Media Release Monet January 22 – May 28, 2017 To mark its twentieth anniversary, the Fondation Beyeler is presenting one of the most important and best-loved artists: Claude Monet. The exhibition will be a celebration of light and color, illustrating the great French painter’s development from Impressionism to his famous paintings of water-lilies. It will feature his Mediterranean landscapes, wild Atlantic coastal scenes, different stretches of the Seine, meadows with wild flowers, haystacks, water lilies, cathedrals, and bridges shrouded in fog. In his paintings, Monet experimented with changing light and color effects in the course of a day and in different seasons. He succeeded in evoking magical moods through reflections and shadows. Claude Monet was a great pioneer, who found the key to the secret garden of modern painting, and opened everyone’s eyes to a new way of seeing the world. The exhibition will show 62 paintings from leading museums in Europe, the USA and Japan, including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston and the Tate, London. 15 paintings from various private collections that are seen extremely rarely and that have not been shown in the context of a Monet exhibition for many years will be special highlights of the show. The exhibition MONET is generously supported by: Beyeler-Stiftung Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss Foundation Novartis Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation Federal Office For Culture FOC Buy your tickets online in advance: www.fondationbeyeler.ch Press images: Please visit our new homepage www.fondationbeyeler.ch and re-register for the press images download. You can unfortunately no longer use your previous access data. Further information: Elena DelCarlo, M.A. Head of Communications Tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, [email protected], www.fondationbeyeler.ch Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen, Switzerland Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10 am - 6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm
Transcript
Media Release
Monet January 22 – May 28, 2017 To mark its twentieth anniversary, the Fondation Beyeler is presenting one of the most important and best-loved artists: Claude Monet. The exhibition will be a celebration of light and color, illustrating the great French painter’s development from Impressionism to his famous paintings of water-lilies. It will feature his Mediterranean landscapes, wild Atlantic coastal scenes, different stretches of the Seine, meadows with wild flowers, haystacks, water lilies, cathedrals, and bridges shrouded in fog. In his paintings, Monet experimented with changing light and color effects in the course of a day and in different seasons. He succeeded in evoking magical moods through reflections and shadows. Claude Monet was a great pioneer, who found the key to the secret garden of modern painting, and opened everyone’s eyes to a new way of seeing the world. The exhibition will show 62 paintings from leading museums in Europe, the USA and Japan, including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston and the Tate, London. 15 paintings from various private collections that are seen extremely rarely and that have not been shown in the context of a Monet exhibition for many years will be special highlights of the show. The exhibition MONET is generously supported by: Beyeler-Stiftung Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss Foundation Novartis Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation Federal Office For Culture FOC Buy your tickets online in advance: www.fondationbeyeler.ch Press images: Please visit our new homepage www.fondationbeyeler.ch and re-register for the press images download. You can unfortunately no longer use your previous access data. Further information: Elena DelCarlo, M.A. Head of Communications Tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, [email protected], www.fondationbeyeler.ch Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen, Switzerland Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10 am - 6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm
Media Release
Monet January 22 – May 28, 2017 In the year of its 20th birthday, the Fondation Beyeler is devoting an exhibition to Claude Monet, one of the most important artists in its collection. Selected aspects of Monet’s oeuvre will be presented in a distilled overview. By concentrating on his work between 1880 and the beginning of the 20th century, with a forward gaze to his late paintings, the show will reveal a fresh and sometimes unexpected facet of the pictorial magician, who still influences our visual experiencing of nature and landscape today. The leitmotif of the “Monet” exhibition will be light, shadow, and reflection as well as the constantly evolving way in which Monet treated them. It will be a celebration of light and colors. Monet’s famed pictorial worlds - his Mediterranean landscapes, wild Atlantic coastal scenes, various locations places along the course of the River Seine, his flower meadows, haystacks, cathedrals and fog-shrouded bridges - are the exhibition’s focal points. In his paintings, Monet experimented with the changing play of light and colors in the course of the day and the seasons. He conjured up magical moods through reflections and shade. Claude Monet was a great pioneer in the field of art, finding the key to the secret garden of modern painting and opening everyone’s eyes to a new way of seeing the world. The exhibition will show 62 paintings from leading museums in Europe, the USA and Japan, including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston and the Tate, London. 