The full Monet: biggest ever exhibition debuts in Paris

The largest ever exhibition of works by Claude Monet takes a new look at the leading French impressionist painter, revealing a “dangerous” artist obsessed with memory and experimentation.

Monet was at the head of a 19th century movement that cleared the way for modern art by embracing subjectivity. The paintings on display at the Grand Palais in Paris, some of which have never been shown in France before, explore his 60-year career.

In recent years, Monet has been more popular with tourists and foreign collectors than France’s art establishment. His haystacks, lily ponds and sunsets have provided fodder for placemats and coffee cups.

Guy Cogeval, director of the Musee d’Orsay since 2008, wants to change all that.

“This is an overwhelming collection of masterpieces. It will revive interest in Monet," he says.

"While working in the United States, I noticed that Monet was considered one of the three major pillars in the history of painting, while in France he has been taken for granted.”

A dangerous artist

Monet was a troubled, even dangerous artist, insists Richard Thomson, one of the show's curators.

“Yes, he painted lovely, sunlit landscapes but he also painted nature in all its different moods," Thompson says.

"His work can be incredibly rough and aggressive. We’ve tried to include pictures in this exhibition that show the dangerous Monet.”

The University of Edinburgh professor points out that Monet, in one of his many experiments, depicted a social pastime, a picnic, on a vast canvass previously reserved for momentous events such as battles.

The bourgeois picnic, the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe of 1865, was Monet’s first big step in Impressionism. This exhibition brings together the enormous fragments and sketches of the painting, which was largely destroyed.

Time and memory

“Monet’s work has to be considered as a whole,” explains Cogeval. It’s very rare in France that we don’t cut him to pieces.”

The exhibition is comprehensive, but only roughly chronological. In order to explore Monet the landscape painter, figure painter and still-life painter, the curators grouped certain paintings together that were painted decades apart.

Monet’s paintings of London's houses of parliament he made in 1870-71, after fleeing the Prussian invasion of France, hang next to a canvas of the same scene 30 years later.

Comparing Monet’s familiar scenes in Argenteuil or Vétheil to versions painted so many years later evokes questions of time and memory as well as fleeting subjectivity.

“One of the great things about him is that he never stopped changing. The Monet of 1870, 1880, 1890, etc, is always different,” says Thompson.

The exhibition does not end, he insists, in the Grand Palais but up the road at the Orangerie in the Tuileries.

“It is absolutely essential to see the water lilies in the Orangerie. That was the summit of Monet’s career and the monumental attempt to create something positive out the debris of war.

The idea is that you move on from this exhibition to the Orangerie. The same ticket will get you in.“

The show sheds new light in a literal sense, too. For the first time at the Grand Palais, bluish light-emitting diodes have been paired with traditional yellow-tinted bulbs.

Perhaps never before have Monet's cobalt skies, sunlit ponds and orange sunsets been so perfectly illuminated.

Organisers say the exhibition could break all records over the next four months, and long queues can be expected at all times. Guided tours of the exhibition, which runs through 24 January, 2011, are already sold out.