Transforming the Art World

Monet's most immediate legacy was the liberation of color and brushwork from their descriptive functions. Before Impressionism, color served form; after Monet, color could exist for its own sake, creating light, atmosphere, and emotion independent of the objects it described. This liberation opened pathways that would be explored by every major movement of modern art.

The Post-Impressionists built directly on Monet's innovations while moving in new directions. Paul Cézanne, who had participated in the first Impressionist exhibition, took Monet's broken brushwork and used it to reconstruct form, leading toward Cubism. Vincent van Gogh adopted Monet's pure colors but charged them with emotional intensity. Georges Seurat systematized Monet's optical mixing into Pointillism, creating a scientific approach to color that Monet himself found too rigid.

The Fauves—Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck—pushed Monet's liberation of color to new extremes. Matisse acknowledged his debt to Monet, particularly the late works where color broke completely free from descriptive function. The explosive hues of Fauvism, which shocked audiences in 1905, were logical extensions of the color investigations Monet had begun decades earlier.