Monet January 22 – May 28, 2017

Home , Celebration of Light, Haystacks (Monet series), Water Lilies (1919)

Media Release

To mark its twentieth anniversary, the Fondation Beyeler is presenting one of the most important and best-loved artists: Claude Monet. The exhibition will be a celebration of light and color, illustrating the great French painter’s development from Impressionism to his famous paintings of water-lilies. It will feature his Mediterranean landscapes, wild Atlantic coastal scenes, different stretches of the Seine, meadows with wild flowers, haystacks, water lilies, cathedrals, and bridges shrouded in fog. In his paintings, Monet experimented with changing light and color effects in the course of a day and in different seasons. He succeeded in evoking magical moods through reflections and shadows.

Claude Monet was a great pioneer, who found the key to the secret garden of modern painting, and opened everyone’s eyes to a new way of seeing the world.

The exhibition will show 62 paintings from leading museums in Europe, the USA and Japan, including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston and the Tate, London. 15 paintings from various private collections that are seen extremely rarely and that have not been shown in the context of a Monet exhibition for many years will be special highlights of the show.

The exhibition MONET is generously supported by: Beyeler-Stiftung Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss Foundation

Novartis Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation Federal Office For Culture FOC

Buy your tickets online in advance: www.fondationbeyeler.ch

Press images: Please visit our new homepage www.fondationbeyeler.ch and re-register for the press images download. You can unfortunately no longer use your previous access data.

Further information: Elena DelCarlo, M.A. Head of Communications Tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, [email protected], www.fondationbeyeler.ch Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen, Switzerland

Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10 am - 6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm

Media Release

Monet January 22 – May 28, 2017

In the year of its 20th birthday, the Fondation Beyeler is devoting an exhibition to Claude Monet, one of the most important artists in its collection. Selected aspects of Monet’s oeuvre will be presented in a distilled overview. By concentrating on his work between 1880 and the beginning of the 20th century, with a forward gaze to his late paintings, the show will reveal a fresh and sometimes unexpected facet of the pictorial magician, who still influences our visual experiencing of nature and landscape today. The leitmotif of the “Monet” exhibition will be light, shadow, and reflection as well as the constantly evolving way in which Monet treated them. It will be a celebration of light and colors. Monet’s famed pictorial worlds - his Mediterranean landscapes, wild Atlantic coastal scenes, various locations places along the course of the River Seine, his flower meadows, haystacks, cathedrals and fog-shrouded bridges - are the exhibition’s focal points.

In his paintings, Monet experimented with the changing play of light and colors in the course of the day and the seasons. He conjured up magical moods through reflections and shade. Claude Monet was a great pioneer in the field of art, finding the key to the secret garden of modern painting and opening everyone’s eyes to a new way of seeing the world.

Light, shadow, and reflection

Following the death of his wife in 1879, Monet embarked on a phase of reorientation. His time as a pioneer of Impressionism was over; while by no means generally acknowledged as an artist, he was beginning to become more independent financially thanks to the help of his dealer, as is documented by his frequent journeys. Through them, he was, for example, first able to concern himself with Mediterranean light, which provided new impulses for his paintings. His art became more personal, moving away from a strictly Impressionist style.

Above all, however, Monet seems to have increasingly turned painting itself into the theme of his paintings. His comment, as passed down by his stepson Jean Hoschedé, that, for him, the motif was of secondary importance to what happened between him and the motif, should be seen in this light. Monet’s reflections on paintings should be interpreted in two ways. The repetition of his motifs through reflections, which reach their zenith and conclusion in his paintings of the reflections in his water-lily ponds, can also be seen as a continuous reflecting on the potential of painting, which is conveyed through the representation and repetition of a motif on a canvas.

Monet’s representations of shade are another way in which he represented the potential of painting. They are both the imitation and the reverse side of the motif, and their abstract form gives the painting a structure that seems to question the mere copying of the motif. This led to the situation in which Wassily Kandinsky, on the occasion of his famous encounter with Monet’s painting of a haystack seen

against the light (Kunsthaus Zurich and in the exhibition), did not recognize the subject for what it was: the painting itself had taken on far greater meaning that the representation of a traditional motif.

