Monet: The Garden Paintings

by Benno Tempel, Marianne Matthieu, Frouke van Dijke

Who isn't familiar with Claude Monet's world-famous water lilies, his impressionistic bursts of colour on canvas in which water and air flow into one another? Over three decades, Monet painted the water lilies in his pond more than three hundred times. Today these garden paintings are regarded as his absolute masterpieces. The development of the artist's work can be clearly discerned in the water lilies. In the earliest paintings he still adheres to conventional spatial boundaries, but his lily ponds evolve into increasingly limitless universes in which the subject is defined by light. Monet is one of the most influential artists of all time. His impact on art history is immense. Vincent van Gogh, but also abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, pop icon Andy Warhol and even the minimalists of the sixties, were heavily influenced by Monet's play of colours and light, his formal language and his purified reinterpretation of the same subjects over and over again. The last large-scale Monet exhibition in the Netherlands was at the Van Gogh Museum in 1986, which is why Kunstmuseum Den Haag thought it was high time to celebrate the impressionist with another major exhibition this year. In Monet – Gardens of Imagination (12 October 2019 – 2 February 2020), the museum brings together no fewer than forty international masterpieces. This book is being published in connection with the exhibition and contains texts by Benno Tempel (director of Kunstmuseum Den Haag), Marianne Mathieu (director of the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) and Frouke van Dijke (curator of nineteenth-century art at Kunstmuseum Den Haag).

Genres: Art

208 pages, Hardcover

Published December 4, 2019

Reviews

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely art book to accompany an exhibition at an art museum in The Hague, Netherlands.
Numerous full-page photos of paintings and details from paintings, focusing on Monet's late works, which were dismissed as old-fashioned and even an embarrassment for a great artist, until well into the 20th century, when they became more respected, even loved. Now they're considered his best work; after all he'd had a long lifetime of perfecting his technique and talent.
There are several essays to give Monet's history and the history of opinion on his garden paintings.
Foreword by Benno Tempel; Monet at Giverny by Marianne Mathieu; The Garden as an Experience in Space and Time by Benno Tempel; Under the Wisteria by Frouke van Dijke; The Rediscovery of Monet by Frouke van Dijke; then the catalog of paintings and Biography by Astrid Goubert, which is really just a timeline. Attached to the essays are several black-and-white photos of Monet, his art, the garden, and various interiors, with a few historic color photos as well.
Many of the fullpage illustrations are unlabeled so I, as a non-expert, can't tell if they're studies or detailed scribbles of fuller paintings.
One small but major error is in the "biography" where it is stated that Monet's younger son Michel was killed in the Battle of Verdun in 1916 during WWI. Actually he survived his father and was his heir, as stated in the essays in this book. In fact, he lived until 1966 according to Wikipedia. This makes me wonder what other facts may be wrong.
So, beautiful book, but lacking a few details.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gorgeous hardcover book offering insightful essays and vibrant images into the life of Claude Monet focusing mostly on his career and paintings of his beloved water garden.

A minor issue: It is stated in the biography that his youngest son, Michel, was killed during WWI. However, other sources say he lived well after his father's death. I wonder whether this should say injured instead. So if you are using this as a source for essays I would fact check the information with another reliable source.

Otherwise an enjoyable book.