Monet

Starred review from January 8, 2018
This evocative homage to one of the titans of modern art is both a collectible and a joy to read. As an aged Claude Monet endures temporary blindness after cataract surgery, he reviews his past: stubborn struggles against the fossilized art establishment, painfully impoverished and transient family life, and the devout (even obsessive) pursuit of natural light in his painting. One of Monet’s early works gave the name “Impressionism” to the innovative approach of a group of young artists who wanted to catch on canvas the immediate visual impact of experience. Efa captures some of that fresh outlook in his luminous illustration of Rubio’s intelligent biographical script, and a well-selected gallery section that follows the narrative lets readers follow Monet’s astonishing efforts to establish himself as an artist, which culminated in his creation of a perfect painterly environment in his estate at Giverny. The large-format binding allows room for the dynamic panel and color design. The quality of the loving production make this a landmark in serious comics about art.

Starred review from November 15, 2017
Monet has loudly maintained, all along, that he's the leader of the impressionists. But in 1880, six years after the first impressionist show scandalized the critics, Renoir convinces him he can't continue fighting old battles. Like Renoir and also Sisley, Cezanne, and Pissarro, Monet has to make a living, and staying with the impressionists is guaranteed poverty. Besides, most critics were starting to warm up to impressionism. Before Efa and Rubio get there, though, they dwell on Monet's early years of struggle, beginning with his 1862 arrival in Paris and extending just beyond his first wife Camille's death, in 1879. And well they should, for Monet's long road to success is a real-life artistic legend that ranks with those of Beethoven, Brahms, Van Gogh, and very few others. Framing it with Monet's double cataract-removal in 1923, Rubio and Efa insert several masterpieces in the background and let their subject's obsession with light enrich their fine work of mainstream European comics. An appendix discusses the background paintings, the originals of which appear alongside Efa's adaptations and sometimes by themselves. Because Efa injects so much of Monet into his own style and Rubio presents fact as fact and conjecture as conjecture, many may think this the best of the many recent comics biographies of artists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)