Monet’s Pictorial Worlds

The exhibition is a journey through Monet’s pictorial worlds. It is arranged according to different themes. The large first room in the exhibition is devoted to Monet’s numerous and diverse representations of the River Seine. One of the most notable exhibits is his rarely shown portrait of his partner and subsequent wife Alice Hoschedé, sitting in the garden in Vetheuil directly on the Seine.

The next room celebrates Monet’s representation of trees: a subtle tribute to Ernst Beyeler, who devoted an entire exhibition to the theme of trees in 1998. Inspired by colored Japanese woodcuts, Monet repeatedly returned to the motif of trees in different lights, their form, and the shade they cast. Trees often give his paintings a geometric structure, as is particularly obvious in his series.

The luminous colors of the Mediterranean are conveyed by a group of canvases Monet painted in the 1880s. In a letter written at that time, he spoke of the “fairytale light” he had discovered in the South.

In 1886 Monet wrote to Alice Hoschedé that he was “crazy about the sea”. A large section of the exhibition is devoted to the coasts of Normandy and the island Belle-Île as well as to the ever-changing light by the sea. It includes a fascinating sequence of different views of a customs official’s cottage on a cliff that lies in brilliant sunlight at times and in the shade at others. On closer examination, the shade seems to have been created out of myriad colors.

Monet’s paintings of early-morning views of the Seine radiate contemplative peace: the painted motif is repeated as a painted reflection in such a way that the distinction between painted reality and its painted reflection seems to disappear in the rising mist. The entire motif is repeated as a reflection. There is no longer any clear-cut differentiation between the top and bottom parts of the painting, which could equally well be hung upside down. In other words, the convention about how paintings ought to be viewed is abandoned and viewers are left to make their own decision. It is as if Monet sought to convey the constant flux (panta rhei) that is such a fundamental characteristic of nature, capturing not only the way light changes from night to day but also the constant merging of two water courses.

Monet loved London. He sought refuge in the city during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. As a successful and already well known painter, he went back there at the turn of the century, painting famous views of Waterloo and Charing Cross Bridge as well as of the Houses of Parliament in different lights, particularly in the fog, which turns all forms into mysterious silhouettes. A tribute not only Monet’s famous hero/forerunner William Turner, but also to the world power of Great Britain with its Parliament and the bridges it built through trade.

Monet’s late work consists almost exclusively of paintings of his garden and the reflections in his water- lily ponds, of which the Beyeler Collection owns some outstanding examples. The exhibition’s last room contains a selection of paintings of Monet’s garden in Giverny.

The exhibition MONET is generously supported by: Beyeler-Stiftung Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss Foundation

Novartis Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation Federal Office For Culture FOC

Buy your tickets online in advance: www.fondationbeyeler.ch

Combined ticket for the Fondation Beyeler’s 20th birthday: Visit all three of the “Monet”; “Wolfgang Tillmans” and “Paul Klee” exhibitions for the special price of CHF 60.

Press images: Please visit our new homepage www.fondationbeyeler.ch and re-register for the press images download. You can unfortunately no longer use your previous access data.

Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10 am - 6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm 22 January – 28 May 2017

01 Claude Monet 02 Claude Monet In the „Norvégienne“, 1887 Charing Cross Bridge: Fog on the Thames, 1903 Oil on canvas, 97,5 x 130,5 cm Oil on canvas, 73,7 x 92,4 cm Musée d’Orsay, Paris, legacy ofPrincesse Edmond de Polignac, 1947 Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Donation of Mrs. Henry Lyman, 1979 Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College

03 Claude Monet 04 Claude Monet Morning on the Seine, 1897 Sunset on the Seine in Winter, 1880 Oil on canvas, 89,9 x 92,7 cm Oil on canvas, 60,6 x 81,1 cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933 Pola Museum of Art, Pola Art Foundation Photo: © The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY / Scala, Florence

05 Claude Monet 06 Claude Monet 07 Claude Monet Jean-Pierre Hoschedé and Michel Monet on the Banks The Customhouse, 1882 View of Bordighera, 1884 of the Epte, c. 1887–90 Oil on canvas, 61 x 75 cm Oil on canvas, 66 x 81,8 cm Oil on canvas, 76 x 96,5 cm Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, The Armand Hammer Collection, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Bequest of Annie Swan Coburn, 1934 Schenkung der Armand Hammer Foundation, Gift of the Saidye Bronfman Foundation, 1995 Photo: Imaging Department Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Photo: © National Gallery of Canada © President and Fellows of Harvard College

