Last spring, a trip to the mall provided me with THIS!! Oh my. Monet is my all-time fav. Truly. I started spreading the word and an event for our group was planned. Today, it is happening. Sherri is in the house, we are picking up Stephannie on the way to Fort Worth and meeting Lana and Diane. YES! Let's do this.I haven't been to the Kimball Museum in years --- and never to the annex that this exhibit is in. We have just a bit to wait before the building opens, allowing for some play time.
With cameras too.
Oh Lana and Diane, where are you??
We are together and ready for fun!!! Into the wonderland we go. This picture of Monet in his garden. Isn't this just perfect. All artiste's wear gray/white while walking through gardens. The hat and beard just complete the whole image in my mind.
Monet and me --- yes, life is good.
Ticket in hand, audio player around the neck, eyes wide open --- oooooh
Okay, so you know my method right? I'ma gonna educate you against your will. I took snapshots of the information on the walls (sorry, what we heard on audio is the treats of actually attending) and am sharing it with y'all.
Monet: The Late Years --
"My sensitivity, far from diminishing, has been sharpened by age, which holds no fears for me so long as unbroken communication with the outside world continues to fuel my curiosity, so long as my hand remains a ready and faithful interpreter of my perception" - Claude Monet
"By his 70th birthday, in 1910, Claude Monet had secured his position as the single most successful living painter in France. This exhibition focuses on the decade before his death in 1926, a time when Monet focused all his creative attention on a single subject - his home in Giverny located some forty-five miles northwest of Paris. In the gardens there, Monet created an environment completely under his control. With its evolving scenery, the garden became a personal laboratory for the artist's sustained study of natural phenomena. Monet also found the creative catharsis he required to persist through a series of personal tragedies including the death of his second wife, Alice, in 1911, the death of his eldest son, Jean, in 1914, and the suffering of World War I. In the final chapter of his life and career, Monet no longer sought fame but remained fiercely ambitious. Between the ages of seventy-three and eighty-six, Monet transformed his painting technique by enlarging his canvasses, experimenting with unconventional compositional cropping, and playing with tonal harmonies. Boldly balancing representation and the joy of pure painting, Monet's radical late works reveal the standard bearer of Impressionism as a modern genius."
"Claude Monet, his companion Alice Hoschede, and their combined family of eight children settled in Giverny in 1883. In addition to traveling throughout France, Monet spent time exploring motifs such as stacks of grain and poplars in the terrain near his home. Experiencing greater financial success, the artist purchased the house in 1890 and began an extensive redesign of the surrounding gardens. in 1893, Monet added to his property, purchasing another plot of land across the road from the flower garden. He received permission to divert a small river to create a pond for cultivating water lilies, which ha may have first learned about at the 1889 Universal Exhibition. The design of the garden was inspired by the art of Japan and included an arched bridge in Japanese style. By 1897, he had begun to paint the water lilies first planted in 1894. This private garden served as a perfect foil for the more traditional flower beds and allees of trees surrounding his house. The surface of the pond allowed him to explore painting the world mirrored in the water, a theme that had interested him since his youth. Works in this gallery include some of the water-lily canvases he first exhibited in 1909. The introduce themes that would remain constant in his late work -- above all, the mystery of light and color captured in reflection."
"Visiting Monet's pond garden in 1897, a critic admired the blooms, 'the models for a decoration, for which (Monet) has already begun to paint studies, large panels, which be showed me afterward in his studio. Imagine a circular room in which the dado beneath the molding is covered with (paintings of) water, dotted with these plants to the very horizon . . . The tones are vague, deliciously nuanced, with a dreamlike delicacy.' This painting is one of the first water-lily studies from the 1890's, the precursor of the large panels that were to come."
"From 1904 to 1908 Monet painted dozens of views of the surface of his pond. In 1909, forty-eight of these were shown to the public. The exhibition was a great success, and many critics lamented that the group could not be kept together. Immediately, people began to think beyond the scope of the pictures they were seeing. As one critic wrote, 'no horizon is given in these paintings, which have no beginning and no end other than the limits of the frame, easily extended by the imagination as far as it wishes.'"
Between the years of 1911 and 1914, Monet "painted seldom, finishing some older work in 1912 and returning to his garden only briefly in 1913 to paint a rose bower and the facade of his house. In the spring of 1914, Monet embarked on a new series of water lily paintings. These works represented a bold departure, marked by gestural brushwork and increasingly larger formats. They are the work of an artist filled with joyful energy, rapidly improvising the images on the canvas as a record of his sensations before the motif. This is exactly the spirit with which Monet was working in the summers of 1914 and 1915. In June 1914, he wrote, '(I am) in a high fever of working and so absorbed, so tired at day's end, I don't have the strength to write . . .I know it's bad, but work above all. I am overjoyed to be back at it. he had a clear idea to paint very large pictures on a mural scale - larger than he had ever worked since his early days."
"Few of the large paintings from Monet's exuberant return to painting in 1914 onward bear dates or signatures, so it is impossible to say exactly when a picture was made. The painter was filmed in 1915 in the act of painting a composition that resembles those grouped here. In another photograph, he is shown painting the canvas now at the Portland Museum of Art. Most of the paintings in the rooms that follow were still in Monet's studio when he died. Some, including these, were marked with a stamp based on his handwritten signature. In the exhibition's last gallery are several smaller paintings that were signed and dated when they were wold to dealers or collectors in Monet's lifetime."
