LONDON.- In 2027, Tate Modern will present its first ever exhibition focusing on the work of Claude Monet (1840-1926). Staged 100 years after the artist’s death and featuring more than 60 paintings, it will be the UK’s largest presentation of Monet’s work in nearly a decade, offering a chance to revisit the life and legacy of a master of impressionism through the lens of time, tracing his lifelong entanglement with nature.
Spanning 60 years of Monet’s career, from the 1870s to the 1920s, the exhibition will focus on his exploration of the passing of time as one of the defining and most profoundly beautiful achievements of modern painting. Featuring extraordinary highlights from Monet’s most famous series such as Cathdrale de Rouen, effet de soleil, fin de journe 1892, and rarely exhibited loans from private collections including Branch of the Seine near Giverny (Sunrise) 1897, the exhibition will trace Monet’s creation of a new style of painting: capturing fleeting moments amid the accelerating pace of modern life. Returning to paint the same scenes and motifs throughout his career to observe the effects of time, light and changing seasons, the exhibition will culminate with works from his crowning achievement, the Water Lilies cycle.
Monet’s career coincided with a dramatic shift in society’s perception of time. The rise of railways in the 1860s brought about a major challenge – the need for standardised time zones – which drastically altered the rhythm of everyday life. Monet responded directly to this accelerating pace of modernity, his rapid brushstrokes capturing the fleeting effects of light and the atmosphere of the city. Intrigued by the changing industrial landscape, he worked intensely to record Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare in early 1877, with works such as Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare capturing this symbol of technological progress at a momentary pause. Shown at Tate Modern alongside his later views of London, including Waterloo Bridge, London, at Dusk, 1904 and Charing Cross Bridge, Smoke in Fog, Impression 1902, these works reveal how Monet rose to the challenge of painting the modern world.
Monet continually experimented with variations of the same subject to capture a specific, transient moment in time. Drawn to the variations of colour and texture produced by light at different times of day, he returned to motifs across seasons and years to depict the passage of time. Tate Modern will offer a rare opportunity to view several of these celebrated ‘series’ together, including six works from his Grainstacks series (1890-1) – paintings of harvested wheat near Giverny where he settled in 1883 – on loan from collections across the world. Believing that landscapes exist in a state of constant transformation, Monet captured the ephemeral beauty of each moment in time. Intended to be viewed side by side, visitors will see how his paintings fragmented time to record its passing. Exceptional examples from other notable series will also be brought together to demonstrate this effect, including Rouen Cathedral, Poplars on the Banks of the Epte and Mornings on the Seine, where Monet took inspiration from his beloved Normandy to push the boundaries of painting.
Widowed in 1879 and facing financial difficulties, Monet found refuge and inspiration in the perpetual movement of the natural world. Tate Modern will bring together notable paintings depicting the winter cycles of freezing and thawing of the Seine including The Break-up of Ice on the Seine 1880-1. Acquiring more land to cultivate a new garden and pond at his Giverny house from 1893 provided Monet with fresh subject matter for his paintings. His final monumental cycle of Water Lily paintings occupied the last three decades of his career, marking the culmination of his enduring relationship with the passing seasons. The exhibition will bring together 20 Water Lily works with rare loans from Japanese institutions such as Water Lily Pond 1907 and panoramic canvases such as Water-Lilies after 1916, demonstrating the cycle’s extraordinary variety. Shown alongside early and late views of his famous garden bridge, generously loaned by the National Gallery, London and Muse Marmottan Monet, Paris, visitors will enjoy the largest grouping of Monet’s garden paintings seen in the UK in over a decade.
The exhibition will close with an immersive video arrangement (D) Aprs Monet 2020 by French contemporary artist Ange Leccia (b. 1952), created in response to Monet’s final Water Lily paintings which are permanently housed at the Muse de l’Orangerie, Paris. Combining footage of both Monet’s paintings and his gardens at Giverny, this projected moving-image work gives visitors a rich sensory encounter with Monet’s atmospheric universe