Press images: Please visit our new homepage www.fondationbeyeler.ch and re-register for the press images download. You can unfortunately no longer use your previous access data. The visual material may be used solely for press purposes in connection with reporting on the exhibition. Reproduction is permitted only in connection with the current exhibition and for the period of its duration. Any other kind of use – in analogue or digital form – must be authorised by the copyright holder(s). Purely private use is excluded from that provision. Please use the captions given and the associated copyrights. We kindly request you to send us a complimentary copy. FONDATION BEYELER 22 January – 28 May 2017

08 Claude Monet 09 Claude Monet Houses of Parliament, Stormy Sky, 1904 Île aux Orties near Vernon, 1897 Oil on canvas, 81 x 92 cm Oil on canvas, 73,3 x 92,7 cm Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, legs de Maurice Masson, 1949 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. McVeigh, 1960 Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / René-Gabriel Ojéda Photo: © bpk / The Metropolitan Museum of Art

10 Claude Monet 11 Claude Monet 12 Claude Monet The Terrace at Vétheuil, 1881 Rocks at Belle-Île, Port-Domois, 1886 Poplars on the Banks of the Epte, 1891 Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm Oil on canvas, 81,3 x 64,8 cm Oil on canvas, 92,4 x 73,7 cm Private Collection Cincinnati Art Museum, Fanny Bryce Lehmer Endowment Tate, Presented by the Art Fund 1926 Photo: Robert Bayer and The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, 1985 Photo: © Tate, London 2016 Photo: Bridgeman Images

11 Claude Monet 12 Claude Monet 13 Theodore Robinson Meadow at Giverny, Autumn Effect, 1886 Water-Lilies, 1916–1919 Portrait of Monet, c. 1888–90 Oil on canvas, 92,1 x 81,6 cm Oil on canvas, 200 x 180 cm Cyanotype, 24 x 16,8 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen / Basel, Beyeler Collection Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection Photo: Robert Bayer gift of Mr. Ira Spanierman, 1985 Photo: © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The restoration of this art work is supported by the Photo: © Terra Foundation for American Art, BNP Paribas Swiss Fondation Chicago / Art Ressource, NY

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THE TRAVELS OF MONSIEUR MONET A Geographical Chronology

hannah rocchi

LE HAVRE a studio of her own, she had connections to local artists and made sure that her nephew could continue his drawing lessons in Le Havre. Monet’s caricatures soon Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, attracted notice and were exhibited at the local sta- 1840, the son of Claude-Alphonse, a commercial ofcer, tioner’s, Gravier, who also sold paints and frames. This and Louise-Justine Aubrée. From 1845 on he grew up in brought his work to the attention of Eugène Boudin, the port city of Le Havre in Normandy, his father having found employment in the trading house of his brother- in-law, Jacques Lecadre. The Lecadres owned a house three kilometers away in the little shing village of Sainte-Adresse, which as a burgeoning bathing resort was much loved by the Monets. Claude attended the local high school beginning in 1851 and there received his rst drawing lessons. His earliest surviving sketches dating from 1856 show caricatures of his teachers and the landscapes of Le Havre. When Monet’s mother died, in 1857, Claude and his elder brother, Léon, moved in with their aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre, who would become very important to him and support him in his pursuit of an artistic career. As an amateur painter with

