Monet, Painting Time

From the 1870s, he was considered the impressionist artist par excellence, even though he only took part in five of the group's exhibitions. His work quickly came to be identified with the "new painting," as it encapsulated its characteristics (most often executed outdoors, with a rapid touch and clear harmonies revealing the impression of a moment) before leading to one of its most singular and remarkable developments. In the 1890s, with series like The Cathedrals, The Haystacks, and The Poplars, the painter revealed an approach akin to the dissection of time, up to the final testament of the Water Lilies, which resolves this insurmountable difficulty of fragmentation in the series to blend into the continuum.

A selection of nearly forty paintings by Monet, mainly from the collections of the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Marmottan Monet, but also from loans from French and international public and private collections, will highlight these different moments, focusing particularly on the Water Lilies cycle. From this new angle and with a detached perspective drawing on various fields of research, the exhibition will offer a re-examination of an oeuvre whose significance, a hundred years later, remains more fundamental than ever.

The exhibition naturally finds its place at the Musée de l'Orangerie, which houses the large Water Lilies decorations. This unique ensemble, a true "Sistine Chapel of Impressionism," as André Masson described it in 1952, offers a testimony to the work of the late Monet, conceived as a complete environment and crowning the Water Lilies cycle. The tour invites reflection on the feeling of the acceleration of time and modernity during the artist's impressionist period, on the capturing of instantaneity through series, and finally on the Water Lilies cycle, in search of a transcription of duration. Monet developed a style of painting that responded to the challenges and upheavals of his era regarding the notion of time, from a point of view that was both lived and felt, as well as tangible through the concrete signs of the transformation of urban space and landscape. The 19th century was the century of the proliferation of clocks in the public space and the synchronization of measured time; it was also the century of the revolution in transport and the development of railways. Monet's impressionist moment thus appears, echoing this revolution in the apprehension of time in the 19th century, as a form of painting that sought to become increasingly inscribed in instantaneity.

After the years in which the impressionist exhibitions took place, one notes in the artist a tendency to explore the effects produced at different times of the day on the same subject. It was in Normandy that he finally developed his famous series on the Haystacks (1888-1891), the Poplars on the Bank of the Epte (1891-1892), the Morning on the Seine (1896-1897), as well as on the Rouen Cathedral (1892-1898). Through these series, the painter pushed the logic of representing the moment to the point of fragmenting time to better grasp its essence. In 1895, the Rouen Cathedrals exhibited at Durand-Ruel were equivalent for Clemenceau to "a revolution without a gunshot" (Clemenceau, "Revolution of Cathedrals" in 1895 in La Justice). With these pictorial investigations, Monet seemed to participate in his era's fascination with the meticulous and almost scientific observation of the world surrounding him.

In the 1890s, Monet inaugurated the final cycle that would occupy him until his death in 1926: that of the Water Lilies. This represents more than two hundred and fifty canvases based on the same subject and is crowned by the creation of the two rooms built specifically to house his large panels donated to France after the 1918 armistice, the painter's final work, inaugurated a year after his death in 1927. Everything converges to offer the viewer an envelopment in the work, close to duration in the Bergsonian sense of the term.