THE HAGUE.- Everyone knows Claude Monet’s world-famous paintings of water lilies. But how many have seen these explosions of colour in person and lost themselves in the reflections of Monet’s water lily pond, no longer certain where the water begins and the sky ends? The last large-scale Monet exhibition in the Netherlands was held thirty years ago. Many of the paintings of his famous garden have never been shown in this country, so it is high time for a major tribute. Monet – The Garden Paintings brings together no fewer than forty masterpieces from collections across the globe. Monet painted them in preparation for his magnum opus: the Grandes Décorations. At the centre of the exhibition is one of the most popular paintings in the Kunstmuseum’s collection: Wisteria. This survey is the follow-up to the groundbreaking Monet retrospective mounted by the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (then the Haags Gemeentemuseum) in 1952, which contributed to the rediscovery of Monet’s works.

Creation of a paradise
Claude Monet (1840-1926) was forty-two years old when he moved to Giverny in 1883. He would continue to live in this small village near Vernon until his death in 1926. He created two gardens there: a flower garden and a water garden with a pond filled with water lilies, inspired by traditional Japanese gardens. Monet consciously opted for exotic plants such as bamboo, water lilies (he first saw coloured water lilies resistant to the European cold at the Exposition Universelle of 1889) and wisteria. He constructed a typical Japanese bridge above the narrow part of his pond.

At Giverny, Monet increasingly shut himself off from the outside world and concentrated on depicting his garden. Between 1883 and 1926 he painted the reflections on his water lily pond hundreds of times. The first of these paintings were in the tradition of Impressionism, but over time Monet employed an increasingly expressive visual idiom. He rejected any suggestion of depth and no longer required his subject to be recognisable. Instead of depicting fleeting moments, Monet's monumental garden paintings exude an atmosphere of timelessness. This makes the Giverny period not only the most productive of Monet’s life but also one in which he underwent an important artistic development. The old painter, a pioneer in the nineteenth century for his role in Impressionism, succeeded in reinventing himself in the twentieth century.

Grandes Décorations
Monet’s wife Alice died in 1911. His sorrow was compounded the following year when he was diagnosed with cataracts and was forced to stop working. He did not resume painting until 1914. Then, at the age of seventy-four and encouraged by his friend, the statesman Georges Clémenceau, and his stepdaughter and daughter-in-law, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, Monet began his final and greatest masterpiece: the Grandes Decorations. Monet envisaged a vast circular installation of water lily paintings that would completely surround and immerse the viewer in his world of reflections. Ultimately, the work would be donated to the French people to mark the end of the First World War.

Above the installation of water lily paintings, Monet wanted to create a decorative frieze of paintings of wisteria. But when he was assigned the existing Orangerie building in Paris, the frieze did not fit. In his search for the perfect ensemble, Monet painted hundreds of canvases. He experimented with format, colour, materials and technique. Over the years, he added works to the series and destroyed others that he considered unsuccessful. The project had become an obsession that he was unable to let go of. His Grandes Décorations was finally installed in the current Musée de l’Orangerie only after his death. The many canvases not included in the installation were left behind in his studio.

Example for young artists
In 1909, Monet had exhibited dozens of his water lily painting at a successful exhibition in Paris. In the years that followed, he painted his water lily pond largely in seclusion, without exhibiting or selling. Following his death in 1926, there was no interest in this part of Monet’s oeuvre. The installation of his Grandes Décorations, which opened in 1927, also attracted little attention. In a period in which Mondrian and Picasso were the heroes of the avant-garde, Monet’s garden paintings were seen as old-fashioned and the messy result of his eye problems.

It would not be until 1952 that these paintings were taken seriously. In that year, the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (then called the Haags Gemeentemuseum) organised a major Monet retrospective together with the Kunsthaus Zürich. Here, for the first time, Monet’s Giverny paintings were shown as a fully-fledged aspect of his oeuvre. This travelling exhibition marked the beginning of the revaluation of Monet’s water lily paintings. Shortly thereafter, young American artists such as Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) embraced Monet as an important source of inspiration. Seeing Monet’s paintings did not change the way they worked, but they recognised something in his almost abstract colour explosions that gave legitimacy to their work. This was the beginning of a reappraisal of Monet’s water lily paintings that ultimately led to their unprecedented popularity today.

Water Lilies beneath Wisteria
Restorer Ruth Hoppe got the surprise of her life when she viewed the X-ray she made of the painting Wisteria. This masterpiece, one of three paintings by Monet in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, had been taken from the galleries to the restoration studio for the first time. One of the techniques Hoppe employed to investigate old damage to the canvas was an X-ray. While she expected to gain a greater understanding of the damage to the painting, she was not expecting to find a group of water lilies in the image.

Curator Frouke van Dijke: ‘Wisteria was already a very special canvas since there are only seven Monet paintings in the world with this subject, whereas the water lilies are iconic for Monet. That this motif is hidden beneath Wisteria makes this canvas even more extraordinary and allows several pieces of the puzzle to fall into place in the story of one of the most popular works in our collection.’ This discovery and the extraordinary history of this masterpiece is one of the storylines in the exhibition Monet – The Garden Paintings and the accompanying publication.

Artworks on the pond and the Erezaal
Monet resonates beyond the temporary exhibition galleries as a source of inspiration for artworks by contemporary artists commissioned specially for the exhibition. The site-specific work Floating Sky by Ursula Palla can be seen on the museum’s pond. In this work, Palla, originally a video artist, refers both to floating water lilies and the reflections that Monet captured in his paintings. Floating Sky allows visitors to look at the world in the same way that Monet looked at his water garden. In the museum’s Erezaal, before the entrance to the exhibition, the Spanish design collective Wanda Barcelona has created an vast installation of hanging botanical forms. The fragile deep-blue paper racemes are reminiscent of Monet’s wisteria and the weeping willows at the edge of his pond.

Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in Dutch and English editions with essays by Benno Tempel, director of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Frouke van Dijke, curator at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and Marianne Mathieu, director of Musée Marmottan Monet (Uitgeverij Hannibal, Dutch edition €24.95, English edition €32.50).

Children’s art book
‘De tuin van Monet’ (Monet’s Garden) by Kaatje Vermeire (Ghent, 1981) is the latest volume in the popular series of children’s books that the Kunstmuseum Den Haag publishes in partnership with Leopold. Plants, flowers, trees and animals play an important role in many of Vermeire’s illustrated books. In her latest offering, readers are welcomed to Monet’s garden by the artist himself. The book (ISBN 9789025878221) is available for €15.99 in the museum shop and in all good bookshops nationwide.