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a former partner in the business, who became Monet’s des Beaux-Arts, he chose the academy of Charles Suisse, new teacher. Boudin invited the young Monet to join where he probably met Camille Pissarro. After his him on plein air painting expeditions around Le Havre, discharge from the army in 1862, Monet returned to an experience that made a lasting impression on his Paris and there joined the studio of the Swiss history pupil. Monet twice applied for a municipal scholarship, painter Charles Gleyre, where he made the acquain- but was turned down both times. Despite moving to tance of Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Pierre- Paris to take painting lessons there in 1859, Monet re- Auguste Renoir. Two years later, when Gleyre ran into peatedly returned to Le Havre, including in 1862, when nancial difculties and had to close his studio, Monet’s after a year of military service in Algeria he had to re- father provided him with the funds he needed to rent a turn to France on grounds of poor health. Later that studio together with Bazille on the rue de Furstenberg. year he was discharged from military service thanks Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and even Paul Cézanne were to the replacement fee paid by his aunt. It was in the all regular visitors there. Monet was experimenting summer of that year that he met the Dutch painter with gural paintings at the time, including his large Johan Barthold Jongkind and claimed to have found Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1865–66). When their money in him his “true teacher.” He also spent the months May to November 1864 painting landscapes in and around Le Havre. His lover and future wife, Camille Doncieux, gave birth to their rst child, Jean-Armand- Claude Monet, in Paris in 1867; yet, urged by his father, who was against the relationship, to leave Paris, the painter spent the summer without them, painting seascapes, gardens, gural compositions, and regattas in Sainte-Adresse. A year later he won a silver medal at the Le Havre art show. After the death of his aunt, in 1870, followed by that of his father just a year later, his visits to Le Havre became less frequent. At the same time, he was drawn more to the towns further up the Normandy coast, to Étretat, Fécamp, and Pourville, where he found even more impressive subjects for paintings. troubles came to a head in January 1866, Monet and Bazille had no choice but to relinquish their shared space. Monet then rented a small studio of his own on the place Pigalle, and it was there that he engaged PARIS Camille Doncieux, the woman he would marry in 1870, to sit for him. His painting of the nineteen-year-old Camille (Camille, or La Femme à la robe verte, 1866), Monet, who was born in Paris, returned to the capital in was accepted for the Salon and not only won fulsome the spring of 1859 to visit the Salon and take painting praise from the critic Émile Zola, but also aroused lessons. During his stays in “chaotic Paris” he incurred the interest of Édouard Manet. Together with other numerous expenses, which he was able to defray thanks Impressionists, Monet founded the Société anonyme only to the support of his father and his aunt. Instead of coopérative des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, enrolling at the atelier of the painter Thomas Couture etc., whose rst group show was held in the studio for the preparatory course for admission to the École of the photographer Nadar on the boulevard des

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Capucines in Paris in 1874. Among the works exhibited was Monet’s work Impression, soleil levant, painted in Le Havre in 1872. The show was savaged by the critics, who in a play on the title of Monet’s painting derided it as an “exhibition of impressionists.” Monet tended to nd his subjects in the suburbs of Paris rather than in the capital itself, one exception being Saint-Lazare railway station, which he captured on several canvases in 1877. When Monet moved to Vétheuil, in 1878, he held onto a small studio in Paris, even if he used it mainly as a showroom for art dealers and potential collectors. When Monet’s patron Ernest Hoschedé declared bank- ruptcy, in 1877, he had no choice but to sell his large collection of works by the Impressionists a year later. to the coast, this time to the shing village of Pourville. It was through the sale of Hoschedé’s paintings that This was a landscape of rugged cliffs with several Monet met the collector and gallerist Georges Petit, subjects of interest to him, among them the customs who in the world of Impressionism would soon come to ofcer’s house near Varengeville. Furthermore, the rival the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. In 1882 Durand- beaches were deserted in the winter months, making Ruel himself commissioned Monet with several still lifes them ideal for painting. Monet began several new se- for his home on the rue de Rome. In 1914, in Giverny, ries, sometimes working on eight canvases at once so Monet began work on his last major project, the famous that he needed help transporting his equipment and Grandes Décorations, and after his death, in 1927, twenty- canvases from one place to another. In the 1880s, when two of these large-format paintings of water lilies were sales of his paintings began to pick up and his nancial installed in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. situation became less dire, Monet was at last able to rent a holiday home in Pourville. His new partner, Alice Hoschedé, and her daughter Blanche, who also painted, often accompanied him on his painting expeditions THE NORMANDY COAST there, and he received visits from both Durand-Ruel and Renoir. In January 1883 Monet visited the village

Although his career necessitated ever more frequent trips to Paris, in 1868 Monet wanted to make a home for himself, his partner Camille Doncieux, and their son, Jean, in Normandy. He wrote to Bazille that he could not imagine spending longer than a month at a time in Paris and that whatever he might paint on the coast of Normandy would be very different from anything pro- duced in the French capital. The cliffs near Fécamp that he painted in early 1881 show how his style of painting was already beginning to change, how his once idyllic landscapes were becoming wilder. Monet spent a few months in Poissy near Paris beginning in December of that year, but found the village uninspiring and returned

