deYoung Museum is featuring nearly 50 paintings by Claude Monet dating mainly from 1913 to 1926, the final phase of the artist’s long career.
During his late years, the well-traveled Monet stayed close to home, inspired by the variety of elements making up his own garden at Giverny, a village located about forty-five miles from Paris. With its evolving scenery of flower beds, footpaths, willows, wisteria, and nymphaea, the garden became a personal laboratory for the artist’s concentrated study of natural phenomena.
The exhibition will focus on the series that Monet invented, and just as important, reinvented, in this setting. In the process, it will reconsider the conventional notion that many of the late works painted on a large scale were preparatory for the Grand Decorations, rather than finished paintings in their own right. Boldly balancing representation and abstraction, Monet’s radical late works redefined the master of Impressionism as a forebear of modernism.
By 1913 Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) had secured his position as the most successful living painter in France. This exhibition focuses primarily on the period between 1913 and 1926, when the well-traveled Monet devoted all of his creative attention to a single location—his home and gardens in Giverny, some forty-five miles northwest of Paris. There he created an environment completely under his control.
With its evolving scenery of flower beds, footpaths, bridges, willows, wisteria, and water lilies, the garden became a personal laboratory for the artist’s sustained study of natural phenomena. In it Monet found the creative catharsis he needed to persist through a series of personal tragedies, including the death of his second wife, Alice Hoschedé, in 1911; the death of his eldest son, Jean, in 1914; and the international trauma of World War I.
The work Monet produced during this period is also marked by his struggle with cataracts: first diagnosed in 1912, he eventually underwent an operation in 1923. In the final chapter of his life and career, Monet remained fiercely ambitious in his approach to painting. Throughout his seventies and eighties, he transformed his technique by enlarging his canvases, experimenting with compositional cropping, and playing with tonal harmonies. Boldly balancing representation and abstraction, Monet’s radical late works redefine the master of Impressionism as a forebear of modernism.
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