15 paintings from various private collections that are seen extremely rarely and that have not been shown in the context of a Monet exhibition for many years will be special highlights of the show. Light, shadow, and reflection Following the death of his wife in 1879, Monet embarked on a phase of reorientation. His time as a pioneer of Impressionism was over; while by no means generally acknowledged as an artist, he was beginning to become more independent financially thanks to the help of his dealer, as is documented by his frequent journeys. Through them, he was, for example, first able to concern himself with Mediterranean light, which provided new impulses for his paintings. His art became more personal, moving away from a strictly Impressionist style. Above all, however, Monet seems to have increasingly turned painting itself into the theme of his paintings. His comment, as passed down by his stepson Jean Hoschedé, that, for him, the motif was of secondary importance to what happened between him and the motif, should be seen in this light. Monet’s reflections on paintings should be interpreted in two ways. The repetition of his motifs through reflections, which reach their zenith and conclusion in his paintings of the reflections in his water-lily ponds, can also be seen as a continuous reflecting on the potential of painting, which is conveyed through the representation and repetition of a motif on a canvas. Monet’s representations of shade are another way in which he represented the potential of painting. They are both the imitation and the reverse side of the motif, and their abstract form gives the painting a structure that seems to question the mere copying of the motif. This led to the situation in which Wassily Kandinsky, on the occasion of his famous encounter with Monet’s painting of a haystack seen
against the light (Kunsthaus Zurich and in the exhibition), did not recognize the subject for what it was: the painting itself had taken on far greater meaning that the representation of a traditional motif. Monet’s Pictorial Worlds The exhibition is a journey through Monet’s pictorial worlds. It is arranged according to different themes. The large first room in the exhibition is devoted to Monet’s numerous and diverse representations of the River Seine. One of the most notable exhibits is his rarely shown portrait of his partner and subsequent wife Alice Hoschedé, sitting in the garden in Vetheuil directly on the Seine. The next room celebrates Monet’s representation of trees: a subtle tribute to Ernst Beyeler, who devoted an entire exhibition to the theme of trees in 1998. Inspired by colored Japanese woodcuts, Monet repeatedly returned to the motif of trees in different lights, their form, and the shade they cast. Trees often give his paintings a geometric structure, as is particularly obvious in his series. The luminous colors of the Mediterranean are conveyed by a group of canvases Monet painted in the 1880s. In a letter written at that time, he spoke of the “fairytale light” he had discovered in the South. In 1886 Monet wrote to Alice Hoschedé that he was “crazy about the sea”. A large section of the exhibition is devoted to the coasts of Normandy and the island Belle-Île as well as to the ever-changing light by the sea. It includes a fascinating sequence of different views of a customs official’s cottage on a cliff that lies in brilliant sunlight at times and in the shade at others. On closer examination, the shade seems to have been created out of myriad colors. Monet’s paintings of early-morning views of the Seine radiate contemplative peace: the painted motif is repeated as a painted reflection in such a way that the distinction between painted reality and its painted reflection seems to disappear in the rising mist. The entire motif is repeated as a reflection. There is no longer any clear-cut differentiation between the top and bottom parts of the painting, which could equally well be hung upside down. In other words, the convention about how paintings ought to be viewed is abandoned and viewers are left to make their own decision. It is as if Monet sought to convey the constant flux (panta rhei) that is such a fundamental characteristic of nature, capturing not only the way light changes from night to day but also the constant merging of two water courses. Monet loved London. He sought refuge in the city during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. As a successful and already well known painter, he went back there at the turn of the century, painting famous views of Waterloo and Charing Cross Bridge as well as of the Houses of Parliament in different lights, particularly in the fog, which turns all forms into mysterious silhouettes. A tribute not only Monet’s famous hero/forerunner William Turner, but also to the world power of Great Britain with its Parliament and the bridges it built through trade. Monet’s late work consists almost exclusively of paintings of his garden and the reflections in his water-lily ponds, of which the Beyeler Collection owns some outstanding examples. The exhibition’s last room contains a selection of paintings of Monet’s garden in Giverny.
