From impressionist views of Paris to quasi-abstract representations of Giverny, the modern art museum of Fontevraud-l’Abbaye (Maine-et-Loire) recounts the metamorphosis of Claude Monet’s painting throughout his life.

Until September 18, the exhibition “Metamorphoses, in the art of Claude Monet”, the very first of this museum opened in May 2021, presents around thirty paintings bequeathed by the son of the painter to the Marmottan museum in 1966.

“Such an exhibition in a village of 1,600 inhabitants is exceptional”, rejoices with AFP Dominique Gagneux, director of this museum installed in the royal abbey of Fontevraud.

Organized according to a chronological thread, the exhibition begins with landscapes painted in the 1870s, among which a misty view of the Gare Saint-Lazare and a setting sun on the beach at Pourville, sketched in the pastel colors already dear to Monet.

A panel recalls the cold welcome given to the impressionist by many art critics of the time: his paintings “cause laughter”, “are lamentable” and “denote the greatest ignorance of drawing” , wrote a columnist in 1877. Success would come ten years later.

In the 1890s, Claude Monet began to paint in series, representing the same landscape at different seasons or times of day, on canvases where the play of light was enough to transform the motif.

– “Colored fog” –

“Monet’s work is a journey through a colored mist. His techniques and points of view evolve but in more than fifty years of painting, there is no break”, says Dominique Gagneux.

Installed in Giverny since 1883, Claude Monet devoted more and more paintings to him and gradually centered his work on the weeping willows and the water lilies in his water garden.

While in classical painting panoramic formats are mainly used to represent vast landscapes, Monet innovates by only sketching a fragment of a park.

The canvases from this period, some one meter wide by three, were hung on dark purple walls, which contrast with the mauve of the wisteria and the light green of the water lilies.

“We wanted to show these paintings in a new light, with a different aesthetic from the white walls of the Marmottan-Monet museum. Even for known paintings, this allows for another experience”, underlines the director of the museum.

The size of the rooms allows visitors to step back a few meters sometimes necessary to distinguish patterns which, seen up close, were drowned in a mass of colors.

Recently restored “Water Lilies, Willow Reflections”, an almost abstract canvas where only a few water lilies can clearly be seen on a blue and mauve monochrome, had not been exhibited to the public for several years. AFP