William C. Seitz and the Experience of Impressionism

Abstract

With Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments (1960), art historian William C. Seitz presented a new curatorial vision of Claude Monet’s late impressionist paintings. The exhibition, mounted at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, included walls dedicated to the impressionist’s series and thematic paintings, including the Water Lilies. Seasons and Moments accomplished more than stoking the US public’s admiration for these works. Seitz used the exhibition to argue that Monet’s impressionism shifted from representing an optical reality to portraying a more abstracted and metaphysical one. Seitz analyzed Monet’s paintings through fin-de-siècle French thinker Henri Bergson’s conceptions of intuition, sensation, and duration.