
By Jurissa Ayala
In 2008, a private art collector paid $80 million for a painting by Impressionistic artist, Claude Monet. A few years earlier, $78.1 million was handed over for an original painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a peer of Monet. Pretty impressive considering Monet, Renoir and their cohorts could not sell their work for even $1 back in their upstart years.
In Paris, in the late 1870s when the Impressionism Movement began, the artists were even prohibited from displaying their work at official art exhibitions. The critics claimed the paintings were “sketch-like” and “unfinished.” One critic called one of Monet’s paintings “just an impression.” Today, those sketch-like, unfinished impressions fetch millions and millions of dollars at art auctions and are on display in some of the most famous museums in the world.
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