapture that would be later found in Vincent van Gogh, only more serene and static in Cezanne.
Later, in the 1880's, Monet would begin his great serieses and his great late period (having known Cezanne's work all that time, of course), and Vincent van Gogh would reach maturity as an artist after coming to Paris and seeing the works of Cezanne and the Impressionists, as well as learning from Pissarro as Cezanne once had.
This is, for me, the finest in western painting since the time of Titian and the high Renaissance, perhaps along with the greatest paintings of Reubens, and one of the highest levels ever achieved in art or in any endeavor by the human species, right up with classic Islamic abstract art, Indian and Chinese philosophy, the Ramayana and the finest Chinese landscape painting (among many wonderful things!)
God loves you! And you can see the spirit of God as Buddhist meditative spirituality in these great works of art!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson
P.S. In my opinion, after Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh, Berthe Morisot was as great as any of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, even great masters like Degas, Pissarro and Renoir (who are all among my favorite painters as well!) and Monet's great earlier paintings. Mary Cassatt was perhaps just as great as well. Let's hear some praise for the great women impressionists who represented the unique point of view of a woman in late-19th Century society, such as Berthe Morisot's wonderful painting of a young mother and her baby that focuses on the mother rather than the baby, showing a young mother's view of the world. Great masters right alongside Renoir and Degas!