In December 1883, Pierre-Auguste Renoir invited his friend Claude Monet to join him on a journey to discover the Mediterranean coast from Genoa to Marseille, with a stopover in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin and Monaco. For Monet it proved to be the first of three painting campaigns on the Franco-Italian Riviera over the next five years and, a successful new exhibition argues, a turning point in his artistic practice.
Monet in full light, at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, celebrates the 140th anniversary of this first trip. Designed in collaboration with the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris, it traces the 60-year arc of the artist’s career from the 1860s landscapes around his native Le Havre to the 1920s water lily paintings in his garden. de Giverny, with particular emphasis on its outings on the Riviera. Nearly four years of preparation, it will bring together nearly 100 paintings, including 44 from Marmottan and others on loan from more than 30 private collections and museums in Europe, the United States and Brazil.
by Monet Rocks on the Mediterranean coast (1888) Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, bequest of Frederick W. Schumacher
A 140th anniversary might not seem like a celebration on this scale. But it suited both institutions, explains Marianne Mathieu, scientific director of the Marmottan and curator of the exhibition. The Forum, the principality’s main convention center and cultural space, needed a subject and material for this year’s iteration of its annual summer exhibition. Le Marmottan had the expertise and contacts to complete its own collection but lacked the space for such an ambitious show. “The anniversary makes sense as Monaco’s raison d’être, and the very large space of the Forum is a key element of the concept, which is to shed new analytical light on the work and practices of Monet”, specifies Mathieu .
As a Nordic painter, Monet was dazzled by his first encounter with the richness of Mediterranean vegetation, color and light, says Marmottan director Érik Desmazières. The impact was so strong that he returned, this time alone, the following month to the area between Monaco and Bordighera in Italy for deeper immersion. Planning to visit for three weeks, he stayed for three months. A third expedition, in 1888, took him to Antibes.
by Monet Villas in Bordighera (1884) © Musee d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt
Colors, light and subject matter weren’t the only novelties of his Mediterranean work, says Mathieu. In his Riviera campaigns, Monet began to paint several versions of the same scene or motif, observed from a fixed vantage point, to capture the fleeting mutability of light in a stable formal composition. Views of Moreno’s Botanical Gardens at Bordighera or the Humpback Bridge at Dolceacqua can be seen as early examples of the signature practice seen in some of his later serial works such as his Haystack, Cathedral of Rouen and the water lily paintings of Giverny.
The Monaco exhibition will approach Monet’s work through the prism of light. “Monet does not paint a landscape, but an atmosphere”, says Matthieu. “Monet paints what he sees. But let’s not ask what he paints, rather when he paints it. The main thing is not the motive, but the moment.
• Monet in full lightGrimaldi Forum, Monaco, 8 July-3 September