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of Étretat, famed for its precipitous cliffs and arches, cancer. Their nancial situation had deteriorated and and there found several motifs right in front of the they were no longer able to pay their servants. As a hotel. He also sought out remote beaches with views devout Christian, Alice Hoschedé took it upon herself of the Manneporte Arch, which he proceeded to paint to ensure that the Monets, who had married in a civil in different light conditions, often working on several ceremony only, received the blessing of the Church for canvases at once. While painting on a secluded beach on their union and that Camille Monet was given the last November 27, 1885, Monet miscalculated the incoming rites. Camille died on September 5, 1879, in Vétheuil tide and was hurled against the face of a cliff by a wave. and was buried in the cemetery there. The winter of He told Alice that his brush and painting equipment 1879–80 was exceptionally cold and the Seine froze had fallen into the sea, but that what annoyed him most over. On January 5, 1880, the Hoschedé-Monet family was that the wave had washed away the canvas he was awoke to the sound of the ice breaking apart, and Monet working on. Monet nished all of his over fty paintings spent the next few days painting dozens of impressions of Étretat in his studio in Giverny, which by then had of this spectacle. As Ernest Hoschedé mainly resided become his permanent home. in Paris and visited his family only occasionally, Monet

ON THE SEINE: ARGENTEUIL, VÉTHEUIL, AND POISSY

On December 21, 1871, Monet rented a house in Argen- teuil, a suburb northwest of Paris that allowed him to live in the country but remain within easy reach of the city. Thanks to the sale of several paintings as well as Camille’s dowry and inheritance, the Monets were able to employ three servants and Monet himself bought a boat that he converted into a oating studio. Argenteuil became an important center for the Impressionists; Cézanne, Manet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir all visited and Alice lived more or less alone with their children Monet there. In 1873 Monet met Gustave Caillebotte. in Vétheuil, and before long they were rumored to be One motif that Monet found especially interesting was having an affair. In 1881 they decided to move again. the railway bridge of Argenteuil. It was destroyed in Monet had been unable to nd a suitable school for the Franco-Prussian War but rebuilt soon afterward, his son Jean, and Alice was considering whether to making it a symbol of French resilience—and further return to Ernest in Paris with the children. In the end, evidence of Monet’s general interest in bridges. however, both Monet and Alice moved to Poissy in De- In 1878 the Monets moved to Vétheuil, a little cember of that year. When Poissy proved uninspiring, village on the Seine, some sixty kilometers away from however, the two families resumed their quest for the Paris. As Monet’s patron Hoschedé was undergoing perfect home, which they would nd in Giverny in nancial difculties at the time, he and his wife, Alice, 1883, some seventy kilometers northeast of Paris. and their six children shared a house with the Monets. Monet’s wife, Camille, had just given birth to their second son, Michel, but was already ill with cervical

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Doge’s Palace, and the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. When the pair left Venice again, in December 1908, Monet consoled himself with the thought that he would return there the following year, although he already had an inkling that that was “a forlorn hope.” Even so, the 1912 Claude Monet: Venise exhibition, comprising twenty- nine views of Venice and held at the Galerie Bernheim- Jeune, was a great success.

ROUEN

ON THE MEDITERRANEAN Léon Monet, who ran the Rouen branch of a Swiss chemical company, was on good terms with his younger brother, Claude. Jean, the elder of Monet’s two sons, In December 1883 Monet accompanied Renoir on a would later work for Léon, providing the painter with short trip to the Mediterranean. They traveled from another good reason for visiting Rouen. It was probably Marseille to Genoa and visited Cézanne in L’Estaque. at his brother’s instigation that Monet took part in the Monet was especially taken with the little town of 23ème Exposition municipale des Beaux-Arts, in Rouen Bordighera on the Ligurian Riviera and vowed to return there in January 1884, this time without Renoir, in order to paint in peace. The three-week stay originally planned eventually turned into three months, during which Monet explored the region, visited several mountain villages, and admired the wonderful gardens of Francesco Moreno, where to his great delight he was able to paint palms. The colors and new motifs brought Monet close to despair, and he complained to Alice of how difcult it was to paint the landscape as it really looked. Visibly fascinated by the warm light of the Mediterranean, he declared that he would need a palette of diamonds and jewels to capture its féerique (magical) atmosphere. Although in her replies Alice made no secret of her displeasure at the painter’s constant absences, Monet chose to linger in the south and continued the series he had just begun. He also traveled to Cap Martin and to Monte Carlo, painting as he went. In January 1888 he painted several views of Antibes. In late September 1908 he visited Venice—one of only a few trips undertaken together with Alice—where he was especially impressed by the Grand Canal, the

