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!

Renoir and Friends

Today I read parts of a book on Renoir to my art therapy client.

I learned that Renoir's circle of friends included the famous Impressionistic painters Monet, Baxille and Sisley. All of them attended the Gleyre Academy and spent time painting together. Imagine that master-mind group!

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Portrait of Claude Monet
1875
Oil
Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

Later in his life, Renoir developed a friendship with Cezanne and the two of them painted similar subjects together.

Montagne Sainte-Victoire
Oil
1889
Paul Cezanne
Montagne Sainte-Victoire
Oil
1889
Pierre-Auguste Renoir had already attained some measure of success as a portrait painter before exhibiting in the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, 1974. He was only 33 years old at the time. Although Renoir's paintings have been classified as Impressionistic, he was always searching for new means of expression and his style during the period of the 1870's varies so much that Renoir's Impressionism, unlike Monet's, has no clear indisputable identity. Renoir quit showing with the Impressionists for several years until the seventh Impressionist show of 1882.

I cherish my artist friends and enjoy passionate discussion of art. I can only imagine how the friendships among these masters might have evolved.

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

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!