The exhibition MONET is generously supported by: Beyeler-Stiftung Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss Foundation Novartis Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation Federal Office For Culture FOC Buy your tickets online in advance: www.fondationbeyeler.ch Combined ticket for the Fondation Beyeler’s 20th birthday: Visit all three of the “Monet”; “Wolfgang Tillmans” and “Paul Klee” exhibitions for the special price of CHF 60. Press images: Please visit our new homepage www.fondationbeyeler.ch and re-register for the press images download. You can unfortunately no longer use your previous access data. Further information: Elena DelCarlo, M.A. Head of Communications Tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, [email protected], www.fondationbeyeler.ch Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen, Switzerland Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10 am - 6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm
07 Claude MonetView of Bordighera, 1884 Oil on canvas, 66 x 81,8 cmThe Armand Hammer Collection, Schenkung der Armand Hammer Foundation, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
04 Claude MonetSunset on the Seine in Winter, 1880 Oil on canvas, 60,6 x 81,1 cmPola Museum of Art, Pola Art Foundation
Press images: Please visit our new homepage www.fondationbeyeler.ch and re-register for the press images download. You can unfortunately no longer use your previous access data. The visual material may be used solely for press purposes in connection with reporting on the exhibition. Reproduction is permitted only in connection with the current exhibition and for the period of its duration. Any other kind of use – in analogue or digital form – must be authorised by the copyright holder(s). Purely private use is excluded from that provision. Please use the captions given and the associated copyrights. We kindly request you to send us a complimentary copy.
12 Claude MonetWater-Lilies, 1916–1919 Oil on canvas, 200 x 180 cmFondation Beyeler, Riehen / Basel, Beyeler CollectionPhoto: Robert BayerThe restoration of this art work is supported by the BNP Paribas Swiss Fondation
10 Claude MonetThe Terrace at Vétheuil, 1881 Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cmPrivate CollectionPhoto: Robert Bayer
11 Claude MonetRocks at Belle-Île, Port-Domois, 1886 Oil on canvas, 81,3 x 64,8 cmCincinnati Art Museum, Fanny Bryce Lehmer Endowment and The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, 1985Photo: Bridgeman Images
Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14,1840, the son of Claude-Alphonse, a commercial ofcer,and Louise-Justine Aubrée. From 1845 on he grew up inthe port city of Le Havre in Normandy, his father havingfound employment in the trading house of his brother-in-law, Jacques Lecadre. The Lecadres owned a housethree kilometers away in the little shing village ofSainte-Adresse, which as a burgeoning bathing resortwas much loved by the Monets. Claude attended thelocal high school beginning in 1851 and there receivedhis rst drawing lessons. His earliest surviving sketchesdating from 1856 show caricatures of his teachers andthe landscapes of Le Havre. When Monet’s mother died,in 1857, Claude and his elder brother, Léon, moved inwith their aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, who would become very important to him and support him in hispursuit of an artistic career. As an amateur painter with
a studio of her own, she had connections to local artistsand made sure that her nephew could continue hisdrawing lessons in Le Havre. Monet’s caricatures soonattracted notice and were exhibited at the local sta-tioner’s, Gravier, who also sold paints and frames. Thisbrought his work to the attention of Eugène Boudin,
THE TRAVELS OF MONSI EUR MONE T
A Geographical Chronology
hannah rocchi
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a former partner in the business, who became Monet’snew teacher. Boudin invited the young Monet to joinhim on plein air painting expeditions around Le Havre,an experience that made a lasting impression on hispupil. Monet twice applied for a municipal scholarship,but was turned down both times. Despite moving toParis to take painting lessons there in 1859, Monet re-peatedly returned to Le Havre, including in 1862, whenafter a year of military service in Algeria he had to re-turn to France on grounds of poor health. Later thatyear he was discharged from military service thanks to the replacement fee paid by his aunt. It was in thesummer of that year that he met the Dutch painterJohan Barthold Jongkind and claimed to have found in him his “true teacher.” He also spent the months May to November 1864 painting landscapes in andaround Le Havre. His lover and future wife, CamilleDoncieux, gave birth to their rst child, Jean-Armand-Claude Monet, in Paris in 1867; yet, urged by his father,who was against the relationship, to leave Paris, thepainter spent the summer without them, paintingseascapes, gardens, gural compositions, and regattas in Sainte-Adresse. A year later he won a silver medal at the Le Havre art show. After the death of his aunt, in 1870, followed by that of his father just a year later,his visits to Le Havre became less frequent. At the sametime, he was drawn more to the towns further up theNormandy coast, to Étretat, Fécamp, and Pourville,where he found even more impressive subjects forpaintings.
