@article{clark_2023, title={Why Monet Matters: MeaningAmongst the Lily Pads}, volume={22}, ISSN={["1543-1002"]}, DOI={10.29411/ncaw.2023.22.1.7}, abstractNote={On May 17, 1927, the Musée de l'Orangerie, its walls lined with expansive panels of the Water Lilies , opened to the public.Intended as a memorial to those who had fought and died in the First World War, Claude Monet's flatly painted murals blurred the boundaries of water and sky.[1]Surely, numbered amongst those viewing the paintings of the recently deceased impressionist's limpid pond of Giverny in the opening days and weeks of the Orangerie were the professionally trained eyes of art historians, curators, and art writers.Likely standing side-by-side with them were individuals who had seen action on the battlefields of the First World War.What did the presumably untrained eyes of these men and women, to whom Monet had dedicated his murals, see?What did they think, their minds perhaps ricocheting between the paintings, the elegiac words spoken at the Orangerie's opening by Monet's comrade Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and their memories of wartime trauma such as the sights of bloodied bodies, the sounds of canon blasts and the dying, and the smells of smoke and putrid flesh?More poignantly, what could these men and women see, as some of them had had their eyesight dimmed, scarred, or even obliterated by the chemical weapons choking the trenches of the First World War?What could the former poilus (infantrymen) with their eye sockets now emptied, covered in patches, or protected by tinted spectacles, intuit, surrounded and immersed in the panoramic Water Lilies?It would seem only right, given Monet's dedication, that the perception of military service members be recounted in the reception history of the Water Lilies.[2] That the perceptions of les poilus standing before the Water Lilies have not been more a focus of art historians speaks, I think, to whose view and whose vision still tends to count in the history of art.In contrast to tendencies within the discipline to write to those already well-versed in the language of art and art history, James H. Rubin intends, with Why Monet Matters: Meaning Among the Lily Pads, to address both twenty-first century specialists and non-specialists}, number={1}, journal={NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART WORLDWIDE}, author={Clark, Alexis}, year={2023}, pages={99-+} }