Monet in New York

If you are not able to travel to Giverny, France to experience the world famous gardens of Claude Monet, you can visit New York. In the Bronx over the next several months, the New York Botanical Garden will offer a taste of Monet’s indisputably radiant living masterpiece — a riotous display of color, plant variety and landscape design.



The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 21, will feature a seasonally changing display of flora, currently a spring kaleidoscope of poppies, roses, foxgloves, irises and delphiniums inside the botanical garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservancy. It also includes two scarcely seen garden-inspired paintings, Monet’s wooden palette, rare photos of Monet in his garden and 30 photographs of Giverny by Elizabeth Murray, who has recorded Monet’s flower oasis for 25 years. These are all located at the botanical garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library.

A facade of Monet’s pink stucco house with its bright green shutters — a historically accurate replica by Tony Award-winning set designer Scott Park — marks the start of the exhibition. From there, visitors are led down the Grand Allee, a shorter recreation of Monet’s rose-covered trellis pathway lined on both sides with thick beds of vibrant flowers. The path opens up to a replica of his famous Japanese footbridge arching over a water lily pool encircled by willow trees and flowering shrubs.

In the courtyard outside the Victorian greenhouse, two immense water basins contain a plethora of water lilies.

Claude Monet, artist and avid gardener, lead the Impressionist movement and revolutionized painting in the 1870s.

The story is that Claude Monet noticed the village of Giverny while looking out of a train window. He made up his mind to move there and rented a house and the area surrounding it. In 1890 he had enough money to buy the house and land outright and set out to create the magnificent gardens he wanted to paint.

Talk about the power of imagination!

Kindred Souls

Claude Monet, one of the best-loved of all artists, was a leading figure in the Impressionist circle. His first subjects reflected the world he knew; the boats of his native Le Havre, the streets of Paris, and the fields and forests of the surrounding countryside. But the subject that was closest to his heart, and dominated his later work, was his garden a Giverny, 65 kilometres northwest of Paris.

For Monet, his garden was a private haven, where domestic pleasure and artistic vision converged. Monet cultivated his garden as a continual source of renewal and inspiration and chose his plantings as carefully as he chose the colors for his palette. The paintings he created in his garden are some of his most famous.





Painting and gardening were the two most powerful influences in his life according to author Debra Mancoff, Monet's Garden in Art. I find myself sharing the same passions; Are we kindred souls?

Throughout his long and productive career, Monet believed that his art served a particular purpose: to give material form to the expression of his feelings in front of the visual spectacle of nature. What a powerful statement!

Art and Soul

All Artists must have a Soul vision to guide them; otherwise they would not stay focused for a lifetime.

The French Impressionist, Claude Monet, explained what happened to him when he was young. While working outdoors one day, in a single moment, "the veil parted," and his entire life destiny was laid out before him. Monet pierced the veil of surface reality and clearly saw a vision of the Divine. He was destined to be an artist, and that vision changed him forever. He learned why he was to be an artist, and no matter the struggles Monet endured during his life, that vision kept him on his destiny path to becoming a world treasure.

According to Paul Heussenstamm, the artist in each of us who has learned to use his/her eyes to view the world from our heart has begun to see the Soul. And to see with Soul. The key is learning "to access" the Soul. Art accesses the Soul of both the creator and the observer.


Large White Lotus
Paul Heussenstamm

A must read is Paul's book;
Divine forces - Art That Awakens The Soul

World Record Bid for a Monet

Le Bassin aux Nymphéa (1919)
signed and dated `Claude Monet 1919' (lower right)
oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 79 1/8 in. (100.4 x 201 cm.)

In June of 2008, Le Bassin aux Nymphéa by Claude Monet sold for a world record bid of £40.1 million (that's $79,138,799.84 USD at today's prices before commission etc).

The fact that the auction attracted such a high bid is probably because this is a large Monet - and those rarely come on the market as most are in museums. It's only ever been seen in public once and is part of a particular series of paintings of the waterlilies in the pool at Giverny which are seen as being very associated with the beginning of abstract art. The painting is of the water and the Nymphéa and the reflections in the water of of the sky, clouds and trees above.

The previous highest price paid for a Monet was set in May of 2008 when Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil (1873) was sold for £21.5 million / $41 million in New York.


Claude Monet's Le Pont Du Chemin De Fer A Argenteuil, 1873

Monet's Gardens in Giverny

Have you been captivated by Monet's paintings of water lilies as I have? Someday I will visit his gardens in Giverny, France.

There are two parts in Monet's garden: a flower garden called Clos Normand in front of the house and a Japanese inspired water garden on the other side of the road. The two parts of Monet's garden contrast and complement one another.

The Clos Normand

The land is divided into flowerbeds where flower clumps of different heights create volume. Fruit trees or ornamental trees dominate the climbing roses, the long -stemmed hollyhocks and the coloured banks of annuals. Monet mixed the simplest flowers (daisies and poppies) with the most rare varieties.

The central alley is covered over by iron arches on which climbing roses grow. Other rose trees cover the balustrade along the house. At the end of the summer nasturtiums invade the soil in the central alley.

Claude Monet did not like organized nor constrained gardens. He married flowers according to their colours and left them to grow rather freely.

With the passing years he developed a passion for botany, exchanging plants with his friends Clemenceau and Caillebotte. Always on the look-out for rare varieties, he bought young plants at great expense. "All my money goes into my garden," he said. But also: "I am in raptures."

The Water Garden

The water garden is full of asymmetries and curves. It is inspired by the Japanese gardens that Monet knew from the prints he collected avidly.

In this water garden you will find the famous Japanese bridge covered with wisterias, other smaller bridges, weeping willows, a bamboo wood and above all the famous nympheas which bloom all summer long. The pond and the surrounding vegetation form an enclosure separated from the surrounding countryside.

Never before had a painter so shaped his subjects in nature before painting them. And so he created his works twice. Monet would find his inspiration in this water garden for more than twenty years. After the Japanese bridge series, he would devote himself to the giant decorations of the Orangerie.

Always looking for mist and transparencies, Monet would dedicate himself less to flowers than to reflections in water, a kind of inverted world transfigured by the liquid element.



Nympheas
Claude Monet

In Katherine Tyrrell's blog you can watch a slide show from the photos she took on her recent visit to the gardens.

Monet

After realizing I could view Van Gogh paintings at the Musée d'Orsay on YouTube, I decided to look for one of my favorite Impressionist painter, Claude Monet.

Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting.

I remember the Museum of Contemporary Art in Basel, France had one of Monet's huge waterlily painting taking up an entire wall. Across the room from it was a over sized, comfy couch for us Monet fans to sit and gaze for a good length of time. I was mesmerized!



I found a lovely video on YouTube featuring some of Monet's paintings called Through The Eyes of Monet.

Enjoy!