As a young artist Monet chose fairly traditional subjects, forests and beaches. In the Normandy of his childhood where Boudin and then Jongkind had introduced him to plein air techniques, he painted seascapes and “snow effects”. Then in Paris and its suburbs, with special emphasis on Argenteuil, in the 1870s, his luminous colourful landscapes of the banks of the Seine reflect the flowering of Impressionnism.
In the 1880s, sites in the north and west of France as well as time spent in Normandy and on the Mediterranean coast, at Belle Ile (1886) or in the Creuse (1889) gave him a wide range of motifs. He gradually constructed his approach to nature. His studies of light and atmosphere took a growing place in the development of his personality as a painter.
Although Monet is undeniably a lanscapist, he often painted figures and still lifes. With Le déjeuner sur l'herbe or Femmes au jardin, he tackled the challenge of painting outdoors. These paintings have almost never left the Musee d’Orsay. For the first time they will be put alongside indoor and outdoor scenes from the same period, on loan from foreign collections, to make a unique ensemble.
Later, his figures or portraits were treated in a more evocative, decorative way. The characters blend into a world of efflorescence or vibrant colour, an ‘envelope’ which makes them rather unreal. The same change can be seen in his still lifes. Powerful celebrations of a world full of vitality, the still lifes from the late 1890s translate a more meditative approach in which objects disintegrate in a swirl of colour and light.
In 1890, when he was already fifty, Monet established a garden on his property at Giverny, and took inspiration from the surrounding countryside, no longer so readily going to paint in other parts of France and abroad. He worked in a systematic way on paintings of the same motif, designed ass series recording changes in light as the hours and seasons wore on.
Although notions of regularity and repetition are threaded throughout Monet’s career and show through forcefully in his painting, the exhibition takes another angle, showing how he thought along other lines: on several occasions he went back in time, calling on memory, dream and nostalgia.
The Grandes Décorations de Nymphéas cycle crowned Monet as a decorator. It was the culmination of research he had begun earlier in his career. He also painted decors for people he knew, such as the collector Ernest Hoschedé or his art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. From the 1890s, at a time when the decorative quality of paintings seemed to promise something new, Monet invented a personal style, reconciling a deep love of nature and the idea of a self-contained poetic world. So with Monet “the dream comes true” as his friend, the writer Octave Mirbeau aptly remarked.
Gathering nearly two hundred works, this retrospective will surprise, challenge and delight visitors with famous works and less well-known paintings but also with unaccustomed comparisons and new groupings of works seldom seen before. The exhibition also seeks to take a fresh look
at a great artist who made the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
