The Denver Art Museum will be the only U.S. museum to show the most comprehensive survey of Claude Monet paintings in two decades when it opens “Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature” next year, officials announced today.
The exhibit will fill three galleries and more than 20,000 square feet of space with 100-plus paintings spanning the legendary French Impressionist’s career, with an emphasis on “the artist’s enduring relationship with nature and his response to the varied and distinct places in which he worked,” according to denveratmuseum.org. That includes Monet’s increasing isolation from people and immersion in nature, which typified the latter days of his career.
Group tickets and event reservations will go on sale December 17. Single ticket prices and on-sale dates for the exhibit, which is not included in museum general admission, will be available at a later date.
The museum, which is already setting the tone for the exhibit by floating the #MonetatDAM hashtag, will run Oct. 20, 2019 through Feb. 2, 2020 and include such well-known themes (and subjects) as haystacks, poplars, Waterloo Bridge and, of course, water lilies.
“The presentation … will explore Monet’s continuous interest in capturing the quickly changing atmospheres, the reflective qualities of water and the effects of light, aspects that increasingly led him to work on multiple canvases at once,” according to denverartmuseum.org, as well as “the critical shift in Monet’s painting” when he began to focus on the aforementioned series.
Individual paintings shared on the DAM’s website include “Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge” (1899), “Boulevard des Capucines” (1873-1874), “The Parc Monceau” (1878), “Path in the Wheat Fields at Pourville (Chemin dans les blés à Pourville)” (1882) and “The Canoe on the Epte” (1890).
“Monet’s constant quest for new motifs shows the artist’s appreciation for nature’s ever-changing and mutable character,” said Angelica Daneo, curator of European painting and sculpture at the DAM. “Not only from place to place, but from moment to moment, a concept that increasingly became the focus of his art.”
Denver Art Museum and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, organized the exhibit with curation by the DAM’s Daneo, Christoph Heinrich and Alexander Penn, and Museum Barberini’s Director Ortrud Westheider. Paintings in the exhibit hail from such lenders as the Musée d’Orsay and Musée Marmottan Monet (both in Paris); Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The exhibition also will include six Monet paintings from the DAM collection, four of which were part of the Frederic C. Hamilton Collection bequest in 2014, according to a press statement.
The exhibit will also included a catalog published by Prestel Publishing with essays by art scholars including Marianne Mathieu, James Rubin, George T.M. Shackelford, and Richard Thomson, among others. The publication will be available in The Shop at the Denver Art Museum and through the online shop. Co-organized by the DAM and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, Denver will be the sole U.S. venue for this presentation.
The exhibition will travel to the Museum Barberini in the spring of 2020.