PA R I S
Monet, who was born in Paris, returned to the capital inthe spring of 1859 to visit the Salon and take paintinglessons. During his stays in “chaotic Paris” he incurrednumerous expenses, which he was able to defray thanksonly to the support of his father and his aunt. Instead ofenrolling at the atelier of the painter Thomas Couturefor the preparatory course for admission to the École
des Beaux-Arts, he chose the academy of Charles Suisse,where he probably met Camille Pissarro. After his discharge from the army in 1862, Monet returned toParis and there joined the studio of the Swiss historypainter Charles Gleyre, where he made the acquain-tance of Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Two years later, when Gleyre ran intonancial difculties and had to close his studio, Monet’sfather provided him with the funds he needed to rent astudio together with Bazille on the rue de Furstenberg.Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and even Paul Cézanne were all regular visitors there. Monet was experimentingwith gural paintings at the time, including his largeDéjeuner sur l’herbe (1865–66). When their money
troubles came to a head in January 1866, Monet andBazille had no choice but to relinquish their sharedspace. Monet then rented a small studio of his own on the place Pigalle, and it was there that he engagedCamille Doncieux, the woman he would marry in 1870,to sit for him. His painting of the nineteen-year-oldCamille (Camille, or La Femme à la robe verte, 1866),was accepted for the Salon and not only won fulsomepraise from the critic Émile Zola, but also aroused the interest of Édouard Manet. Together with other Impressionists, Monet founded the Société anonymecoopérative des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs,etc., whose rst group show was held in the studio of the photographer Nadar on the boulevard des
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Capucines in Paris in 1874. Among the works exhibitedwas Monet’s work Impression, soleil levant, painted inLe Havre in 1872. The show was savaged by the critics,who in a play on the title of Monet’s painting derided it as an “exhibition of impressionists.” Monet tended tond his subjects in the suburbs of Paris rather than inthe capital itself, one exception being Saint-Lazare rail-way station, which he captured on several canvases in1877. When Monet moved to Vétheuil, in 1878, he heldonto a small studio in Paris, even if he used it mainly as a showroom for art dealers and potential collectors.When Monet’s patron Ernest Hoschedé declared bank-ruptcy, in 1877, he had no choice but to sell his large collection of works by the Impressionists a year later. It was through the sale of Hoschedé’s paintings thatMonet met the collector and gallerist Georges Petit,who in the world of Impressionism would soon come torival the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. In 1882 Durand-Ruel himself commissioned Monet with several still lifesfor his home on the rue de Rome. In 1914, in Giverny,Monet began work on his last major project, the famousGrandes Décorations, and after his death, in 1927, twenty-two of these large-format paintings of water lilies wereinstalled in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.
T H E N O R M A N DY C OA S T
Although his career necessitated ever more frequenttrips to Paris, in 1868 Monet wanted to make a home forhimself, his partner Camille Doncieux, and their son,Jean, in Normandy. He wrote to Bazille that he could not imagine spending longer than a month at a time inParis and that whatever he might paint on the coast ofNormandy would be very different from anything pro-duced in the French capital. The cliffs near Fécamp thathe painted in early 1881 show how his style of paintingwas already beginning to change, how his once idylliclandscapes were becoming wilder. Monet spent a fewmonths in Poissy near Paris beginning in December ofthat year, but found the village uninspiring and returned
to the coast, this time to the shing village of Pourville.This was a landscape of rugged cliffs with several subjects of interest to him, among them the customs ofcer’s house near Varengeville. Furthermore, thebeaches were deserted in the winter months, makingthem ideal for painting. Monet began several new se-ries, sometimes working on eight canvases at once sothat he needed help transporting his equipment andcanvases from one place to another. In the 1880s, whensales of his paintings began to pick up and his nancialsituation became less dire, Monet was at last able to rent a holiday home in Pourville. His new partner, AliceHoschedé, and her daughter Blanche, who also painted,often accompanied him on his painting expeditionsthere, and he received visits from both Durand-Rueland Renoir. In January 1883 Monet visited the village
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of Étretat, famed for its precipitous cliffs and arches,and there found several motifs right in front of thehotel. He also sought out remote beaches with views of the Manneporte Arch, which he proceeded to paintin different light conditions, often working on severalcanvases at once. While painting on a secluded beach onNovember 27, 1885, Monet miscalculated the incomingtide and was hurled against the face of a cliff by a wave.He told Alice that his brush and painting equipmenthad fallen into the sea, but that what annoyed him mostwas that the wave had washed away the canvas he wasworking on. Monet nished all of his over fty paintingsof Étretat in his studio in Giverny, which by then hadbecome his permanent home.