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in March 1872. Monet discovered his fascination with the Gothic towers of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption, the cathedral in Rouen, which would become such a major preoccupation of his later years. He had planned to return to Rouen for longer painting projects as early as the spring of 1891, but in the end was too busy expand- ing his garden in Giverny to leave. In February 1892, however, he was offered the use of an empty apartment that looked out onto the cathedral’s west façade. In March of that year he took lodgings above a boutique that offered a similar view but from a slightly different angle. While in Rouen he worked on nine canvases at the same time, painting from early morning to late evening. The intensity was not without consequences, and Monet was aficted by nightmares in which the LONDON cathedral—“it seemed to be blue, pink, or yellow”— came crashing down on top of him. The constantly changing light drove Monet almost to despair, and by On July 19, 1870, Napoléon III declared war on Prussia. 1893 he was working on up to fourteen canvases at once. Fearful of being conscripted, Monet ed to London at In early 1894 he began preparing an exhibition of his the beginning of October that year, taking Camille and cathedral paintings, but was plagued by doubts over their son Jean with him. There he met Paul Durand- whether he was up to the task. Twenty paintings in the Ruel, who was likewise a refugee and would become series were to be exhibited as a solo show at the gallery Monet’s most important art dealer. Durand-Ruel’s rst of his art dealer, Durand-Ruel, in 1895. Believing that documented sale of a Monet work was in May 1871. this might be an opportunity to raise his market value, Together with Pissarro, Monet visited London’s many he decided to demand 15,000 francs per painting. museums and there admired the works of Joseph Mal- Durand-Ruel was so appalled that he refused to be lord William Turner and John Constable. When the involved in the actual sales and left the negotiations war ended in late May 1871, Monet returned to France to the painter himself. Most of the works were well via the Netherlands. received in the press and would meet with acclaim in Although he would return to London on several other exhibitions, too. Although Monet never received occasions in the following years, his stays would invari- 15,000 francs for his cathedrals during his lifetime, the ably be brief and motivated mainly by visits to fellow French state did at least pay 10,500 francs for the one painters. His desire to paint various views of the Thames that it bought for the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris swathed in fog nevertheless comes up in several letters. in 1907. When his youngest son, Michel, went to London to study, Monet, Alice, and Alice’s daughter Germaine paid him a visit there in September 1899. They stayed at the luxurious Savoy Hotel, which has excellent views of the Thames. Monet was thus able to spend a whole month painting Charing Cross Bridge to excess, dedicating himself intensively to Waterloo Bridge later on. He would return to London in the next two years, and in 1900 set up his easel in a room in St. Thomas’ Hospital

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that commanded an especially ne view of Westminster. While there, Monet received a visit from Georges Clemenceau, a personal friend of his and later an important French statesman, through whose good ofces he was granted permission to paint in the Tower of London—a dispensation he never made use of. The thick fog that he woke up to toward the end of his stay in 1901 was grounds enough for him to postpone his departure. Many of the canvases begun in London were actually nished back in Monet’s studio in Giverny. There he also began to destroy some of them, admitting to Durand-Ruel that “my mistake is to try to improve them.” An exhibition of selected London paintings held in Paris at Durand-Ruel’s in May 1904 met with great summer there, Monet built a boathouse so that he could acclaim. explore his environs in search of suitable motifs by boat. He also began planting a garden, which soon became an enduring passion. He painted views of the church of Vernon as well as his rst elds with grainstacks. It GIVERNY was on the tiny Île aux Orties, which Monet bought as a place to moor his boats, that he painted Alice’s daughter Suzanne with a parasol (Essai de gure en plein-air: Monet signed a lease for a house with a plot of land in Femme à l’obrelle, 1886). Apart from his French painter Giverny and moved in on April 29, 1883, bought it in friends, he was visited by both the American painter 1890, and lived there until his death, for over forty years John Singer Sargent (in 1885 and 1887) and Georges all told. Alice and her children moved in the very next Clemenceau, the former of whom painted both Monet day after the lease was signed. The village near the and Blanche Hoschedé at work. The rst grainstacks Seine is not far from Vernon, which is where the older began to appear in late 1888. Monet traveled much less children went to school. The two-story house was big after 1890 and tended to conne himself to just a few enough to accommodate the large family, and the barn motifs that he painted in series. He clearly felt at home was readily converted into a painting studio. In the rst in Giverny and lavished a great amount of time (and money) on the cultivation of his garden there, which became a favorite preoccupation. Many of his motifs were now to be found on his doorstep, among them the aforementioned grainstacks, which in 1890–91 he painted no fewer than twenty-ve times in varying light. Ernest Hoschedé died in Paris in 1891 with his wife, Alice, at his side. He was buried in Giverny. In the spring of 1891 Monet began painting a series of a row of poplars on the Epte River two kilometers away from his home, which he visited in his studio boat. When the poplars came up for auction in August of that year, he paid the timber merchant to leave them standing until he had nished painting them. A little less than a year

