Monet, paint time
When: 30.09.2026 10:00
Where: 48.863725, 2.326703
Organizer: Admin
He has been considered since the 1870s as the quintessential Impressionist artist, although he participated in only five group exhibitions. His work quickly comes to merge with the “new painting,” as it encapsulates its characteristics (most often executed outdoors, with a rapid brushstroke and clear harmonies revealing the impression of a moment) before leading to one of its most singular and remarkable extensions. In the 1890s, with series such as Les cathédrales, Les meules, Les peupliers, the painter reveals an approach close to the dissection of time, up to the final testament of Nymphéas which resolves this insurmountable difficulty of fragmentation in the series to merge into the continuum.
A selection of nearly forty Monet paintings, mainly from the collections of the musée d’Orsay and the musée Marmottan Monet, but also on loan from French and international public and private collections, will highlight these different moments, focusing especially on the Nymphéas cycle. From this unprecedented perspective and with a distanced gaze invoking various fields of research, the exhibition will propose to re‑examine a work whose significance, a hundred years later, remains more than ever fundamental.
The exhibition naturally finds its place at the musée de l’Orangerie, which houses the large Nymphéas decorations. This unique ensemble, a true “Sistine Chapel of Impressionism,” according to André Masson’s 1952 expression, offers a testimony of the work of the last Monet, conceived as a true environment and crowning the Nymphéas cycle. The route invites reflection on the feeling of acceleration of time and modernity during the artist’s Impressionist period, on the capture of instantaneity through the series, and finally on the Nymphéas cycle, in the search for a transcription of duration. Monet develops a painting that responds to the challenges and upheavals of his era regarding the notion of time from a perspective that is both lived, felt, and also tangible through concrete signs of transformation of urban space and landscape. The 19th century is that of the multiplication of clocks in public space and the synchronization of measured time; it is also that of the transportation revolution, the development of railways. The Impressionist moment in Monet thus appears, echoing this 19th‑century revolution in the apprehension of time, as that of a painting that seeks to inscribe itself increasingly in instantaneity.
After the years during which the Impressionist exhibitions took place, the artist shows a tendency to explore the effects produced at different times of day on the same subject. It is in Normandy that he finally develops his famous series around Les Meules (1888‑1891), Les Peupliers au bord de l’Epte (1891‑1892), Les Matinées sur la Seine (1896‑1897) as well as around the Cathédrale de Rouen (1892‑1898). Through these series, the painter pushes the logic of representing the moment to the fragmentation of time in order to better grasp its essence. In 1895, the Cathédrales de Rouen exhibited at Durand‑Ruel were equivalent for Clemenceau to “a revolution without a rifle” (Clemenceau, “Révolution de Cathédrales” in 1895 in La Justice). With these pictorial researches, Monet seems to partake in his era’s fascination with meticulous and almost scientific observation of the world around him.
In the 1890s, Monet inaugurated the ultimate cycle that would occupy him until his death in 1926, the Nymphéas. This comprises more than two hundred and fifty canvases on the same subject and is crowned by the creation of the two rooms specifically built to house his large panels offered to France in the aftermath of the 1918 armistice, the painter’s final work inaugurated a year after his death in 1927. Everything works together to give the viewer an immersion in the work close to duration in the Bergsonian sense of the term.
Source: https://www.paris.fr/evenements/monet-peindre-le-temps-116716
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