O N T H E S E I N E : A R G E N T E U I L ,
V É T H E U I L , A N D P O I S S Y
On December 21, 1871, Monet rented a house in Argen-teuil, a suburb northwest of Paris that allowed him tolive in the country but remain within easy reach of thecity. Thanks to the sale of several paintings as well asCamille’s dowry and inheritance, the Monets were ableto employ three servants and Monet himself bought aboat that he converted into a oating studio. Argenteuilbecame an important center for the Impressionists;Cézanne, Manet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir all visitedMonet there. In 1873 Monet met Gustave Caillebotte.One motif that Monet found especially interesting wasthe railway bridge of Argenteuil. It was destroyed in the Franco-Prussian War but rebuilt soon afterward,making it a symbol of French resilience—and further evidence of Monet’s general interest in bridges.
In 1878 the Monets moved to Vétheuil, a little village on the Seine, some sixty kilometers away fromParis. As Monet’s patron Hoschedé was undergoing nancial difculties at the time, he and his wife, Alice,and their six children shared a house with the Monets.Monet’s wife, Camille, had just given birth to their second son, Michel, but was already ill with cervical
cancer. Their nancial situation had deteriorated andthey were no longer able to pay their servants. As a devout Christian, Alice Hoschedé took it upon herself to ensure that the Monets, who had married in a civilceremony only, received the blessing of the Church fortheir union and that Camille Monet was given the lastrites. Camille died on September 5, 1879, in Vétheuil and was buried in the cemetery there. The winter of1879–80 was exceptionally cold and the Seine frozeover. On January 5, 1880, the Hoschedé-Monet familyawoke to the sound of the ice breaking apart, and Monetspent the next few days painting dozens of impressionsof this spectacle. As Ernest Hoschedé mainly resided in Paris and visited his family only occasionally, Monet
and Alice lived more or less alone with their children in Vétheuil, and before long they were rumored to behaving an affair. In 1881 they decided to move again.Monet had been unable to nd a suitable school for his son Jean, and Alice was considering whether to return to Ernest in Paris with the children. In the end,however, both Monet and Alice moved to Poissy in De-cember of that year. When Poissy proved uninspiring,however, the two families resumed their quest for theperfect home, which they would nd in Giverny in 1883, some seventy kilometers northeast of Paris.
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O N T H E M E D I T E R R A N E A N
In December 1883 Monet accompanied Renoir on ashort trip to the Mediterranean. They traveled fromMarseille to Genoa and visited Cézanne in L’Estaque.Monet was especially taken with the little town of Bordighera on the Ligurian Riviera and vowed to returnthere in January 1884, this time without Renoir, in orderto paint in peace. The three-week stay originally plannedeventually turned into three months, during which Monetexplored the region, visited several mountain villages,and admired the wonderful gardens of FrancescoMoreno, where to his great delight he was able to paintpalms. The colors and new motifs brought Monet closeto despair, and he complained to Alice of how difcult it was to paint the landscape as it really looked. Visiblyfascinated by the warm light of the Mediterranean, hedeclared that he would need a palette of diamonds andjewels to capture its féerique (magical) atmosphere. Although in her replies Alice made no secret of her displeasure at the painter’s constant absences, Monetchose to linger in the south and continued the series he had just begun. He also traveled to Cap Martin and to Monte Carlo, painting as he went. In January 1888 he painted several views of Antibes.
In late September 1908 he visited Venice—one ofonly a few trips undertaken together with Alice—wherehe was especially impressed by the Grand Canal, the
Doge’s Palace, and the church of San Giorgio Maggiore.When the pair left Venice again, in December 1908,Monet consoled himself with the thought that he wouldreturn there the following year, although he already hadan inkling that that was “a forlorn hope.” Even so, the1912 Claude Monet: Venise exhibition, comprising twenty-nine views of Venice and held at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, was a great success.
