Claude Monet: 1840-1926
Paris, Galeries nationales, Grand
Palais
22 September 2010 – 24 January
2011
There is a fabulous retrospective of Monet’s painting going on in 
of Art, which I had seen), through three from the early 1920s,
two Weeping Willow paintings (one we
knew from the Musée d’Orsay, and one[at right] which—along with the other
painting from this period—was from the Larock-Granoff collection in Paris) and The Japanese Bridge. Even these bookends of the exhibition are enough
to suggest the extreme breadth of the works on display—including famous
paintings that one is familiar with from some of the great museums of the world
(including some of the masterpieces in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum
in NY [e.g., the great 1867 Garden at Sainte-Adresse; at left] or the Art Institute in Chicago [its wonderful
The Beach at Sainte-Adresse, from the
same year; at right]) and those from museums which I, for one, had never gotten
to visit, as well as much less well known works which I had never seen from museums
and private collections.
This major exhibition was put
together through a joint effort of the Réunion
des musées nationaux and the Musée d’Orsay.
It was the result of the efforts of
several curators, and they assembled important works from scores of museums and
private collections from fifteen different countries. There is a wonderful catalogue of the show, Monet
(Grand Palais 
(www.monet2010.com/en#/galerie/1), which includes zoom-able images of many of the
works in the show.
We found the wonderful
paintings from Monet’s first decade or two to be particularly exciting, as
there were so many beautiful and works we had never seen. The exhibit was a little light on my favorite
of Monet’s paintings—the “series paintings” of the 1890s and early 1900s—the
Grainstacks, the Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, The Houses of Parliament, et al., each painted in many different
moments of light and weather, time of year and time of day. (I have to confess, however, that this was
partly my own fault, as we actually missed a room from precisely this period,
it having been somewhat difficult negotiating the crowds in the exhibit with my
mother’s wheel chair. Having checked the
catalogue for what was there, however, I was reassured to see that there were
not too many we had missed, and that it was a relatively underrepresented part
of Monet’s oeuvre. [I remember so
fondly the exhibition that took place in NY decades ago that had 8-12 versions
of each of these and other of series paintings; but I do not remember whether
it had been at the Met or at MoMA, nor do I recall exactly when it took place—and
I welcome any input on these questions.])
The show is an incredibly
important and rewarding sweep of Monet’s work, and one that you should try to
see, if at all possible. The crowds are
intense, ever-present, and make the quiet appreciation of this amazing assemblage
of art difficult fully to enjoy the art; but it is still well worth the effort.
There are some other minor quibbles I
had with the exhibit, but none of enough consequence to outweigh its incredible
virtues.
The exhibit runs only through
24 January 2011, and it is already sold out through the very end of December;
so, if you want to see it, act quickly! There are some work-arounds for getting
tickets: a good concierge at a major
hotel in Paris can often arrange something, even last minute; the Carte Musée can
provide entry on certain days (although not holiday weeks); and, as at most
monuments and museums in Paris, handicapped access takes you right to the head
of any line (we went with my mother, with whom we use a wheelchair for walking
any considerable distance, and it produced access for us without any tickets
needed). But this is a very special
opportunity, so try not to miss it.
Open every day from 10:00 am, closing Fridays-Mondays and Wednesdays
at 10:00 pm, and at 2:00 pm on Tuesdays and at 8:00 pm on Thursdays. During the
holidays (from 18 December to 2 January), open every day from 9:00 am to 11:00
pm (included Tuesdays). Closes at 6 pm on 24 and 31 December. Closed on 25 December.
Admission: 12 € - Concession: 8 €
Tickets online at: www.digitick.com/claude-monet-entree-simple-expo-peinture-css4-rmn-pg51-ei71849.html
Below I include the piece the NY Times did about the show, shortly after it opened:
Critic’s Notebook
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: October 4, 2010
Like white noise, he’s everywhere and invisible, the
staple of countless dentists’ offices. Old hat for more than
a century now. Is it too late to recapture some of the shock and thrill
that caused horrified Parisians in the 1870s to perceive his work as “leprous”?
Amazingly, no, it’s not. The Monet show that just opened
here at the Grand
Palais is a start. The biggest art spectacle
in Europe this fall, with some 160 paintings, it is, believe it or not, the
first full-dress overview
It happens to be ravishing.
Monet the populist decorator of candle-in-Chianti-bottle
bistros and college dormitories is modernism’s prettiest painter, a virtuoso of
picturesque country scenes and ephemeral weather but not an especially
heavyweight thinker or troublemaker. Clichés about him as a wandering minstrel
in a white beard trailed like the Pied Piper by children toting his canvases
across hill and dale haven’t exactly toughened his reputation, either.