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later Monet and Alice married in Giverny. Work on their property continued, and in early 1893 Monet purchased the adjoining plot with the aim of creating a water lily pond. In the summer of 1896 Monet began work on his Matinée sur la Seine series, for which he set off for work in his boat at half past three in the morning. In 1899 he had a second studio built specically for the purpose of nishing paintings begun en plein air, while the rst studio, being larger, would henceforth serve mainly as a showroom. Water lilies were becoming an increasingly important subject by now, and in 1901 he purchased land again, to enlarge his pond. He also had a third studio built to allow him to commence work on the monumen- tal water lily wall panels (the Grandes Décorations). From 1909 on, Monet’s sight deteriorated to such an extent that he had to undergo various operations, notwithstanding his fears that these might change his perception of color. Alice fell ill with a rare form of leukemia and died in 1911, with a distraught Monet by her side. Following the death of his son Jean, in 1914, Blanche, who was both Monet’s stepdaughter and daughter-in-law, moved into the house at Giverny and cared for the deeply grieved artist. Yet he continued painting, right to the end of his days, nding most of his motifs in his own garden. It was also in Giverny that Monet, who died of lung cancer on December 5, 1926, would nd his nal resting place. He was buried in the same grave as his son Jean (1914), his wife Alice (1911), her rst husband, Ernest Hoschedé (1891), and their daughters Suzanne (1899) and Marthe (1925).

The present chronology is based on the accounts provided in Charles F. Stuckey, “Chronology,” in Claude Monet 1840–1926, exh. cat. The Art Institute of Chicago (London and Chicago, 1995), p. 185–266; and quotations cited from the artist’s letters published in Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné (Paris and Lausanne, 1974–91), vols. 1–5.

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Quotations

Backlight

“I am chasing a dream, I want the unattainable.”

-Claude Monet

The Seine

“I have painted the Seine throughout my life, at every hour, at every season … I have never tired of it: for me the Seine is always new.”

-Claude Monet, 1924

The Coast and the Sea

“You know my passion for the sea. (…) I’m mad about it.”

-Claude Monet, 1886

The Mediterranean

“I am living in a wonderland. I do not know which way to turn: everything is superb and I want to do everything. It is terribly difficult, you need a palette made of diamonds and precious stones. As for blue and pink, there is no shortage here.”

-Claude Monet, 1884

Morning on the Seine

“The crack of dawn, in August, 3:30 a.m. (…) (He) comes to the river. There he unties his rowboat moored in the reeds along the bank, and with a few strokes, reaches the large punt at anchor which serves as his studio.”

-Maurice Guillemot, 1898

London

“What I love more than anything in London is the fog. (…) Without the fog London wouldn’t be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth.”

