Monet takes center stage in Frankfurt Städel Museum exhibit

PanARMENIAN.Net - When the curator Felix Krämer began work on “Monet and the Birth of Impressionism”, which opened at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt on March 11, he was going to call it simply, “The Birth of Impressionism”. But he soon decided that Claude Monet was the key, because the artist’s early work of the 1860s had such an influence on his avant-garde colleagues. Hence the decision to give the French artist star billing and allow his works to dominate the show, The Art Newspaper reports.

The exhibition includes around 100 paintings on loan from many countries, half by Monet and the remainder by his contemporaries. It tells the story of the movement’s early years, from 1860 to 1880, which made negotiating loans a challenge. Because fewer Impressionist paintings were made in that early period (many more pictures were produced between 1880 and 1900, once Impressionism had gathered momentum), organisers had a smaller pool of potential lenders to draw from. Krämer decided that Frankfurt would have to be the sole venue, since it would have been too difficult to get loans extended for another city.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is Monet’s painting, Le Déjeuner, 1868-69, a delightful scene of domestic life with the artist’s wife Camille and son Jean sitting at a dining table. It was rejected from the Paris Salon in 1870, but Monet showed it in the first Impressionist exhibition four years later. Le Déjeuner was eventually bought by the Städel in 1910. The painting has just been subject to a technical examination, revealing that Monet made considerable changes to the initial composition, including moving Jean from Camille’s arms to have him sit at the table. In Städel’s forthcoming show, the painting will hang with another Monet luncheon scene, Le Déjeuner: Panneau Decorative, around 1873, this one depicted outdoors, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Among the loans are several rarely seen Monet works from private collections, including the delightful Fishing Boats, Calm Weather, 1868, which sold at Christie’s in 2012 for $2.1m. Another private loan is the painting Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect, 1899-1901, which will be presented alongside a picture showing a similar view from the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.

The main contemporaries of Monet represented in the exhibition will include Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, Alfred Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas. Among the works by Sisley is The Painter Monet in the Forest of Fontainebleau, around 1865, from the Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken, Germany. It is a sketchy oil showing Monet working outdoors among the trees—a vivid demonstration of how the Impressionists tackled the landscape.

An unusual feature of the exhibition will be a group of 18 early caricatures mocking the Impressionists, including an 1879 cartoon of an artist with long hair, using a floor brush to throw paint at his canvas. But although initially reviled, Monet and his colleagues were to become part of the art establishment. Last month Monet’s Venetian view of Le Grand Canal, 1908, sold for £23.7m at Sotheby’s in London.

“Monet and the Birth of Impressionism” runs till June 21.