Follow the Monet: New exhibit debuts in Paris
BY LORI RACKL Travel Editor
Claude Monet painted hundreds of water lilies. You can see the scene that inspired him at the artist's water garden in Giverny, France.
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GIVERNY, France - It's hard to believe the Impressionist paintings plastered on countless coffee mugs, mouse pads and calendars caused such a scandal when they debuted in the 19th century.
Impressionism's light, colorful brushstrokes depicting everyday subject matter rocked the art world. Claude Monet, the founding father of the revolution (which got its name from his painting "Impression: Sunrise"), was widely ridiculed by the European art establishment and critics, who derided the works as "unfinished" and "lazy."
Monet clearly got the last laugh, as evidenced by all those coffee mugs, mouse pads and calendars.
The chain-smoking family man is one of the most famous painters of all time, and his prolific career is the subject of a major art exhibition opening today at the Grand Palais in Paris. Some 33,000 culture vultures already have reserved tickets to the Monet retrospective, the largest in France in 30 years. It features nearly 200 of his works cherry picked from 70 museums around the world.
Four of the paintings come from the Art Institute of Chicago, whose own blockbuster Monet exhibition in 1995 attracted close to a million people.
Running through Jan. 24, the Paris exhibit is a rare chance to soak up six decades' worth of Monet masterpieces. But the Grand Palais isn't the only place in France that Monet fans should visit to get a complete picture of this seminal artist.
A mandatory pilgrimage lies 54 miles northwest of Paris in Giverny. Monet lived in this dreamy little village in Normandy for 43 years. Most of those years were spent painting the water lily pond Monet created across the street from his pink house with green shutters.
As talented with a garden hoe as a paintbrush, Monet had the Epte River diverted to create a body of still water for his lilies to grow - a move that didn't go over well with fellow villagers.
As soon as you venture into Monet's water garden, the scene is instantly recognizable: the gentle arc of the Japanese bridge. The heavy weeping willows. The wooden row boats. The lilies.
"It's like walking into a painting," said Gloria Groom, curator of 19th century European painting and sculpture at the Art Institute. "That's what Giverny is all about: those last 25 years when he basically created the world he painted."
Monet admitted he became obsessed with putting the lilies on canvas - the way the sun illuminated them at different times of day, different seasons. He was still painting water lilies when he died in 1926 at age 86, nearly blinded by cataracts.
The massive studio he built in Giverny to paint giant panels of water lilies has been transformed into a gift shop where you can load up on - you guessed it - coffee mugs, mouse pads and calendars., The recent removal of hundreds of tall poplar trees on neighboring land means "this is the first time in 30 years we can see the pond as Monet saw it, with the light reflecting off the water," said Jan Huntley, head of artist and volunteer programs for the Foundation Claude Monet.
Monet's house, open to visitors from April through October, was restored in the 1970s to its original appearance, right down to the scores of Japanese prints carefully arranged on the walls and the yellow dining room that's painted so bright, you reach for your sunglasses.
"There aren't that many artists' homes where you actually feel the presence of the artist," Groom said. "Giverny really is the one place where Monet comes alive."
The front lawn's stunning garden is like a living paint box with different-colored flowers in each compartment. Cobalt blue tiles cover the kitchen, where shiny copper pots and pans line the walls. It all looks like it did when Monet lived here with his second wife, Alice, and their combined eight children.
This is the Giverny that greeted Bertha Palmer, Chicago socialite and patroness of the arts, when she visited Monet in the late 1800s.
Palmer - of Palmer House Hilton Hotel fame - was a quick convert to the Impressionist movement. She once owned as many as 90 Monet paintings. Several were from Monet's now-famous "Haystacks" series, another example of his fixation with capturing the same scene under different conditions. She bequeathed many of her treasures to the Art Institute, paving the way for the Chicago museum to build one of the world's best Impressionist art collections, including 33 Monets.
Another bastion of Impressionist art, Paris' Musee d'Orsay typically is a highlight for Monet fans making the trek to France. But the museum is undergoing renovations in preparation for its 25th anniversary next year, so much of its Impressionist collection has been loaned to a traveling exhibition. That exhibit recently wrapped up in San Francisco and is headed next month to Nashville, Tenn. (See related story.)
A lesser-known Parisian museum, however, is chock full of Monet's work. The Marmottan Monet Museum, which only recently added "Monet" to its name, boasts the world's largest roster of the artist's creations, housing more than 150 pieces in a 19th century mansion on the city's western edge.
Another must on any Monet tour in Paris, the Orangerie Museum is where you'll find his famous series of eight giant water lily panels - his swan song as an artist.
Monet donated these mammoth canvases, each measuring over 6 feet tall and several times that in width, to the French people. All he asked is that the paintings be showcased in a suitable venue. The Orangerie fit the bill until a second floor was added years later, blocking the skylights that had let the sun illuminate his work.
A major overhaul to the Orangerie in 2006 allowed natural light to shine on the lilies once again, just the way Monet had pictured it.
Information for this article was gathered on a research trip sponsored in part by the France Tourism Development Agency.
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