R O U E N
Léon Monet, who ran the Rouen branch of a Swisschemical company, was on good terms with his youngerbrother, Claude. Jean, the elder of Monet’s two sons,would later work for Léon, providing the painter withanother good reason for visiting Rouen. It was probablyat his brother’s instigation that Monet took part in the23ème Exposition municipale des Beaux-Arts, in Rouen
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in March 1872. Monet discovered his fascination withthe Gothic towers of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption, thecathedral in Rouen, which would become such a majorpreoccupation of his later years. He had planned to return to Rouen for longer painting projects as early asthe spring of 1891, but in the end was too busy expand-ing his garden in Giverny to leave. In February 1892,however, he was offered the use of an empty apartmentthat looked out onto the cathedral’s west façade. InMarch of that year he took lodgings above a boutiquethat offered a similar view but from a slightly differentangle. While in Rouen he worked on nine canvases atthe same time, painting from early morning to lateevening. The intensity was not without consequences,and Monet was aficted by nightmares in which thecathedral—“it seemed to be blue, pink, or yellow”—came crashing down on top of him. The constantlychanging light drove Monet almost to despair, and by1893 he was working on up to fourteen canvases at once.In early 1894 he began preparing an exhibition of hiscathedral paintings, but was plagued by doubts overwhether he was up to the task. Twenty paintings in theseries were to be exhibited as a solo show at the galleryof his art dealer, Durand-Ruel, in 1895. Believing thatthis might be an opportunity to raise his market value,he decided to demand 15,000 francs per painting. Durand-Ruel was so appalled that he refused to be involved in the actual sales and left the negotiations to the painter himself. Most of the works were well received in the press and would meet with acclaim inother exhibitions, too. Although Monet never received15,000 francs for his cathedrals during his lifetime, theFrench state did at least pay 10,500 francs for the onethat it bought for the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 1907.
LO N D O N
On July 19, 1870, Napoléon III declared war on Prussia.Fearful of being conscripted, Monet ed to London atthe beginning of October that year, taking Camille andtheir son Jean with him. There he met Paul Durand-Ruel, who was likewise a refugee and would becomeMonet’s most important art dealer. Durand-Ruel’s rstdocumented sale of a Monet work was in May 1871. Together with Pissarro, Monet visited London’s manymuseums and there admired the works of Joseph Mal-lord William Turner and John Constable. When the war ended in late May 1871, Monet returned to Francevia the Netherlands.
Although he would return to London on several occasions in the following years, his stays would invari-ably be brief and motivated mainly by visits to fellowpainters. His desire to paint various views of the Thamesswathed in fog nevertheless comes up in several letters.When his youngest son, Michel, went to London tostudy, Monet, Alice, and Alice’s daughter Germaine paidhim a visit there in September 1899. They stayed at theluxurious Savoy Hotel, which has excellent views of theThames. Monet was thus able to spend a whole monthpainting Charing Cross Bridge to excess, dedicatinghimself intensively to Waterloo Bridge later on. Hewould return to London in the next two years, and in1900 set up his easel in a room in St. Thomas’ Hospital
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that commanded an especially ne view of Westminster.While there, Monet received a visit from GeorgesClemenceau, a personal friend of his and later an im-portant French statesman, through whose good ofceshe was granted permission to paint in the Tower of London—a dispensation he never made use of. Thethick fog that he woke up to toward the end of his stayin 1901 was grounds enough for him to postpone his departure. Many of the canvases begun in London wereactually nished back in Monet’s studio in Giverny.There he also began to destroy some of them, admittingto Durand-Ruel that “my mistake is to try to improvethem.” An exhibition of selected London paintings heldin Paris at Durand-Ruel’s in May 1904 met with greatacclaim.
