Claude Monet The Water Lily Pond, 1917 1919
Inventive genius of vision Claude Monet was able to see in the relationship of lights and colors what no one had guessed. Among his contemporary painters he was the greatest collector of Japanese prints and, after the invention of painting en plain air, he had that great garden of Giverny built which gradually became a wonderful park of a thousand colors with a pond, surrounded by willows. where the water lilies floated.
“It took me a long time to understand them. I planted and cultivated them without thinking about painting them … Then all of a sudden I had the revelation of the magic of my pond. I took my palette… ”, he stated.
The exhibition “Monet” is dedicated to the great painter, “father of the Impressionists”, born in Paris in 1980 and died 86 years old in Giverny, starting tomorrow in the Palazzo Reale in Milan.
A path that winds chronologically through about fifty works from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.
Claude Monet London and the Houses of Parliament, 1905
The visitor is welcomed by a video reconstruction: walking on floating water lilies of the pond and then crossing a field of poppies …
The portrait of his son Michel, dated 1883, is the last one made by the artist before abandoning figurative painting for landscape painting.
In the mid-19th century, the development of the railway network and the invention of color in tubes allowed not only to travel, but above all to paint in the open air: his marinas, landscapes and family scenes were born – on display “La wife Camille on the beach of Trouville-.
Claude Monet on the beach of Trouville, 1870
Monet does not imitate real colors, but interprets them in relation to light and context. More than the subject he is interested in the way in which it is transfigured by the light. His canvases are crossed by hasty brushstrokes to capture the constantly changing brightness.
It portrays the same subject in different light conditions, from the pink tones of dawn to the more intense and cold ones of the morning to the warmest ones.
Here are the canvases of the Charing Cross bridge and the English Parliament, the details of which are dissolved in large areas of cold colors, with the fog that seems to cancel the subject.
Then the reflections of the water, the flashes, the transparencies found in the paintings painted on the pond in the Japanese garden of his home in Giverny and the expressionist nymphs, just splashed, the flowers as simple touches of color and finally, while he struggles with blindness, the form vanishes, giving way to movement and color.
The canvas becomes more and more indecipherable: weeping willows, rose hedges… they take on an ever more dreamlike dimension.
“My poor life makes me see everything foggy”, he said in 1922
“Monet. Dal Musée Marmottan Monet, Parigi ”
Royal Palace – Piazza Duomo, 12 Milan
18 September 2021– 30 January 2022
Admission: full € 14.00 Audio guide included – reduced € 12.00 Audio guide included
Information and reservations: +39 02892992
www.monetmilano.it
Claude Monet portrait of his son Michel, 1883