"Envisioning the sweeping murals he was aiming to make, around 1915 Monet began working with canvases that measure two meters - about six and half fee - in height or width. These were carried back and forth from Monet's studio to the banks of the pond, where they would be placed in front of Monet as the light on the water changed. Eventually, the number of these canvases outgrew even the largest studio on his property. In 1915, he decided to build a gigantic sky-lit hall, measuring nearly forty by eighty feet and fifty feed in height to accommodate their numbers. The increased space would allow him, for the first time, to work on even larger canvases that were too big to move from place to place. Nearby, we have place three entirely independent canvases in a row to suggest the kinds of groupings of his pond-side panels Monet was able to make. These, in turn, helped him to work out the design of larger compositions that might be the width of these three put together."
Monet stands in his large 1915 studio with three panels from his mural series. he wears a black armband in mourning for his brother Leon, who died in 1917.
"Between 1915 and 1917, Monet had already accumulated many large panels measuring two meters in height by one, two, or even four meters in width. Around 1918, however, he ordered dozens of two-meter-wide canvases and began to paint views of the water-lily pond that repeated, on the horizontal axis, compositional formulas he had explored in square and vertical formats a decade before. using similar arrangements of reflected shadows and light, the paintings investigated changing effects of light and atmosphere, as Monet had in his 1890s series paintings. These new canvases were not precisely studies for the murals that he was painting simultaneously, but they express the artist's pervading interest in a kind of panoramic perception of space."
"'Beyond painting and gardening, I am good for nothing,' Monet said. One major constant throughout the artist's career was his unfailing dedication to closely observing nature - if he was to paint at home in Giverny, his elaborate garden became a necessary extravagance. He expended great energy and expense studying horticultural magazines, consulting with specialists, and commiserating with fellow enthusiasts. In the early days, Monet tended the garden with his children. He ultimately employed eight gardeners, as his designed became more ambitious. Monet's lily pond was the most important feature of his garden. Maintaining the crystalline quality of the water and the vibrancy of the lilies required one gardener to skim the surface of the pond on a daily basis and dunk the liles to wash off the dust from the nearby road. Monet even went so far as paying to pave the surrounding roads to prevent the dust from accumulating. The pond offered an ever-changing reflective surface, capturing both the color of the lilies and the foliage of the adjacent weeping willows, as well as, at times, the changing effects of the clouds. On the same impressive scale, Monet also painted irises, daylilies, and agapanthuses gorwing at the water's edge."
"The water lily compositions Monet had painted in the 1890s and the early 1900s provided the foundation for his most ambitious artistic project: a panoramic mural cycle inspired by his Giverny pond. In response to observed phenomena within the garden, drawing upon his memory and studies made beside the pond, he painted the larger canvases in his studio rather than in the open air. The paitings proliferated, eventually numbering dozens of canvases together measuring hundreds of feet in width. Monet was well advanced with the project while the First World War was being fought. When the armistice came on November 11, 1918, he decided to offer some of these great paintings to France. Plans for the installation of the paintings -- the artist's Grandes Decorations literally 'great decorations' - evolved from year to year.
In the first formal project, drawn up in 1919, the triptych called Agapanthus - the center panel of which is exhibited here - was scheduled to be installed at eye level, with a frieze of wisteria vines near the ceiling of the large circular room. By a few years later, it was decided to install an enlarged selection of paintings in two oval rooms constructed within an existing structure, the Orangerie in the Tuileres Gardens, Paris. This installation opened only after Monet's death. Monet had more paintings at his disposal than there was room on the walls at the Orangerie, so some canvases - the Agapanthus triptych for instance, and the other large Water Lilies exhibited here - remained in his estate at his death. They were only released onto the art market after World War II, when the power of the artist's late works was appreciated for the first time."
I have to admit --- I wanted to just be absorbed by this one. To me, this is pure beauty.
"In the last decade of his life, Monet returned to painting works on a smaller scale, moving away from the water lily point per se to concentrate on a select group of motifs in different parts of his garden to depict in series. These included views of his home, the Japanese bridge, rose archiway and weeping willows. his work on these themes coincided with his struggles to complete the large mural decorations. Though ceaselessly productive, Monet's correspondences with friends and family attest to the artist's changeable moods. Writing to his friend the journalist and art critic, Gustave Geffroy, Monet stated, 'Ah, how I suffer, how painting makes me suffer! It tortures me. The pain it causes me.' In 1924, Georges Clemenceau, the former Prime Minister of France wrote to Monet, 'work patiently or angrily - but go to work. You know better than anyone the value of what you have done.' Visitor's to Monet's studio reported seeing canvases that had been slashed or burned by the artist. Monet's struggles with his eyesight undoubtedly increased his self-doubt. First diagnosed with cataracts in 1912, the artist carefully adapted his approach to color by memorizing the placement of paint pigments on his palette. Close study of the surfaces of these last canvases reveals how much control Monet maintained over the application of his paints, even though he no longer saw with the clarity he had once enjoyed. Masterful mixing of colors on the brush, or their juxtaposition and layering on the canvas, demonstrates the artist's abiding skill as he entered his eighties."
A rare signature.
"The paintings of the facade of the artist's house at Giverny may be among the most daring he ever completed. The house, at left, recedes towards a large round tree, at right. circular strokes of paint at the center indicate the flower beds, filled with geraniums and roses, planted near the building. These works undoubtedly reflect the artist's changing eyesight. With only ten percent vision in his left eye and legally blind in the right, Monet finally agreed to undergo surgery in 1923. The surgery, along with corrective lenses, restored enough vision in Monet's right eye that he ultimately returned to work in 1924. Though one of the canvases bears the date '22,' it is believed that these courageous paintings were among the artist's last works."
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