PARIS.- From September 15th, 2016, through January 22, 2017, the Marmottan Monet Museum presents the exhibition «Hodler Monet Munch – To Paint the impossible.»

Why would one unite, in one exhibition, the work of Ferdinand Hodler, Claude Monet, and Edvard Munch? A Swissman born in 1853, who died in 1918; a Frenchman born in 1840, who died in 1926; and a Norweigian born in 1863, who died in 1944. At first glance, the composition of the trio may appear strange. These men never even met, and, although there is no doubt that Hodler and Munch often looked toward the work of Monet, there is no evidence of the converse. The aggravating circumstance : Art History has taken to classifying these men in different categories, Impressionism, Postimpressionism or Symbolism. But it is precisely such classification that this exhibition aims to challenge, by demonstrating that their works have much more to say to one another than formerly believed.

Historical facts, first: these painters are contemporaries, even though they belong to different gene rations. They live in the same w orld, a world in flux : europe before and after World War i. They are experiencing changes that range from the technical to the political and social, all of which affect their lifestyles and their artistic practices. They are all three travelers, discovering places and motifs which would not have been accessible to them just 50 years earlier. monet ends up in norway; hodler climbs all the way to the glaciers of the alps; munch voyages incessantly back and forth between northern and southern europe. The men are also, thus, contemporaries of accelerated development of natural sciences taking place during this period, advances brought about by experiments and series – models that all three, to varying degrees, introduce into their creative process.

All three implement such experiments, such series — that is to say, they apply a systematic, methodical attention to their investigations — in order to confront the difficulty of representing subjects which, precisely for their peculiarities, become obsessions for them. «i continued to choose things that are impossible to do: water with grass rippling in the background ... it’s wonderful to see it done, but it will drive you crazy to do it.» These words are spoken by monet, but they might equally come from the painter who obsessively studies the horizon of the alps from his window, working from dawn to dusk until his death: hodler. or he who, dissatisfied, drives himself to depression by revisiting the same motifs again and again: a red house; sailors in the snow; the setting sun, the northern night: munch. how to capture the dazzling brilliance of the sun, using simple oil paints on a single canvas? how to paint the snow, whose glaring whiteness does not vary despite the modulations of the light? how to suggest the movements and variations of light on the water, despite a painting’s immobility? all three artists, thus, consign the art of painting to tests of the impossible.

This exhibition does not seek to trace their investigations step by step, however; it does not incessantly compare their attempts through visual confrontations in a space reconceived to accommodate twenty works by each. The show’s subjects (which is to say its problems): mountain tops, sun, snow, living waters. indeed, this show unites these subjects one last time, under the name of color freed from the responsibility of imitation, and extends all the way to the artists’ final works, ambiguous and free – so free that they were hardly even understood by their contemporaries. Thanks to a unique partnership between the oslo munchmuseet and the marmottan monet museum, the show presents a handful of works by the norwegian artist which have never been seen in Paris. similarly, the generosity of several private swiss collections enables a presentation of works by hodler that is, in its ensemble, no less exceptional, both in terms of quality and rarity.