This show, surveying his long career and probing its
depths, helps restore something of his original status. He comes across as more
than the familiar Impressionist — he comes across as a painter of strange and
elusive probity, of memory and reflection, as an artist seeking not just to
simulate sun, rain and snow, but states of mind as well. He gave form to “the
heavenly pasturage our minds can find in things,” is how Proust once put it.
In part he did this by returning again and again, as the
exhibition stresses, to certain sites and motifs, completing pictures not on
the spot, but often in his studio, based on what he remembered.
All this is hardly news, and to make the case, pictures in
the show are hung, albeit a bit confusingly, by subject as opposed to
chronologically, with occasional pedestrian ones from haunts like Vétheuil and
That said, it would be churlish
to belabor the exhibition’s failings. Intelligence and sobriety befit an artist
too glibly thought of as easy. In the flesh, his best works, it turns out,
thwart the problem of their own endless reproduction by being, well,
irreproducible. You just can’t grasp the bejeweled, darkling purple and pink
light emanating from the moody reveries of
His path was never straight from material realism toward
greater abstraction. Conditions dictated style. Steam rising through the gloom
at the Gare St-Lazare
called for gossamer curlicues of pink and white on smeared patches of gray-blue
pigment one day. The next, a sharp spring sun across the Quai du Louvre demanded more crystalline
clarity.
And before the awesome rock portal at Étretat,
Monet elected dots and dashes to connote raw nature and a swift wind. The
style, precisely what shocked and appalled old-school Parisians, masqueraded as
an instant take on the subject. Former fishing villages on the Norman coast
like Étretat were already turning into resorts
catering to vacationing urbanites who wanted to experience such places as if
unspoiled by people like themselves.
Indulging such self-delusions, the painter created not
just spontaneous records of unblemished countryside, but also heightened
versions of vistas and monuments unspoiled and so beckoning that, faced with
the real thing, a natural instinct was to reconcile truth to fiction, rather
than the other way around.
I mean that Monet’s visions of places can come to inhabit
and even supplant our direct memories of them. At
Monet was really painting mental states, states of
reflection. His late, sublime “Water Lilies” is literally that: reflections of
light, clouds and foliage against the surface of his pond at Giverny, Monet’s erotic, mysterious,
multicolored abyss of shimmering, indefinite space, which kind of describes
memory itself.
What makes these pictures look so modern has partly to do,
as every art museum docent points out, with their lack of foreground and
background and the obvious debt to
There’s a photograph he took of himself around 1905, when
he was in his mid-60s. In it, he’s standing on the edge of his lily pond, his
head casting a shadow on the sunlit water. Lilies float above. The effect is a
little disorienting. A temptation is to imagine we’re looking up at Monet, so
that the lilies become clouds and the pond, sky. It’s akin to the “Water
Lilies,” where the horizon line dissolves and where it’s hard to tell whether
the view depicted is across the water, from above it or even from underneath.
But in this case he’s in the picture.
By the way, it’s an interesting question, Monet and the
camera. He loved new things. He followed balloonists and boat racers the way
sports fans now track baseball and football scores. He became an automobile
enthusiast, buying one of the first Panhard-Levassor
motor cars, with leather upholstery. The occasional photo
aside, why not the camera? What did it lack, besides color?
Perhaps photographs seemed to him too literal, too far
from the interior states that were his real project. We can make out his beard
and profile under the familiar wide-brimmed hat in his photograph. It conjures
up other images we have of him as stout, natty, in tweed suit, cambric shirt
and ankle boots, a human brandy snifter. His photograph, although a jeu d’esprit, exudes a whiff of
melancholy because like all photographs it’s a reminder, with that shadow, of
something gone except in the picture and our recollections of it. Monet managed
in the photograph what he exalted in paint: the effervescent pleasure of seeing
and the inevitable disappearance of that pleasure.
No wonder Proust revered him. Proust also wrote that his
pictures “make us adore a field, a sky, a beach, a river as though these were
shrines which we long to visit, shrines we lose faith in when we see.” Reality,
with its mess and noise, fails to live up to what Monet painted.
But Proust also meant that Monet didn’t just idealize
places; he wasn’t just a French weatherman with paints. He showed us Argenteuil
and Belle-Île, the Houses of Parliament in London and
the banks of the Seine, vibrating with electric color, “parts of the world,” as
Proust said, “that are themselves and nothing but themselves,” places that
already existed in our imagination, as if waiting to be discovered and that now
bid for our affection.
“On the threshold of love we are bashful,” Proust noted.
“There has to be someone who will say to us, ‘Here is
what you may love: love it.’ ”
Monet does exactly that.
And how can we not?