Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse – @The ArtWolf

0 (0)

With Monet as the starting point, the exhibition spans the early 1860s to the 1920s, a period of tremendous social change and innovation in the arts, and includes Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Avant-Garde artists of the early twentieth century. It brings together over 120 works, from public institutions and private collections across Europe and the USA, including 35 paintings by Monet alongside rarely seen masterpieces by Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Gustav Klimt and Wassily Kandinsky.

Arguably the most important painter of gardens in the history of art, Monet was also an avid horticulturist who cultivated gardens wherever he lived. As early as the 1860s, a symbiotic relationship developed between his activities as a horticulturist and his paintings of gardens, a relationship that can be traced from his early years in Sainte-Adresse to his final months at Giverny. ‘I perhaps owe it to flowers’, he wrote, ‘that I became a painter’. A rich selection of documentary materials including horticultural books and journals, as well as receipts for purchases of plants and excerpts from letters, are included in the exhibition.

Highlights of the exhibition includes a magnificent selection of Monet’s water lily paintings including the great Agapanthus Triptych of 1916 – 1919, (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis) works that are closely related to the great panorama that he donated to the French State in 1922 and that are now permanently housed in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. It is the first time this monumental triptych has been seen in the UK. This exhibition is among the first to consider Monet’s ‘Grandes Décorations’ as a response to the traumatic events of World War I, and the first to juxtapose the large Water Lilies with garden paintings by other artists reacting to this period of suffering and loss.

“Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse” has been co-organised by the Royal Academy of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art.