This paper explains that Claude Monet's "Water Lily"
paintings represent plein-air painting, meaning they were painted outside
the confines of the studio, which relates directly to the Impressionistic mode of thinking about art. The author points out that Claude Monet emphasized the visual
experience of the sensuously immediate, producing a new kind of art from an unacknowledged, yet most commonplace, kind of visual experience called "the glance". The paper relates that these later Monet paintings are akin to the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollack and Abstractionists like Kandinsky because, in essence, the later water lily paintings are abstract in their concentration on flow, color texture, and movement. Table of Contents Monet and Impressionism Giverney and the Water Lilies "Water Lilies" Importance Figure 1: "Water Lilies" ("The Clouds") Figure2: "Water Lilies" (1906) Figure 3: "Waterlilies, Green Reflection, Left Part" (1916-1923) Figure 4: "Water Lilies" (1907) Figure 5: Bridge at Giverney. "Le Bassin aux Nympheas"