Tag Archives: Monet

Three of the Greatest Painters of the Past 150 Years?

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Now this is an exhibition I can get behind: Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm promises to be a brilliant and insightful exhibition. I heard the title, and I immediately got it: the loose brushwork and rich colors that developed over their long careers can seem remarkably similar despite the very different times and places in which they worked.

 Twombly’s 2008 Lepanto versue Monet’s 1914 Waterlillies:

“J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly are three of the greatest painters of the last 150 years. This groundbreaking exhibition focuses on their later work, examining not only the art historical links and affinities between them but also the common characteristics of and motivations underlying their late style.” – More on the background to the exhibition here.

 Monet’s Japanese Bridge (1918-1924) and Turner’s Sunset:

I would love to see how they flesh it out–in the flesh, so to speak. Anyone want to plan a trip to Stockholm this October?

A Shimmering Heat

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The Manneporte near Étretat (1886), Claude Monet 

At least Monet’s shimmering heat has the ocean. We’re looking at temperatures that of 101 here in New York, and the asphalt is indeed shimmering.

Linnea in Monet’s Garden

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Nympheas, 1907

Of course you have heard the hype and of course you like Monet, so if you haven’t heeded the call to go see Monet’s Late Work on view at Gagosian’s 21st street location, yet let me repeat them all and say: Go now. It’s cheaper than a museum (free) and shows works that museums rarely do (privately-owned). This being one of my first art excursions upon being back in New York, I was more than a little gleeful to find myself surronded by these late, great works. They are strangely wild, more so than you might give “pretty” Monet credit for. And the colors!
The colors almost beg you to paint, even if you should be someone like me: more of an enthusiast than an artist. From a distance all seems serene, giving an impression of reality. Up close, things in the pictures fall apart and you become filled with wonder at a surface that contains so many contradictions.
At least that was the joyful effect it had on me, reminding me as it did of Linnea in Monet’s Garden.There are few Linneas in the US and certainly very few in Georgia where I grew up so as a child, which is why I was given a copy of this book about once a year in honor of my name. However my trips to Paris have unfortunately been when the Orangerie hosting Monet’s circular water lily series was closed. Here I was finally in Monet’s garden.

L’Allee de Rosiers, 1920-1922

While I have been to the real garden of Monet in Giverny, it’s beauty doesn’t compare with the artist’s work. Somehow in the process of seeing and painting the same sights for so many years, Monet arrived a point in his later years when his paintings were so patently not about the object itself but about his experience with them, his experience with the paint, his desire for the right color, that he no more heeded his eyes than he did contemporary painting styles. He painted, as it were, from the heart, from years of experience, and with great love. It is a beautiful thing to see.