Denver Art Museum sole U.S. stop for massive Monet exhibit
The Denver Art Museum will be the only U.S. museum to show the most comprehensive survey of Claude Monet paintings in two decades when it opens “Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature” next year, officials announced Monday.
The exhibit will fill three galleries and more than 20,000 square feet of space with 100-plus paintings spanning the legendary French Impressionist’s career, with an emphasis on “the artist’s enduring relationship with nature and his response to the varied and distinct places in which he worked,” according to denverartmuseum.org.
That includes Monet’s increasing isolation from people and immersion in nature, which typified the latter days of his career.
Group tickets and event reservations will go on sale Dec. 17. Single ticket prices and on-sale dates for the exhibit, which is not included in museum general admission, will be available at a later date.
The museum, which is already setting the tone for the exhibit by floating the #MonetatDAM hashtag, will run Oct. 20, 2019, through Feb. 2, 2020, and include such well-known themes (and subjects) as haystacks, poplars, Waterloo Bridge and, of course, water lilies.
“The presentation … will explore Monet’s continuous interest in capturing the quickly changing atmospheres, the reflective qualities of water and the effects of light, aspects that increasingly led him to work on multiple canvases at once,” according to denverart museum.org, as well as “the critical shift in Monet’s painting” when he began to focus on the aforementioned series.
Individual paintings shared on the DAM’s website include “Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge” (1899), “Boulevard des Capucines” (1873-1874), “The Parc Monceau” (1878), “Path in the Wheat Fields at Pourville (Chemin dans les blés à Pourville)” (1882) and “The Canoe on the Epte” (1890).
“Monet’s constant quest for new motifs shows the artist’s appreciation for nature’s everchanging and mutable character,” said Angelica Daneo, curator of European painting and sculpture at the DAM, in a press statement. “Not only from place to place, but from moment to moment, a concept that increasingly became the focus of his art.”
Denver Art Museum and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, organized the exhibit with curation by the DAM’s Daneo, Christoph Heinrich and Alexander Penn, and Museum Barberini’s director Ortrud Westheider. Paintings in the exhibit hail from such lenders as the Musée d’Orsay and Musée Marmottan Monet (both in Paris); Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The exhibition will also include six Monet paintings from the DAM collection, four of which were part of the Frederic C. Hamilton Collection bequest in 2014, according to a press statement.
A catalog to be published by Prestel Publishing will feature essays by art scholars including Marianne Mathieu, James Rubin, George T.M. Shackelford, and Richard Thomson, among others. It will be for sale in The Shop at the Denver Art Museum and online.
After Denver, the exhibition travels to the Museum Barberini in the spring of 2020.