WELCOME WATER LILIES
Monet’s masterpieces at the VAG
Claude Monet loved tulips and rhododendrons.
To create his perfect painting environment, he designed a garden filled with them as well as beds of zinnias and asters. He planted irises and bamboo, filled a pool with water lilies and framed it with weeping willows. He added a Japanese bridge covered in wisteria so he could look from a height onto his garden at Giverny, 64 kilometres northwest of Paris on the Seine River.
Monet planned his famous garden so it would produce colour from spring to autumn like a living “painter’s palette.” He was able to move around the pool with his easel to paint water lilies at any time of day under any conditions.
Although beautiful, Monet’s famous water lily paintings could leave viewers a little disoriented. They lacked a traditional horizon line and mixed translucence with reflection, making it difficult to separate the sky above from the water below.
Monet’s water lily paintings were also significant because they left the Impressionism of the 19th century behind and pointed the way to the emergence of abstraction in the 20th century.
In one of its summer exhibitions, the Vancouver Art Gallery has brought a group of Monet’s Giverny paintings to Vancouver. Of 38 paintings in the exhibition, 21 were painted by Monet when he lived at Giverny from 1903 until his death in 1926. The exhibition includes several big water lily paintings as well as what is believed to be the artist’s last painting.
An exhibition like Claude Monet’s Secret Garden doesn’t happen overnight. Ian Thom, a senior curator at the gallery, first approached the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris about doing a show about Monet’s work five years ago.
He went to the Marmottan for a reason: With 94 paintings, drawings and other works, it has the largest collection of Monets in the world.
But getting the exhibition to Vancouver wasn’t a straightforward process. He said there was a lot of back and forth with the Marmottan, which is not a big, public museum run by the state like many others in France. Rather, it’s a small, privately owned gallery undergoing extensive renovations. Thom said that’s not the reason this major exhibition is coming to Vancouver. The Marmottan, he knew, likes to organize an exhibition for a particular place.
Initially, the Marmottan wanted to include a bunch of caricatures by Monet when he was 18 years old. Thom said while they might be historically interesting, they didn’t fit in with an exhibition that looked at the importance of Monet’s garden at Giverny.
“Although the exhibition was to be focused mostly on paintings at Giverny, we wanted a group of paintings that would lead up to that,” he said.
“In Monet’s lifetime Monet’s garden was famous, but it wasn’t public.”
The exhibition includes paintings from the early 1870s to show how Monet’s work developed over time. As an artist, he recorded new developments in contemporary life, which included construction of railways and movement of trains that opened up the French countryside.
One of Monet’s most radical innovations was to make landscape paintings with no sky, Thom said.
“The fact that he was prepared to paint a picture without any conventional point of reference for the viewer is also important in terms of how you look at them,” Thom said.
The exhibition doesn’t include any of Monet’s famous paintings of haystacks or of Rouen Cathedral. Not surprisingly, the VAG didn’t get Monet’s Impression Sunrise, the painting that spawned the art movement known as Impressionism. It’s still at the Marmottan.
“I begged and begged and begged, but didn’t get it,” Thom said.
One of the dramatic juxtaposition of works in the exhibition is two paintings of Charing Cross in London, Monet’s favourite European city. One from 1901 and another from 1902 hardly look like they’re paintings of the same place.
“The treatment of the light is so dramatically different,” Thom said.
Thom said the works show how obsessed Monet was with the quality of light at Giverny.
“In some cases, he would have six to eight paintings on the go at once,” Thom said.
“As the light changed, he would move from painting to painting.”
In a separate exhibition on the same floor as Monet’s paintings is another related exhibition. Stephen Shore: The Giverny Portfolio is comprised of 25 photographs by the U.S. artist. They were commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to record the revival of Monet’s gardens during extensive restorations. Shore visited the site during a five-year period ending in 1982 to document the changes at different times during the day and in different seasons.
Claude Monet’s Secret Garden and Stephen Shore: The Giverny Portfolio both open today and continue to Oct. 1 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.