Monet show sheds new light
FRANCE: A vast Claude Monet retrospective in Paris sheds new
light on the Impressionist megastar, vaunting a “difficult” artist and
using ultra-modern LEDs to illuminate his work as never before.
While the 19th-century movement that arguably cleared the way for all
modern art was about the artist’s fleeting subjectivity, the show
opening Wednesday also puts the viewer at the centre of a new
experience.
Out goes the coffee table notoriety of a popular artist defined by
water lilies and haystacks and in comes a painter troubled by his
relationship with memory and the march of industrial progress.
“Monet’s actually quite a difficult artist at times,” says one of the
show’s curators, Richard Thomson, pointing to depictions of bourgeois
social pastimes on vast canvasses previously reserved for momentous
events such as battles.
“They’re very ambitious, very tough things... so we’ve tried to show
that he was a difficult painter as well as sometimes a more reassuring
one,” says the University of Edinburgh professor.
The cobalt blues of Monet’s beloved skies and waters and the oranges
of his sunsets jump out under bluish light-emitting diodes (LEDs),
delicately blended with traditional yellow-tinted bulbs at the Grand
Palais for the first time.
“The lighting is better, it’s a little colder, using LED lamps which
awaken the intensity of the colours,” the exhibition’s designer, Hubert
Le Galle, told AFP.
Spanning over 60 years of Monet’s prolific production, the show is
being held at Paris’ Grand Palais — just over the River Seine from the
Musee d’Orsay which supplied around 50 of the 170 paintings from its
permanent collection.
Organisers also dipped into dozens of public and private collections
around the world, from Bucharest to Birmingham, to complete the picture
in what is being billed as the biggest retrospective since 1980.
But in fact it’s bigger, “by a few paintings”, Thomson said.
“But we weren’t going for size, what we wanted to do here was go for
an exhibition that’s comprehensive but also does it in a slightly
different way.”
Hence the structure, which is loosely chronological right up until
Monet’s death in 1926, but also groups paintings of similar scenes
together though they may have been painted decades apart.
In this way Monet’s works evoke questions of time and memory, in the
style of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”, much as Proust’s
novels evoke impressionism with their lengthy descriptions of such banal
splendours as the northern French seaside.
The exhibit hangs next to each other Monet’s depictions of London’s
houses of parliament he made in 1870-71, after fleeing the Prussian
invasion of France, and those he painted of the same scene 30 years
later.
“There’s this idea of going back, remembering being there with his
first wife who had since died, and the sense of nostalgia,” says
Thomson.
The result is an exhibition composed rather of many
“mini-retrospectives”: Monet as a landscape painter, as a figure painter
and as a still life painter.
The show was Guy Cogeval’s brainchild and one of the first decisions
he took after becoming director of Paris’ Musee d’Orsay in 2008.
“Cogeval wanted to reassert the Musee d’Orsay as the world’s leading
impressionist exhibition, and he thought that the best way to do that
was to have a major, major Monet exhibition,” Thomson said.
Monet’s “Impression, sunrise”, from which Impressionism gets its
name, is noticeably absent from such a comprehensive exhibition,
however, despite its hanging at the nearby Marmottan Museum.
“We discussed loans with the Marmottan but then they decided they
weren’t going to lend,” Thomson says, adding that he doesn’t know if he
will go to the rival museum’s Monet exhibition, taking place at the same
time. Grand Palais spokeswoman Florence Le Moing told AFP that guided
tours of the exhibition, which runs to January 24, 2011, have already
sold out. PARIS, AFP |