10C
Monday, August 18. 1997
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Early Monet work revisited
Finally...a reason to come to campus on Fridays!!
Exhibit showcases unseen paintings
The Associated Press
FORT WORTH, Texas — At the middle of his life, Claude Monet traveled to the Mediterranean. He was captivated by the intense sunlight, exotic plants, luminous mountains and the ever-changing see.
Monet, the French artist obsessed with painting light, discovered fabulous new opportunities and frightening challenges that changed his work.
Claude Monet
"When surrounded with such dazzling
light, one finds one's palette rather poor. Here art would need tones of gold and diamonds," Monet wrote to his dealer in 1884.
That visit to the Italian and French Rivieres in 1884, a trip to Antibes, France, four years later, and one to Venice in 1908 are the focus of Monet and the Mediterranean, at the Kimbell Art Museum through Sept. 7. It moves to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City in October.
The show includes 70 works of about 125 Monet (1840-1926) did in the Mediterranean. Many are privately owned and have never been exhibited or reproduced in color.
"To see them together is mesmerizing," said exhibition creator Joachim Pissarro, the great-grandson of Monet's Impressionist contemporary Camille Pissarro. Pissarro has been the Kimbell's chief curator since 1994 and became curator of European and contemporary art at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Conn., in July.
"They are important because historically Monet is at a point where he is leaving Impressionism behind," Pissarro said of the early works in the exhibit.
The artists who had collaborated in the impressionist movement in
Starting August 21
What we think of today as the grown-up,fully developed Monet really began down
in the Mediterranean. Yet those works have never been looked at
Charles Stuckey curator of paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts
the 1870s were branching out in the 1880s.
"They were all trying to forge a new language, a new style purely their own." Pissarro said. "Monet did that by going to the south."
To capture its transitory effects, he worked on serial paintings that became a focus of his later work.
"The idea of the series transformed painting, the idea that more than one picture told a story," Pissarro said.
Charles Stuckey, who organized the Art Institute of Chicago's 1995 Monet retrospective, says the Mediterranean brought Monet a sense of otherworldiness that carried him beyond his earlier realism.
"What we think of today as the grown-up, fully developed Monet really began down in the Mediterranean. Yet those works have never been looked at," said Stuckey, curator of paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts who will succeed Pissarro at the Kimbell.
but struggled in a dramatically different environment.
Monet spent most of his threemonth 1884 trip in the Italian fishing village of Bordighera. He was excited by the tropical vegetation,
"It is too thick with dense foliage, and all you can find are motifs with lots of detail, jumbles terribly difficult to paint, and I, in contrast, am the man of isolated trees and large spaces," he wrote his mistress, Alice Hoschede, Feb. 11, 1884. Pissarro analyzes their correspondence in his book, Monet and the Mediterranean.
Monet's bold paintings of olive trees, which may have influenced similar works by Vincent van Gogh five years later, have never been exhibited together before. Four are in the Kimbels show.
"It's a mystery why they were not exposed," Pissarro said. "It is a major rediscovery."
Monet carried his obsession with plants home to Giverny. He began his own famous garden, creating the water lilies and other subjects that later absorbed him.
In 1888, Monet spent three months in Antibes, painting the bright water, the glittering Maritime Alps, and even capturing the mistral wind.
"These wonderful pictures did not come easily to him. He sweated physically and morally," Pissarro said. "He walked miles daily. He never made it easy for himself. The more impossible the task seemed to be, the more he wanted to tackle it."
Monet would set out at dawn with several canvases, painting in the same place all day to catch the changing light. A group of paintings in the exhibit show the old town of Antibes as shadows and reflections evolve, again framed by trees.
A few of Monet's Mediterranean paintings were exhibited in the 1880s, and the works received favorable reviews from Monet's supporters. But most of the paintings did not sell well and received little attention.
Monet painted until his death years later, still experimenting and self-critical, and still influencing colleagues.
"We don't easily understand heir was one of the most important painters in the 20th century," Pissarro said.
"He's not a facile artist. If you give him your time, he will pay you back."
THE BUS PASS SALE IS GOING ON NOW!
WHERE: KANSAS UNION IN THE KANSAS ROOM (LEVEL 6)
WHEN: AUGUST 18-22 8:30 - 4:30
WHY: BECAUSE KU ON WHEELS IS THE BUS SYSTEM HERE AT KU THAT GETS STUDENTS TO AND FROM CLASS WITHOUT HASSLES.
HOW MUCH: YEARLY BUS PASS (FALL & SPRING) $110
FALL BUS PASS $60
FREE BUS RIDES AUGUST 18-21