A Bouquet of Monets

New York City’s Gagosian Gallery is presenting 27 of Monet’s paintings, one of several presentations of the artists’s works on view in recent years:

Oscar Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840. As a teenager, he developed a reputation as a caricaturist, and studied with the landscape artist Eugéne Boudin. Over the course of his prolific career, he produced more than 2,000 paintings. By end of the 1890s he was well established and hailed as France’s leading landscape painter. In the remaining years of his life, he staged only four exhibitions, all in Paris — recent works and views of Le pont japonais in 1900, a selection of London paintings in 1904, the Nymphéas in 1909, and views of Venice in 1912 — each to great critical acclaim. On November 12, 1918, the day after the Armistice, Monet offered to donate two paintings to France in honor of the victory. This offer became the basis for his eventual gift of twenty-two decorative panels depicting his water lily garden, which were installed permanently in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 1927. Recent exhibitions of his work include “Monet in the 20th Century,” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1998, traveled to the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1999); “Monet, le cycle des Nymphéas,” Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris (1999); “Claude Monet … Up to Digital Impressionism,” Fondation Beyeler (2002); “Monet’s Garden” and “Monet’s Water Lilies,” Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). Oscar Claude Monet died at Giverny in 1926 at the age of 86.

Take a virtual trip through the first 34 pages of the  book, Monet’s House; an Impressionist Interior, online. There’s also a country by country list of museums’ holdings of original Monets.

If you’re interested in painting techniques, in 2006  NPR launched “a mini-series on how art is affected by available technology” and began with “the link between collapsible tin tubes and some of the world’s best-loved paintings”. The following excerpt including quotes from Monet’s well known biographer, Prof. Paul Tucker, who imparts some details of the process as well as an amusing bit or two:

Professor PAUL HAYES TUCKER (Art History, University of Massachusetts): It was an arduous task when you think about grinding down actual bits of rock and the like.

STAMBERG: Art historian Paul Hayes Tucker. Once they had their colored powders, artists through the ages mixed linseed or poppy seed oil into the dry pigment to make a buttery paste of paint.

Okay. You’ve got your paint. How, in the old days, did you store it? You ready? You put it into pig bladders, little balloony pig parts.

Prof. TUCKER: They were stretched like leather. They weren’t much larger, really, than sort of overgrown walnuts.

STAMBERG: National Gallery of Art conservator Anne Hoenigswald says there were some pig problems.

Ms. ANNE HOENIGSWALD (Conservator, National Gallery of Art): They couldn’t be completely sealed, but they would sort of tie the top of them. And then they had these little pins that they would use to prick open the bladder and then would have to squeeze the paint out. But the problem was there’s still a certain amount of air that gets into them. They were messy. They could break. The oil could pop out.