Monet's Minutes: Impressionism and the Industrialization of Time

A stunning exploration of the vital links between Claude Monets Impressionism and the time technologies that helped define modernity in the nineteenth century   Monets Minutes is a revelatory account charting the relationship between the works of Claude Monet (18401926)founder of French Impressionism and one of the worlds best-known paintersand the modern experience of time. André Dombrowski illuminates Monets celebration of instantaneity in the context of the late nineteenth-century time technologies that underwrote it.   Monets version of Impressionism demonstrated an acute awareness of the particularly modern pressures of time, but until now scholars have not examined the histories and technologies of time and timekeeping that informed Impressionisms major stylistic shifts. Arguing that the fascination with instantaneity rejected the dulling cultures of newly routinized and standardized time, Monets Minutes traces the evolution of Monets art to what were then seismic shifts in the shape of time itself.   In each chapter, Dombrowski focuses on the connections between a set of Monets works and a specific technology or experience of time, while providing the voices of period critics responding to Impressionism. Grounded in exceptional research and analyses, this book offers new interpretations of key paintings by Monet and a fresh perspective on late nineteenth-century art, society, and modern temporality.