G I V E R N Y
Monet signed a lease for a house with a plot of land inGiverny and moved in on April 29, 1883, bought it in1890, and lived there until his death, for over forty yearsall told. Alice and her children moved in the very nextday after the lease was signed. The village near theSeine is not far from Vernon, which is where the olderchildren went to school. The two-story house was bigenough to accommodate the large family, and the barnwas readily converted into a painting studio. In the rst
summer there, Monet built a boathouse so that he couldexplore his environs in search of suitable motifs by boat.He also began planting a garden, which soon became an enduring passion. He painted views of the church of Vernon as well as his rst elds with grainstacks. It was on the tiny Île aux Orties, which Monet bought as aplace to moor his boats, that he painted Alice’s daughterSuzanne with a parasol (Essai de gure en plein-air:Femme à l’obrelle, 1886). Apart from his French painterfriends, he was visited by both the American painterJohn Singer Sargent (in 1885 and 1887) and GeorgesClemenceau, the former of whom painted both Monetand Blanche Hoschedé at work. The rst grainstacksbegan to appear in late 1888. Monet traveled much lessafter 1890 and tended to conne himself to just a fewmotifs that he painted in series. He clearly felt at homein Giverny and lavished a great amount of time (andmoney) on the cultivation of his garden there, which became a favorite preoccupation. Many of his motifswere now to be found on his doorstep, among them the aforementioned grainstacks, which in 1890–91 hepainted no fewer than twenty-ve times in varying light. Ernest Hoschedé died in Paris in 1891 with hiswife, Alice, at his side. He was buried in Giverny. In thespring of 1891 Monet began painting a series of a row of poplars on the Epte River two kilometers away fromhis home, which he visited in his studio boat. When thepoplars came up for auction in August of that year, hepaid the timber merchant to leave them standing untilhe had nished painting them. A little less than a year
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later Monet and Alice married in Giverny. Work on theirproperty continued, and in early 1893 Monet purchasedthe adjoining plot with the aim of creating a water lilypond. In the summer of 1896 Monet began work on hisMatinée sur la Seine series, for which he set off for workin his boat at half past three in the morning. In 1899 hehad a second studio built specically for the purpose of nishing paintings begun en plein air, while the rststudio, being larger, would henceforth serve mainly as ashowroom. Water lilies were becoming an increasinglyimportant subject by now, and in 1901 he purchased landagain, to enlarge his pond. He also had a third studiobuilt to allow him to commence work on the monumen-tal water lily wall panels (the Grandes Décorations).From 1909 on, Monet’s sight deteriorated to such an extent that he had to undergo various operations,notwithstanding his fears that these might change hisperception of color. Alice fell ill with a rare form ofleukemia and died in 1911, with a distraught Monet byher side. Following the death of his son Jean, in 1914,Blanche, who was both Monet’s stepdaughter anddaughter-in-law, moved into the house at Giverny andcared for the deeply grieved artist. Yet he continuedpainting, right to the end of his days, nding most of his motifs in his own garden. It was also in Giverny thatMonet, who died of lung cancer on December 5, 1926,would nd his nal resting place. He was buried in thesame grave as his son Jean (1914), his wife Alice (1911),her rst husband, Ernest Hoschedé (1891), and theirdaughters Suzanne (1899) and Marthe (1925).
The present chronology is based on the accounts pro-vided in Charles F. Stuckey, “Chronology,” in ClaudeMonet 1840–1926, exh. cat. The Art Institute of Chicago(London and Chicago, 1995), p. 185–266; and quotationscited from the artist’s letters published in DanielWildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogueraisonné (Paris and Lausanne, 1974–91), vols. 1–5.
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Quotations Backlight “I am chasing a dream, I want the unattainable.” -Claude Monet The Seine “I have painted the Seine throughout my life, at every hour, at every season … I have never tired of it: for me the Seine is always new.” -Claude Monet, 1924 The Coast and the Sea “You know my passion for the sea. (…) I’m mad about it.” -Claude Monet, 1886 The Mediterranean “I am living in a wonderland. I do not know which way to turn: everything is superb and I want to do everything. It is terribly difficult, you need a palette made of diamonds and precious stones. As for blue and pink, there is no shortage here.” -Claude Monet, 1884 Morning on the Seine “The crack of dawn, in August, 3:30 a.m. (…) (He) comes to the river. There he unties his rowboat moored in the reeds along the bank, and with a few strokes, reaches the large punt at anchor which serves as his studio.” -Maurice Guillemot, 1898 London “What I love more than anything in London is the fog. (…) Without the fog London wouldn’t be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth.” -Claude Monet, 1918
