Monet's Garden comes to Melbourne

Monet’s Garden
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
May 10 - September 8

The major event making Melbourne a cultural destination this year is the Winter Masterpieces exhibition of Monet’s Garden, which is expected to draw large numbers of art lovers from both sides of the Tasman.

Last year's Napoleon exhibition attracted close to 200,000 visitors and around 30% were from outside the city.

Curator of this year's exhibition Sophie Matthiesson says is is the special event featuring the largest number of Monets ever brought to Australia. There will be 60 works by the artist, plus two by Renoir.

“The exhibition is a combined effort between the National Gallery of Victoria and Musee Marmottan [in Paris] and Arts Exhibitions Australia, which brought the incredibly successful Monet show to Auckland a number of years ago 1980s.

“That’s the last time that a significant body of work by the artist has come to the region. That exhibition had only 20 works so this will feature three times as many.

“The Paris museum has the biggest holdings of Monet’s in the world because his son Michel died unexpectedly in 1966 and the works were acquired by the state. While the large paintings he produced later in life went to the Orangerie, the rest went to the Musee Marmottan.”

As well as his importance as a painter, many people have been drawn to the artist because of his garden at Giverny which he developed over a number of years. It fell into disrepair and was only fully reopened in the late 1980s, attracting huge crowds ever since.

Monet’s Garden traces the evolution of these garden motifs in his paintings over 20 years, revealing the transition of his purely Impressionist style to the more personal pictorial idiom he adopted in later life.

The exhibition takes visitors on a journey beginning with Monet’s arrival in Giverny in 1883 and the first steps taken towards the creation of the garden that would serve as inspiration for the rest of his life.

The initial section of the show includes a series of paintings produced when the garden was being laid out. These were created in Normandy, in the valley of the Seine or during Monet’s travels to Norway and London.

Highlights include Field of Yellow Irises at Giverny 1887 and Parliament, Reflections on the Thames 1900.

The second section is entirely of paintings representing his garden, produced between 1897 and 1926. Through these visitors will experience everything from the iconic Japanese footbridge, the waterlilies and other flowers including irises, agapanthus, wisteria, weeping willow and the alley of roses.

The show concludes with a spectacular, specially commissioned filmic installation which will immerse fans in the daily beauty of the garden as it is today. Entitled The Last Day at Giverny, it records from sunrise to sunset the last day of the season in a circular display intended to surround and embrace visitors.

The exhibition will also show a series of rarely seen late works by the artist – including some of the last easel paintings created in the Giverny garden as the artist began to lose his sight. These are a radical departure from his earlier style.

An almost concurrent exhibition (June 15 - October 6) is Australian Impressionists in France at the Ian Potter Centre in Federation Square.

More than 130 paintings show how antipodean artists were early adopters of impressionist ideas. While it features essentially Australians such as John Russell and Charles Condor, Frances Hodgkins is also included.