Soaking in the colour of an Impressionist master.
Immersive show breathes new life into an old master Chris Knight
There are two holy shrines for fans of Claude Monet, the French painter and one of the founders of the impressionist movement. You can visit la Musée de l’orangerie in Paris, permanent home to the artist’s eight large Water Lilies murals, as well as works by such contemporaries as Matisse, Modigliani and Renoir. Then there is the artist’s house and gardens in Giverny, a day-trip from Paris and the inspiration for many of his later works including the Water Lilies.
Of course, France is a little difficult to reach these days. But for a brief time a third site of wonder has popped up in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Beyond Monet, opening Aug. 12 and running to Oct. 3, gives visitors a chance to practically step inside the canvass. It’s the next best thing to the real thing.
The exhibit comprises two ovalshaped rooms, mirroring the floorplan of the Musée de l’orangerie. You enter the first through an archway constructed of empty picture frames, passing into a space that includes copies of the Japanese bridge in Giverny. In this quiet, airy room are what you might consider the standard gallery accountrements; panels with information about the artist, the times, the movement.
But exit from the back, and a short passage leads to a second cavernous oval, its walls made of gauzy screens, topped by additional panels that slant inward. The effect is somewhere between a sailing ship and a greenhouse, the latter image buttressed by a sturdy gazebo that sits in the centre of the room, inviting visitors to take a seat on its steps and watch the world go by.
And go by it does. The organizers have digitized and animated works by the master, including Water Lilies, Impression: Sunrise and Poppies. Boats bob in the water, waves ripple, steam billows from trains, and one work of art shimmers and melts into the next, accompanied by an ethereal score. If you walk (slowly!) while focusing on the images, the effect is almost psychedelic as the room seems to bob and spin. If one of your fellow visitors gets close to the walls — especially if they’re in pale clothing — they will seem to be swallowed up by the brushstrokes.
A recent media preview was particularly uncrowded, but timed tickets limited to 50 people per quarter hour should ensure that social distancing remains easy. The loop of moving images lasts about 30 minutes, and organizers expect visitors will spend about an hour in the exhibit.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited both the Paris museum and the gardens at Giverny, and found Beyond Monet a beautiful accompaniment and a welcome reminder of those years-ago trips. The room is sparse and simple. In addition to the gazebo, there are black cylindrical benches, and black circles on the floor, looking for all the world like something Bugs Bunny would paint and then jump into.
In addition to the shimmering artwork, the walls sometimes include quotations from the artist, projected in their original French on one side of the room, and in English translation on the other. At one point the room fills with competing remarks from early critics of Impressionism (they were not kind) and from Monet and his contemporaries.
These include beautiful words. “These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession for me,” Monet once wrote in a letter to a friend. “It is beyond my strength as an old man, and yet I want to render what I feel.”
Another lovely thought: “All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.” I had to look up the exact phrasing of that one when I got home, because as I struggled to write it in my notebook, the breeze of time pushed another swirl of impressionism onto the walls in front of me and, subsumed in the beauty of its movement, the words were gone.