-Claude Monet, 1918

Claude Monet from a new angle: Light, shadow, and reflection

⁄ The painter of light

“The world’s appearance would be shaken if we succeeded in perceiving the spaces in between things as things.” These words from the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty apply to the core of Claude Monet’s art in the years between 1880 and the beginning of the twentieth century. While interest usually lies only on the early and late work of this exceptional artist, the catalogue, containing more than fifty works of art,

traces the development between these two periods. Accompanied by texts by well-known art historians, the reader is invited to follow Monet’s unusual treatment of reflections and shadows in his paintings. Ed. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Ulf Küster It allowed him to break loose from the modalities of Text(s) by Maria Becker, Gottfried Boehm, Ulf Küster, representational logic and the pictorial object. And Philippe Piguet, Hannah Rocchi, and James H. Rubin they made room for an aesthetic that helped to do Graphic design by Uwe Koch justice to perception itself and to enforce a painting’s English self-reflexive momentum. 2017. 180 pp., 130 ills. hardcover Exhibition: Fondation Beyeler Riehen/Basel 27.40 x 31.00 cm 22.1.–28.5.2017

ISBN 978-3-7757-4239-9 CHF 62.50 / € 58.00

Media Release

Under the Influence of Claude, Vincent, Paul… and the others The impact of Impressionist painting on early French cinema

Matthias Brunner’s film installation has been created for the Fondation Beyeler on the occasion of its “Monet” exhibition. It lasts 30 minutes and is accompanied by Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No. 4.

There is virtually no film genre more closely linked with the fine arts than is the Impressionist cinema of the 1920s with French Impressionist painting. From a purely stylistic viewpoint, film pioneers and iconic directors like Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac and Louis Delluc were strongly influenced by 19th century Impressionist painting. Numerous other major artists like Man Ray, who later made a name for himself as a Surrealist, and directors like Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir, who were representatives of poetic Realism, were marked by French Impressionism in their early works. Impressionism thus became a gateway leading to later radical changes in the language of film.

Anyone who misses the colors of Impressionist painting in the cinema of those early years is more than compensated by the refined film technique, which is characterized by, for example, rapid montages, time lapses, blurring, double exposures and light reflections. Up until today, the dialog between film and painting can possibly best be grasped through the work of Jean-Luc Godard, whose films abound in quotations from painting and art history.

Of particular note are foreign directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and G.V. Aleksandrov, who made Romance sentimentale in France, as well as another Russian, Dimitri Kirsanoff, who directed the legendary Franco-Swiss co-production Rapt, based on a work by the French-speaking Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and Alberto Cavalcanti, the Brazilian director of Rien que les heures who lived in Paris. Their films – all of them French productions – are very much on a par with those made by French directors and are repeatedly associated with French Impressionist cinema.

This collage film with excerpts from 25 films by the 12 most famous directors, who caused a furore in France at the time, is a tribute to Impressionist painting and Impressionist cinema, which was later followed by “Cinéma Pur”, abstract film, as well as Surrealism and poetic Realism.

Special thanks go to:

Dr. h.c. Sam Keller Dr. Ulf Küster Prof. Dr. Gottfried Boehm Dr. Pamela Kort Christian Wirtz Heinz Spoerli Jürg Steinacher

In memory of:

Jean Epstein; Man Ray; Abel Gance; Dimitri Kirsanov; Louis Delluc; Sergei Eisenstein; Germaine Dulac; G.V. Aleksandrov; Jean Renoir; Alberto Cavalcanti; Louis Feuillade; Jean Vigo

Gratiseintritt für alle bis 25 Jahre Die Fondation Beyeler freut sich, anlässlich ihres 20. Geburtstags im Jahr 2017 allen Personen bis 25 Jahren kostenlosen Eintritt in die Ausstellungen zu offerieren. Diese Aktion wird grosszügig unterstützt durch die Basler Kantonalbank.

Entrée gratuite pour les moins de 25 ans La Fondation Beyeler est heureuse d'offrir, à l'occasion de son 20e anniversaire, l'entrée gratuite des expositions à tous les visiteurs de moins de 25 ans. Cette opération bénéficie du généreux soutien de la Basler Kantonalbank.

Entrata gratuita per tutti fino ai 25 anni In occasione del suo ventennale nel 2017 la Fondation Beyeler è lieta di offrire a tutte le persone fino a 25 anni d’età l’entrata gratuita alle mostre. Questa iniziativa è generosamente sostenuta dalla Banca cantonale Basilea.

Free admission for everyone up to 25 years old In celebration of its 20th birthday in 2017, the Fondation Beyeler is delighted to offer free admission to its exhibitions for everyone up to the age of 25. This special gift is generously supported by the Basler Kantonalbank.

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