Claude Monet from a new angle: Light, shadow, and reflection
Ed. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Ulf Küster Text(s) by Maria Becker, Gottfried Boehm, Ulf Küster, Philippe Piguet, Hannah Rocchi, and James H. Rubin Graphic design by Uwe Koch English 2017. 180 pp., 130 ills. hardcover 27.40 x 31.00 cm
ISBN 978-3-7757-4239-9 CHF 62.50 / € 58.00
⁄ The painter of light “The world’s appearance would be shaken if we succeeded in perceiving the spaces in between things as things.” These words from the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty apply to the core of Claude Monet’s art in the years between 1880 and the beginning of the twentieth century. While interest usually lies only on the early and late work of this exceptional artist, the catalogue, containing more than fifty works of art, traces the development between these two periods. Accompanied by texts by well-known art historians, the reader is invited to follow Monet’s unusual treatment of reflections and shadows in his paintings. It allowed him to break loose from the modalities of representational logic and the pictorial object. And they made room for an aesthetic that helped to do justice to perception itself and to enforce a painting’s self-reflexive momentum. Exhibition: Fondation Beyeler Riehen/Basel 22.1.–28.5.2017
Media Release
Under the Influence of Claude, Vincent, Paul… and the others
The impact of Impressionist painting on early French cinema Matthias Brunner’s film installation has been created for the Fondation Beyeler on the occasion of its “Monet” exhibition. It lasts 30 minutes and is accompanied by Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No. 4. There is virtually no film genre more closely linked with the fine arts than is the Impressionist cinema of the 1920s with French Impressionist painting. From a purely stylistic viewpoint, film pioneers and iconic directors like Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac and Louis Delluc were strongly influenced by 19th century Impressionist painting. Numerous other major artists like Man Ray, who later made a name for himself as a Surrealist, and directors like Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir, who were representatives of poetic Realism, were marked by French Impressionism in their early works. Impressionism thus became a gateway leading to later radical changes in the language of film. Anyone who misses the colors of Impressionist painting in the cinema of those early years is more than compensated by the refined film technique, which is characterized by, for example, rapid montages, time lapses, blurring, double exposures and light reflections. Up until today, the dialog between film and painting can possibly best be grasped through the work of Jean-Luc Godard, whose films abound in quotations from painting and art history. Of particular note are foreign directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and G.V. Aleksandrov, who made Romance sentimentale in France, as well as another Russian, Dimitri Kirsanoff, who directed the legendary Franco-Swiss co-production Rapt, based on a work by the French-speaking Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and Alberto Cavalcanti, the Brazilian director of Rien que les heures who lived in Paris. Their films – all of them French productions – are very much on a par with those made by French directors and are repeatedly associated with French Impressionist cinema. This collage film with excerpts from 25 films by the 12 most famous directors, who caused a furore in France at the time, is a tribute to Impressionist painting and Impressionist cinema, which was later followed by “Cinéma Pur”, abstract film, as well as Surrealism and poetic Realism. Special thanks go to: Dr. h.c. Sam Keller Dr. Ulf Küster Prof. Dr. Gottfried Boehm Dr. Pamela Kort Christian Wirtz Heinz Spoerli Jürg Steinacher In memory of: Jean Epstein; Man Ray; Abel Gance; Dimitri Kirsanov; Louis Delluc; Sergei Eisenstein; Germaine Dulac; G.V. Aleksandrov; Jean Renoir; Alberto Cavalcanti; Louis Feuillade; Jean Vigo
Gratiseintritt für alle bis 25 Jahre Die Fondation Beyeler freut sich, anlässlich ihres 20. Geburtstags im Jahr 2017 allen Personen bis 25 Jahren kostenlosen Eintritt in die Ausstellungen zu offerieren. Diese Aktion wird grosszügig unterstützt durch die Basler Kantonalbank. Entrée gratuite pour les moins de 25 ans La Fondation Beyeler est heureuse d'offrir, à l'occasion de son 20e anniversaire, l'entrée gratuite des expositions à tous les visiteurs de moins de 25 ans. Cette opération bénéficie du généreux soutien de la Basler Kantonalbank. Entrata gratuita per tutti fino ai 25 anni In occasione del suo ventennale nel 2017 la Fondation Beyeler è lieta di offrire a tutte le persone fino a 25 anni d’età l’entrata gratuita alle mostre. Questa iniziativa è generosamente sostenuta dalla Banca cantonale Basilea. Free admission for everyone up to 25 years old In celebration of its 20th birthday in 2017, the Fondation Beyeler is delighted to offer free admission to its exhibitions for everyone up to the age of 25. This special gift is generously supported by the Basler Kantonalbank.
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