MONET AND ARCHITECTURE. The National Gallery in London has featured The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Monet & Architecture. I had never thought of Monet in terms of architecture. Rosalind McKever in this interview states what has been my view of how Monet used buildings as a source of color: “He’s…using the colors of the buildings…. Often the inclusion of a particular building would give Monet a complementary color. For instance, in a landscape that’s very green, if you have a red roof of a building, that’s really going to light up the composition in an interesting way.”
She also points out what was basically new to me: “…Monet’s skill as a draughtsman. We’re so used to thinking about the artist in terms of color, his water lilies and his nature scenes. But in these works he’s painting very complicated structures like bridges with precise angles and lots of straight lines with incredible clarity and it feels as though he’s done all that incredibly quickly.”